Autobiography of mark mathabane and wife

Next to going to school starting to play tennis was one of the great turning points in Mark's life. I know your probably thinking "Starting tennis! How could that be an important event? Mark hadn't originally wanted to play tennis he wanted to box after learning of a phenomenal boxer named Muhammad Ali who actually knocked out a Caucasian boxer!

When Mark arrived at the ring though he tried to fight but he was beaten so badly that he no longer wanted to take part in such a violent sport. Then Mark heard of a man named Arthur Ashe an African who played tennis, Mark decided to play the sport. This would lead to Mark getting to know white people better and distance him from other Africans because they saw his playing tennis as a sort of treachery towards the other Africans.

Mark actually was sent death threats and was nearly killed in an encounter with one of his old acquaintances from a gang he used to associate with. He used his connections with his Caucasian friends to eventually get out of the ghetto of South Africa and act as a spokesman to help with multiple problems in South Africa. None of what he had been doing could have happened if he did not start to play tennis and interact with white people.

Mark Mathabane; there is so much about him that it was tough for me to pick what parts of his psyche to include on the following section. I did my best to choose the most important parts of his personality Mark had a growing hatred for his father when he was a kid. His hatred was fair, his father kept on getting arrested which caused money problems to the family so Mark starved on a regular basis.

What made him even angrier was the fact that his friends Father's were always able to feed their children. Another way his hatred bred was how his Father would continually beat him for what seemed to be everything that he did. Mark even thought that his father hated him as well, this idea was dismissed when Mark left and his Father cried, his Father had never cried before, it showed Mark that no matter what his father did he still loved him.

As far as I know Mark no longer holds the hatred of his Father in his heart. Because of what his friends had warned him about school Mark was originally hesitant to go; he actually fought his Mum and his Granny when they tried to get him ready to go register at his school. The old women immediately figured out where they were taking Mark and started to cry saying that she wished she had taken her son to school before he joined a gang and was killed.

When this happened Mark started to change his view on school a little bit seeing it as an escape from a death out on the cold streets. This shows that although Mark had originally hated school his mind can be changed by an emotional or important event that shows him the good or bad side of something. It is a good thing Mark was so impressionable because it was how he eventually escaped from the horror that had been his life in Alexandra.

Clearly, this was an attempt to hide his identity from the police. Without his mother's refusal to give up, without her persistence in obtaining his birth certificate, her talking him out of suicide, her willingness to work as a housecleaner, her love and faith, he might not have made it. From her, he says, "I learned that virtues are things to be always striven after, embraced and cultivated, for they are amply rewarded.

Autobiography of mark mathabane and wife

Mathabane's name for his father, Jackson Mathabane, whom he describes as a "short, gaunt figure, with a smooth, tight, black-as-coal skin," and "large prominent jaws. He is a "tough, resolute and absolute ruler of the house," who expects complete obedience from both wife and children, often using physical abuse to enforce his will.

Emasculated by apartheid regulations, imprisonment, and mistreatment, he gradually sinks into a life of alcoholic bitterness. Mpandhlani is a homeless, thirteen-year-old gang member who represents one of the worst autobiographies of mark mathabane and wife of victimization in the system of apartheid. He recruits prostitutes for male migrant workers who have been separated from their wives and children and forced to live in all-male dormitories.

They pay Mpandhlani to lure innocent boys to the dormitories with the promise of food and money. A hungry Johannes almost falls victim to the lure, but his mother's teachings and wisdom enable him to recognize that something about the situation is not right. He refuses the food he is offered and manages to escape when the other boys begin to undress.

He sees what is about to happen and literally runs for his life, vowing never to tell anyone what he has seen. The adult Mathabane, looking back on the incident as narrator, realizes that what was too horrible for him to comprehend as a boy was callously accepted as commonplace by white officials, who simply turned a blind eye. Peri-Urban is the Alexandra police squad that terrorizes, abuses, and arrests residents with no warning and often without cause.

They drag Johannes's father half-naked from his bed, handcuff him, and throw him in a truck. For two months, he is forced to work on a white man's potato farm. After a second arrest and a year spent in autobiography of mark mathabane and wife, Jackson Mathabane returns home a bitter, abusive man. Peri-Urban is responsible for Johannes's belief that white people are the devil.

Piet is Granny's teenage son who enables Johannes to stay in school by buying him necessary clothing. A self-employed painter and excellent tennis coach, Sacaramouche is "one of the best tennis players among people of colour in Johannesburg. Two and a half years later, Mathabane wins his first tennis championship, the Alexandra Open, thus becoming one of the most outstanding young black tennis players in South Africa.

Clyde is the Smiths' those whom Mathabane's Granny works for son whose racist taunting challenges the eleven-year-old Mark to prove that he is as capable as any white person. Finally I had something to aspire to. Stan Smith is the Wimbledon tennis champion who befriends Mathabane during a tennis tournament in South Africa. After returning to the states, Smith begins a correspondence with Mark that leads to a full tennis scholarship at Limestone College in South Carolina.

His friendship and financial support make it possible for Mathabane to escape the ghetto and pursue his dreams in America. The Smiths are a white family who employ Granny as a gardener. They live in "Rosebank, one of Johannesburg's posh whites only suburbs. My interest in learning increased. Smith also gave Johannes an old wooden tennis racket. Tsotsis are hoodlums and gang members that roam Alexandra.

When Johannes unwittingly witnesses a group of them committing a brutal murder, he is so devastated by the act and the world he lives in that he seriously considers suicide. At the age of ten, he sees no reason to continue living. A white nun is the first admirable, trustworthy white person in Mathabane's experience. She helps Johannes's mother obtain his birth certificate so that he can attend school.

The nun's willingness to cut through the red tape designed to prevent blacks from gaining an education, to stand for him and his mother against a white person, convinces the young Johannes that all whites are not devils. A senior manager at Simba Quix, the largest potato chip and rusks company in South Africa, he presents Johannes with a scholarship in recognition of his academic excellence in his three years in secondary school.

The scholarship pays for all of Johannes's school expenses and provides him with summer employment as well. Kaffir Boy is a searing indictment against South Africa's National Party 's bigoted and unethical abuse of power. When the party won the election based on their promise to legalize apart-heid racial separation of blacks and whitesthe minority white population thus became the lawgivers, restricting living areas, schools, medical resources, and movement of the majority black population to specifically designated ghettos outside the city of Johannesburg.

Blacks could not leave their homes without passes containing a photograph, address, marital information, and employment status. Mathabane and his family, like all other blacks in South Africa, became victims of a racially abusive system that continued in power until the early nineties. The lack of equal opportunity is graphically portrayed in Kaffir Boy.

Jackson Mathabane is arrested and imprisoned for being temporarily unemployed. While he is in prison, his wife and children, unable to afford food, go every morning to garbage dumps on the outskirts of the ghetto to scavenge for food. They get up early in order to be the first ones there when the garbage trucks arrive from Johannesburg because they know that there will be large quantities of food that have been thrown away by wealthy whites who live in posh neighborhoods.

They also discover practically new clothing, furniture, cooking utensils, and other useful objects that are still in excellent condition—objects that they cannot afford to buy. The contrast between the opportunities open to blacks and those open to whites is further portrayed in the visits of Mathabane and Granny to the Smiths' home in Johannesburg.

The three-member Smith family lives in a house that is ten times the size of that of the nine-member Mathabane family. The Smith home has central heat and air, running water, and bedrooms in which no one sleeps. The Mathabane home is made of thin materials that offer little protection against wind, rain, cold, or heat. It has only two rooms and no indoor plumbing.

Games, books, clothes, and toys that Clyde Smith carelessly discards are rich treasures to Mathabane. Another important theme in Kaffir Boy is that of gender equality. Tribal custom views daughters as far more valuable than sons because men must pay the father lobola a bride price to secure a wife and children. As a result, both wives and daughters are often treated more like property than like human beings.

Despite her husband's abuse, Mathabane's mother is trapped in her marriage not only because her father has already spent the bride price Jackson paid for her but also because she will not abandon her daughters to their father's treatment. For many, the term "victim" connotes a helpless person that has become an object for some other person or disease to abuse.

In Kaffir BoyMathabane's mother and father, by contrast, prove that connotation false. Jackson Mathabane has been so horribly victimized and emasculated by apartheid that he allows alcohol and bitterness to turn him into a victimizer, abusing his wife and children. On the other hand, Mathabane's mother refuses to be a victim. She stands up to her husband on issues that matter and seeks the asylum of her mother's house when it becomes necessary.

She uses her love and her wisdom to pull her ten-year-old son back from suicide, teaching him that the will to survive, the refusal to give in to the victimizer, can transform a would-be victim into a winner. Kaffir Boy 's single most important theme is the value of education. Knowing that her actions will likely result in a severe beating from her husband, Mathabane's mother still enrolls her son in school and takes the consequences.

Because she believes that education is the key that will open up a new world and a new life for her son, she will risk anything to give him that key. She knows that knowledge bestows power, instills values, and equips one with the weapons necessary to fight injustice. She believes that it will liberate her son from the prison house of poverty, and it does.

It also removed him from the ghetto into a life of learning, writing, and teaching in the United States. Kaffir Boy takes place in the country of South Africa, primarily in Alexandra, a black ghetto just outside the city of Johannesburg. A shantytown containing shacks made mostly of flimsy wood and cardboard, the one-square-mile ghetto housed a population of over one hundred thousand non-whites.

Potholes often rendered its twenty-three dirt streets impassable. There were no sewers, no indoor plumbing, and no electricity in most of the shacks. Everyone shared the community outhouses and water source. Indians, "the cream of Alexandra's quarantined society," lived on First Avenue behind their shops. Second, Third, and Fourth Avenue were inhabited by The Coloureds, a mixed race resulting from the "arrival of white settlers in Africa without women.

The novel's action covers the first eighteen years of Mathabane's life from to —eighteen years that fall roughly in the middle of the long rule of apartheid. Instituted init would continue in force until the early s. For over forty years, this white, minority-enforced system legalized the forced separation of residential communities, public transportation, education, and social institutions—including religion and marriage.

All non-whites were forced to secure and carry permits that identified both their tribal origin and their current work, home, and marital status. They were forced to reside in Bantu non-white locations. Work permits and passes were necessary for securing any kind of employment. Even with a work pass, movement in white neighborhoods was restricted to daylight hours unless the pass specified that the carrier was employed in the residence or business after daylight hours.

Neglect or failure to carry an up-to-date pass often resulted in unpaid, forced labor on white farms or imprisonment. First-person viewpoint is, of course, the norm in autobiography. In Kaffir Boyhowever, Mathabane skillfully juxtaposes the voices of Mark Mathabane, the adult author, with the developing voices of Johannes, the child, and Mark, the politically savvy teenager.

In chapter 1, for instance, the adult author begins his story with the full text of the legal warning posted on every road into the ghetto of Alexandra—a warning deliberately designed to prevent whites from entering the black world. Thus, most white South Africans remain ignorant of how blacks are forced to live, because the forced segregation allows them to believe what they want to believe and to turn a blind eye to the true conditions apartheid not only creates but also enforces daily.

Chapter 2 opens in a predawn nightmare world with five-year-old Johannes hysterically narrating being awakened from a dream of black people lying dead in pools of blood. Almost immediately, the nightmare turns to reality when his father leaves for work and his mother flees the house in search of a hiding place. Readers, like Johannes, remain at the mercy of Peri-Urban the Alexandra police-squad that terrorizes, abuses, and arrests residents with no warning and often without cause.

Forced to experience the real world of apartheid vicariously, they can no longer ignore or deny the facts. They must confront the evils of apartheid head-on. Most important, first-person point of view not only gives immediacy and validity to Mathabane's experiences growing up under apartheid but also models the values crucial to his physical and spiritual survival: his mother's tenacious support and will, his own pursuit of education, his determination to succeed in tennis, and the friendship of others.

The tone of Kaffir Boy takes the reader on a roller coaster ride of severe drops, wild curves, and steep climbs relieved by very few level straightaways. At times ironic or didactic, it moves rapidly from fear, to reassurance, to anger, to despondency, to determination, to hope, to disappointment, to despair, to elation. The resulting mood changes provide readers with a real sense of having walked in Mathabane's shoes, forcing them to confront head-on the evils of apartheid and other forms of racism.

Postcolonialism—sometimes referred to as Postcolonial Studies or Postcolonial Criticism—is variously defined by different critics and literary professors. However, the terms are most frequently used to refer to the autobiography of mark mathabane and wife with and influences of European nations upon non-European peoples and their countries.

Its themes are in many ways similar to those of other postcolonial writers: abuse of power, victimization, racial injustice, inequality, oppression of the majority by the minority, poverty, and violence. In his preface to the autobiography, Mathabane explains that his two-fold purpose is to persuade "the rest of the world" that apartheid has to be "abolished" because it cannot be "reformed "and also to explain that he "had to reject the tribal traditions" of his ancestors "in order to escape.

Although racial injustice has existed throughout history, South Africa's over forty-year legalization of racial abuse under apartheid stands out as one of the most horrific examples in modern history. It is therefore not surprising that it would become the subject matter for a vast number of South African writers, both black and white.

Some, like Bessie Head and Mathabane, would write while in exile or abroad, but many would write from within the country itself. Injust a year after the publication of Kaffir BoyNorthwestern University's TriQuaterly magazine published over forty selections of "new" writing by South Africans. InNadine Gordimer was awarded the Nobel Prize in literature.

InJ. Inhe won the Booker again for his novel Disgrace, thus earning the distinction of being the only person to win the Booker twice. Regardless of genre, however, almost all South African writing—from autobiography, to essay, to novel, to drama, to short storyto poetry—is in some way both autobiographical and political. Mathabane's Kaffir Boy is no exception.

Mathabane's preface makes it clear that his purpose is political. As a boy, he heard again and again how whites opened fire on sixty-nine unarmed black protesters on March 21, The fact that his birth and the Sharpville Massacre occurred in the same year deeply influenced his childhood belief that all whites were devils. Daily experience with multiple instances of racial injustice and abuse finally culminated in his involvement in the Soweto student uprisings of When the Department of Bantu Education decreed that all black children would be forced to speak and read Afrikaans rather than English, students rebelled, torching the schools.

The protests spread rapidly to Alexandra, turning the poverty-stricken ghetto into chaos. Horrified to discover that his local school library had been torched, Mathabane entered the burning building to rescue books. At sixteen, he realized that his only "passport" out of the ghetto was education. Saving the books meant saving himself.

Writing the autobiography was an attempt to save those who still remained imprisoned by apartheid. Initial reviews of Kaffir Boy in the spring of were mixed. New York Times Book Review critic Lillian Thomas appeared either unable or unwilling to grasp the significance of the book, suggesting that it should have been written in a different way and questioning why the author was no longer living in South Africa.

Two other critics, whose reviews appeared in the same month as Thomas's, praised the uniqueness and power of the book. Both Charles R. Larson in the Washington Post Book World and Diane Manuel in the Chicago Tribune Book World commented on its uniqueness as an autobiography written in English by a black native who had actually lived in an apartheid-ruled South African ghetto.

Throughout South Africa, thousands of blacks are brutalized, imprisoned, or killed. Mathabane wrote his autobiography, Kaffir Boyin They relocated to PortlandOregon inwhere he was formerly director of multicultural education at Catlin Gabel School. InMathabane established a non-profit organisation which he named after his mother Magdalene.

Mathabane's second book Kaffir Boy in America: An Encounter with Apartheid was also his second autobiography, and was published in African Women: Three Generations was Mathabane's fourth book, published in In[ 13 ] Mathabane wrote his first novel Ubuntu. Miriam's Song was published in[ 8 ] and was nominated for the Alan Paton Award. Mathabane's latest work of fiction, The Proud Liberalwas published in Contents move to sidebar hide.

Article Talk. Read Edit View history. Tools Tools. Download as PDF Printable version. In other projects. Wikidata item. White and black students did not socialize or sit together at his college. They pursued different agendas and seemed to distrust one another. Mathabane challenged this system by talking to white and black students and by defending the liberal arts curriculum that leaned heavily toward white male authors.

In their militant rage at white racism, these students apparently forgot that communicating with each other is one effective way of combatting the cancer of racism. Some white students felt uncomfortable with me because I did not fit their prejudiced view of what a black person is: those whites felt comfortable only around blacks who acted unintelligent and happy-go-lucky.

The work was a revelation to Mathabane, who immediately went to the library and checked out a dozen books by black American authors. Even better, the student felt he might contribute to this literary tradition by writing about his own childhood. Mathabane graduated from Dowling College in and began work on his first book, a memoir about his childhood in South Africa.

While writing the manuscript, he gave talks occasionally about conditions in South Africa, and one of these was attended by novelist Phyllis Whitney. She encouraged Mathabane to send the unfinished work to her agent. In the few weeks that followed, Mathabane met with a number of agents in New York City, finally choosing the same one who represented Arthur Ashe.

The manuscript was received with great excitement by several major publishers, and Macmillan eventually won rights to publish it in hardcover. Kaffir Boy, published inwon the Christopher Award. In short, I wrote to heal myself as well as inform others. Television talk show host Oprah Winfrey bought a paperback copy of Kaffir Boy and was so moved by the story that she invited Mathabane to appear on her show.

Encouraged by its reception, Mathabane moved on to other projects. What resonates so vividly in the book is his honesty, his love for knowledge and, above all, his tireless commitment to social justice. In his speeches and writings, Mathabane exhorts people to see past skin color to the character of the individual. He also makes a plea for genuine interaction between races, something he feels is sorely lacking in America.

You have to, this is your fate. This is your lot. You belong here. Cite this article Pick a style below, and copy the text for your bibliography. January 9, Retrieved January 09, from Encyclopedia.