Born a Crime

Trevor Noah was born in Johannesburg in 1984 to a black Xhosa mother and a white Swiss father, at a time when the laws of apartheid South Africa made their relationship a crime. Born a Crime is his account of growing up as the living proof of that crime: hidden indoors as a small child, too light for Soweto, too black for the colored neighborhood his family moved to, and always a little outside every group. At the center of the book stands his mother, Patricia Nombuyiselo Noah, a deeply religious, stubborn and fearless woman who raised him as if he were already free.

The book came out in 2016, the year after Noah became host of The Daily Show in the United States. It has eighteen chapters in three parts: childhood under apartheid and in its last years (chapters 1 to 8), school and adolescence in the new South Africa (9 to 14), and young adulthood, hustling, a week in jail and his mother's marriage to a violent man (15 to 18). Between the chapters Noah places short essays on South African history: how apartheid divided people, the homelands, language, the schooling given to black children. The stories are funny and frank, and the book also contains strong language and scenes of violence, which this summary retells briefly.

Notes. A memoir tells events as the author remembers them; this summary reports Noah's account and his views. The racial groups the book names (black, white, colored, Indian) were legal categories under apartheid, and the book uses them as South Africans do.