| Abstrakt: |
Mark Mathabane’s Kaffir Boy: The True Story of a Black Youth’s Coming of Age in Apartheid South Africa delivers on all the promises made by its subtitle. It traces Mathabane’s own story growing up in a very poor black family in the segregated Bantu township of Alexandra, near Johannesburg, following him from his birth in 1960 until 1978, when he boards a plane for the United States and college. The story is told in straightforward chronological order, in the first person, in fifty-four short chapters. Dialogue and description bring characters and settings to life—so well, in fact, that the sixteen black-and-white photographs do not add much to the prose. |
