Born a Crime

smart kid. You don’t want to be in that class.” “But aren’t the classes the same? English is English. Math is math.” “Yeah, but ...

Finally she gave me a stern warning. “You do realize the effect this will have on your future? You do understand what you’re giv ...

when I was forced to choose, I chose black. The world saw me as colored, but I didn’t spend my life looking at myself. I spent m ...

With the black kids, I wasn’t constantly trying to be. With the black kids, I just was. ...

Before apartheid, any black South African who received a formal education was likely taught by European missionaries, foreign en ...

freedom. The only way to make apartheid work, therefore, was to cripple the black mind. Under apartheid, the government built wh ...

ground? Mission schools were told to conform to the new curriculum or shut down. Most of them shut down, and black children were ...

schools and the Bantu schools, offers a neat comparison of the two groups of whites who oppressed us, the British and the Afrika ...

...

THE SECOND GIRL My mother used to tell me, “I chose to have you because I wanted something to love and something that would love ...

belong to her father, didn’t belong with her siblings. She grew up with nothing and wanted something to call her own. My grandpa ...

Meadowlands. They divorced not long after that, and my grandmother moved to Orlando with my mom, my aunt, and my uncle. My mom w ...

to please him and be with him. She was always being swatted away by his girlfriends, who didn’t like having a reminder of his fi ...

taking her to live with him in the Meadowlands, without even telling her why, he packed her off and sent her to live with his si ...

family again for twelve years. She lived in a hut with fourteen cousins —fourteen children from fourteen different mothers and f ...

made up over 80 percent of South Africa’s population, the territory allocated for the homelands was about 13 percent of the coun ...

cows,” my mother would later say, “one of the oxen.” She and her cousins were up at half past four, plowing fields and herding a ...

The farmers would put out scraps for the animals, and she’d jump for it. She was hungry; let the animals fend for themselves. Th ...

didn’t have food or shoes or even a pair of underwear, but she had English. She could read and write. When she was old enough sh ...

could no longer keep her in Transkei. My mom wrote to my gran, asking her to send the price of a train ticket, about thirty rand ...