Passport to Knowledge, Essay Example

In part two of Kaffir Boy, Mark Mathabane continues his harrowing account of life as a young boy growing up in Alexandra, the foetid, desperately poor ghetto in apartheid South Africa.  Violence and hunger were constant threats to his family, and police raids were weekly events that sometimes resulted in imprisonment for Mathabane’s father.  “Papa” Mathabane ruled his family through violence, which became worse as police persecutions, unemployment and alcoholism took their toll on him.

Amid this soul-crushing environment, young Mark managed to survive living by his wits, scrounging through filth for enough food to stay alive and avoiding the degradation of prostitution.  Most importantly, his mother provided a desperately needed emotional and psychological anchor for her son, recognizing his potential and hoping he might have what it would take to one day escape the ghetto.

Mark’s mother determined that he should attend school despite his father’s wishes and the family’s inability to pay school expenses on a timely basis.  With bound hands, he was led off to the Shangaan tribal school by his mother.  She would pay the price for defying her husband, who beat her severely in retribution.

There were retributions for Mark as well.  He discovered that school meant oppression of another kind.  He suffered beatings because he wore ill-fitting clothes because his father refused to pay for a uniform or other school expenses.  Not surprisingly, he wanted to give up on school but his mother gave him the moral support he so needed to continue, promising that things were bound to get better.

One of the most striking features of Mathabane’s remarkable story was his ability to maintain hope, to continue to function in the face of incredible hardships.  Amazingly, he achieved the highest marks in his class but physical abuse at school and the psychological effect of witnessing a brutal murder at the age of 10 nearly overwhelmed him.

In the last throes of desperation, Mathabane was on the point of suicide.  His mother pleaded with him not to use the knife she found him with, claiming that suicide might free him but that losing him would mean long-term suffering for she and his siblings.  “I too would want to die if you were to die,” she told him.  “You’re the only hope I have.  I love you very much” (p. 169).  He handed over the knife.

Mark was indispensable to his mother.  Not only did he offer her hope, he was de facto “man of the house,” filling a void left by a father who abrogated his moral role as patriarch through physical and emotional abuse.  Mark’s presence was particularly important during his father’s absences, during which he helped care for his brothers and sisters.  (In part one, we saw just how important Mark was to the family, looking after his brothers and sisters while his mother fled the police during a night raid.)

In a society where challenging a husband’s authority could be quite dangerous for a woman, the willingness of Mathabane’s mother to endure all manner of abuse to protect her son reflects not only her love for him but a long-sublimated desire to attend school herself.  In an emotionally charged scene between the two, she tells Mark, “Unlike your father, I’ve always wanted to go to school but couldn’t because my father, under the sway of tribal traditions, thought it unnecessary to educate females.  That’s why I so much want you to go, child.  For if you do, I know that someday I too would come to go, old as I would be then.” Her nearly frantic insistence that he remain in school is, in its way, an act of desperation nearly as severe as the one she prevented Mark from carrying through.

Mathabane’s mother was determined to find a way to fund his schooling despite the back breaking work and the resistance she faced from her traditionalist husband.  Mathabane’s father, who flatly refused to fund his education, ridiculed his wife for thinking she could pay for it on what little she made as a cleaning woman.  Her defiant response was that it didn’t matter: she would somehow find a way.

By the time Mathabane reached Standard Six, it was apparent that his mother’s sacrifice was not in vain.  She took a cleaning job, despite carrying her fifth child, to ensure that Mark had the opportunity to develop what was clearly a keen and discerning mind.  Eventually, the intervention of fate and a kind-hearted patroness (of sorts) helped broaden the young student’s educational landscape.

Mrs. Smith, a woman who lived in a whites-only suburb of Johannesburg, employed Mark’s grandmother.  Mrs. Smith donated her son’s old clothes, books and toys, an act of simple kindness that had a monumental effect on an impressionable and intellectually hungry young mind.  Mrs. Smith got to know Mark through his grandmother, leading to further generosity on her part.  Soon, Mark was reading literature and venturing down new and exciting paths of educational exploration.

“These books and toys revealed to me a new reality,” Mathabane said.  “They moulded my thoughts and feelings and made me dream. My interest in learning increased” (p. 171).

Mrs. Smith’s attitude toward blacks was, comparatively speaking, positive, even progressive for the time.  Apartheid South Africa of the 1970s and ‘80s was a brutally repressive place.  Her acknowledgment of young Mathabane was, in itself, a generous gesture, though in commenting that he looked like “a very smart pickaninny” (p. 188), she exhibited a dubious moral barometer that could at best be described as ambiguous.

Mathabane’s relationship with another of the Smiths had an effect on his psyche that was nearly as beneficial, though unintentionally so.  Mrs. Smith’s son, Clyde, heaped racially offensive verbal abuse on Mathabane, who wrote that it motivated him to prove he was as capable of succeeding as any white person.

To her credit, Mrs. Smith rose to Mathabane’s defense when Clyde called him a “kaffir.”  Evidently, she had a somewhat more elastic view of the status of blacks in South African society than was generally accepted during that era.  To Mrs. Smith, Mark and his grandmother were “bantu,” and not deserving of a racist term as denigrating as “kaffir.”

As it happened, mental acuity was not the only asset that would help Mathabane find a way out of his surroundings.  In addition to books and clothes, Mrs. Smith gave him an old wooden tennis racket, an afterthought on her part but one that would have a powerful impact on the course of the young man’s life.  She encouraged him to practice diligently and hoped that he might one day come to emulate the success of the great black American tennis champion Arthur Ashe.  Eventually, he would find that his athletic abilities were the equal of his mental powers.

As Mathabane continued to excel in his studies, his perception of the outside world, and the world around him, began to transform.  He read Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island, a story that captivated his imagination and fueled his desire to gain a command of the English language.  Unfortunately, most of the books available through his school dealt with tribal customs and matters.  The Bantu Education law required black children to acquire a solid educational foundation in tribal life, the idea being that this would inculcate them in the thinking that perpetuated apartheid.

Mathabane was outraged by the Bantu law.  Dr. Verwoerd, then prime minister of South Africa, said the law served the very useful purpose of keeping blacks from being mislead into thinking that opportunities existed beyond the ghetto.  Nevertheless, he continued to read any books he was given, relying on Mrs. Smith to provide the stories that were denied him at school.  When his grandmother failed to come home with a new book, he would revisit the old ones or read a neighbor’s dictionary, striving to improve his vocabulary and command of English.

By the time he was promoted to Standard Four, his teachers had begun predicting that great things awaited him.  Yet, with so many of his fellow students having to drop out because their parents could no longer afford school, Mathabane was constantly concerned that the same fate might befall him.  His motto became “Learn as much as you can, while the opportunity is still there” (p. 197).

School was his only true outlet.  His relationship with his father had soured past the point of repair.  One day, Mathabane’s father, who had lost his money gambling, asked his son for 30 cents so he could catch the bus to work.  Mathabane, who had taken a job selling newspapers after school, already had to help pay to feed the family, in addition to needing money for school.  He refused his father’s demand and a confrontation ensued.  After a week living at his grandmother’s house, he returned, realizing that his father was not only powerless in society, but had become nearly irrelevant in his own home.  His anachronistic belief in the old tribal ways had ruined him: he lived in a state of willful ignorance that his son could never understand.

To Mark, the true victim of all this was his mother.  His guilt over the circumstances of her life was a constant and painful reminder of the existence that daily threatened to claim him forever.  By his mother’s admission, the white people for whom she labored “worked her like a mule, treated her like vermin, yet paid for nothing” (p. 209).  One day, watching her prepare porridge as she carried a baby on her back, he declared his intention to quit school and work full time in order to help make ends meet.  Believing a Standard Six education would qualify him for a job, he intended to fill the place left so painfully vacant by his father’s stubbornness and irresponsible behavior.

She reminded Mathabane that the best he could ever hope for would be picking up garbage.  He had a gift and she intended to see him realize his potential, if it killed her.  When Mathabane asked where the money would come from, she swore that she would find it “from somewhere.  I’ll even break my back if that’s what it takes to keep you going” (p. 210).  They arrived at a compromise: if Mathabane passed Standard Six with a First Class standing, he would move on to secondary school.  Otherwise, he would go to work at a nearby factory and help his beleaguered mother provide for the family.

Works Cited

Mathabane, Mark.  Kaffir Boy.  New York: MacMillan (1986).