Triumph of Spirit: ‘Road to Alexandra’, Essay Example

In part one of Kaffir Boy, author Mark Mathabane immediately introduces us to the terrors of life in one of South Africa’s worst ghettos – a night raid by the infamous Alexandra police force, the Peri-Urban.

The feared raids often resulted in imprisonment, a threat that forced the mother of then five-year-old Mathabane to flee the house and lie hidden in a ditch.  The boy was left alone with his siblings.  Convinced that no adult is home, the police left but the next night they returned.  This time Mathabane was forced to watch his father being abused, then dragged away into the night – he served two months doing hard labor because he couldn’t afford to pay his poll tax.

Mark’s father was jailed again the following year for no other offense than unemployment.  The family came near to starving in his absence and it’s only through the intervention of his grandmother that they were able to survive.  Desperate for food, Mark was enticed into a brothel of young boys but fled, horrified with what he’d seen.  When his father returned, it was as an embittered and violent man.  Mark gravitated toward his mother, who acted as a kind of spiritual refuge, telling him stories and fables from her tribal heritage.  They became his only link to hope for a better day.

Background

The true horror of the old colonial system of oppression was its power to pervert from without and within.  Native values, customs and institutions, no matter how ancient, were cut adrift from their roots and set at odds and distance from their own people.  When indigenous populations come to believe that their own traditions are ignorant practices deserving of obsolescence, alienation and displacement soon follow.

In South Africa, one of the most brutally efficient systems of institutionalized racism in recent history relegated the country’s black native population to a nearly sub-human level of existence.  Utterly powerless in their own country, the descendants of tribesmen conquered by the Boers, Dutch settlers who ruthlessly snatched native lands, were subjugated and forced to live in teeming ghettos.

This is the bleak historical setting for Mathabane’s story.  Born into a nightmare world of violence and want, Mathabane spares no detail in recounting the humiliation and deprivation that nearly destroyed his family, as it had many others.  Born with an inquisitive mind and a keen natural intelligence Mathabane, with the sacrifice and support of his mother, was able to escape the fate of his violent, pathetic father.

Mathabane deprecated what he regarded as the tribal backwardness of his father and came to loathe the Christian church, a tool of white imperial exploitation that his mother wanted the family to join.  Along the way, Mathabane maintained a sense of moral equilibrium, insisting the choices he made that would lead him out of his repressive environment were based not on issues of race but on maintaining his integrity.

Ethnic Comparisons

The Johannesburg regime came to power in 1948 on the promise that it would maintain a system of segregation known as apartheid, an Afrikaans word meaning “separate.”  With the exception of Nazi Germany, few governments have established a social order based purely on racism as successfully as the National Party (NP).  One is tempted to compare the oppression of the Jews under Hitler to the conditions under which blacks lived in South Africa.  There are similarities as well as distinct differences.

The NP played on South Africans’ fears of black political aspirations, fears that had roots in the old colonial tradition of informal racial segregation.  Those traditions produced the word “kaffir,” a derogatory term for black people, and a habit of regarding blacks, Indians, Asians and other non-whites as inferior.  Many countries have legacies of hate rooted in the distant past.  In Germany, fear of Jewish people intermittently flared into violence until Adolf Hitler instituted the pogrom that led to the worst case of mass murder in known history.

In South Africa, the NP came to power by taking advantage of the same kind of chronic hatred.  A well-organized bureaucracy, working in partnership with the state’s ruthless enforcement agencies, gave the South African system a longevity that Nazi Germany failed to achieve.  South Africa’s leaders during the apartheid era were successful at maintaining a supportable social stratification, holding out the opportunity for education among a small number of blacks but eliminating any real opportunity for advancement.  There was no question of equal rights for blacks before the law.

The oppression of the North American Indian perhaps offers a closer parallel to the experience of blacks in South Africa.  Herded onto reservations, American Indian tribes became subjects of a well-organized and programmatic “solution” that calls to mind Alexandra and the other ghettos of South Africa, set aside to maintain apartheid.  As well, the native peoples of the American continent were regarded as racially inferior, ignorant savages that didn’t deserve the same rights and opportunities that white Americans took for granted.

Atrocities, murders and intimidation characterized the worst aspects of the oppression suffered by American Indians and native South Africans.  But it was calculated and unquestioned racism that typified both scenarios, the ability of both states to cow native populations into accepting an image of themselves foisted upon them.

Role of a Young Boy in a Desperate Family

Negative self-image set Mark’s family at a powerful disadvantage, as it did for countless South Africans during apartheid.  A questioning, intelligent boy, Mark felt like a victim but never stopped asking why the circumstances of their lives were so unfair.  He acted as a counterpoint to his brutish and ignorant father who was a true victim of apartheid, emotionally and physically.

Mark was the product of his mother’s hope.  He embodied the only hope that his mother still had, the hope that there might be a future for at least one of her children.  She fired Mark’s imagination with stories and fables from her tribal heritage, which eventually inspired him to think beyond the confines of the family’s demoralizing predicament.  Ultimately, she gave him the strength to rise above apartheid and envision a brighter future far from Alexandra.

Mark appeared to have a strong moral compass.  He had the strength to leave the juvenile brothel even with Mphandlani enticing him with food.  That moral strength also enabled him to reject his father’s tribal superstitions, which so horrified him during their visit to the Venda reservation.

The strain from his father’s periods of incarceration left him an embittered man who turns to alcohol and violence.  A strict adherent to the old tribal ways, he saw himself as supreme lord and master in his household.

Mark’s mother was unable to leave in spite of the physical and emotional abuse she must endure on behalf of her children.  Tribal custom here is as oppressive as the government – the lobola, a kind of dowry arrangement, had already been paid for her and tribal law forbade her from leaving her husband.

In such a damaged environment, Mark and his mother appear to have had an unspoken symbiotic relationship that sustained both.  At one point, Mark told his mother “he is not happy in this world;” she reassured him that things would get better, which she knew to be untrue.  In spite of her misery, she consolef Mark in his worst moments and offered him a glimmer of hope because he was her hope.

Pros and Cons

The “cons” of such a family setting seem obvious at first: an abusive, alcoholic father; a dangerous environment in which starvation and sickness are the norms; a beleaguered mother who often has to beg in order to feed and shelter her children.  A desperately poor family having more children obviously worsens an already dire situation.  As Mark told his mother, there will be even less food to go around with a new mouth to feed when he found out she was pregnant.  Governmental indifference ensured that birth control options and family planning information remained non-existent. That day-to-day reality would be enough to destroy anyone’s spirit, but there was something more insidious and sinister at work.

The traditional roles of a “nuclear” family call for a father to provide for the family by producing a steady income.  The mother’s “traditional” role is to care for children and support her husband.  But the social restrictions of apartheid drastically impair the father’s ability to find and maintain steady employment, as described in “Road to Alexandra.”  Unable to fulfill his role, and under additional normative social pressures from tribal beliefs, the dynamic begins to turn inward on itself.

The father feels worthless, angry and frustrated.  His powerlessness begins to manifest itself in feelings of resentment toward his family, who seem more like unwanted burdens.  He turns to alcohol or drugs, which exacerbates the situation.  Domestic violence ensues.  The most damaging effect of such a scenario is the perpetuation of feelings of worthlessness.  Family members come to see themselves as victims and so they become victims who will, in their turn, feed the cycle and help create more victims.

One of the lessons of Kaffir Boy appears to be that family can provide support even in a hopeless environment like the one Mathabane described with such sobering clarity.  As previously mentioned, he and his mother shared a bond that helped both endure the most extreme privation and violence.  It is truly remarkable that Mathabane survived the ordeal of his youth feeling that a brighter future lay ahead of him, but without his mother’s help it’s highly unlikely his fate would have been different from that of others who shared his circumstances.

Mathabane’s extended family was vitally important and, in fact, the family would have lost their home and quite likely starved to death in their father’s absence without the intervention of his grandmother.  In that sense, having a large family may have been considered highly desirable when resources are exhausted.

Conclusion

Perhaps the most redeeming quality of “Road to Alexandra” lies in Mathabane’s stubborn courage and persistent belief that there was reason to hope.  There was reason to hope, not only for Mathabane, who survived the worst conditions imaginable, but for all of South Africa, which eventually freed itself from the profanity of apartheid.

At the height of its power, apartheid was so much a part of South Africa’s national identity it was difficult to imagine that freedom and equality could ever take root there.  Citing allegory and invoking the “triumph of the human spirit” are often simplistic and trite literary devices that fail to appreciate true meaning.  But Mathabane’s story obviates such comparisons.  His truly is a triumph of spirit because spirit is all he had to sustain him.

Works Cited

Mathabane, Mark.  Kaffir Boy,  New York:  Penguin  (1987)