“Mark Mathabane was weaned on devastating poverty and schooled in the cruel streets of South Africa's most desperate ghetto, where bloody gang wars and midnight police raids were his rites of passage. Like every other child born in the hopelessness of apartheid, he learned to measure his life in days, not years.
Yet Mark Mathabane, armed only with the courage of his family and a hard-won education, raised himself up from the squalor and humiliation to cross the line between black and white and win a scholarship to an American university.”
“This is a rare look inside the festering adobe shanties of Alexandra, one of South Africa's notorious black townships. Rare because it comes from the heart of a passionate young African who grew up there.” — Chicago Tribune
”This extraordinary memoir of life under apartheid is itself a triumph of the human spirit over hatred and unspeakable degradation. For Mark Mathabane did what no physically and psychologically battered “Kaffir” from the rat-infested alleys of Alexandra was supposed to do —he escaped to tell about it. Powerful, intense, inspiring.” — Publishers Weekly
Note - As detailed by Merriam Webster: In South Africa, the use of the term kaffir to refer to a black African is a profoundly offensive & inflammatory expression of contemptuous racism that is sufficient grounds for legal action. The term is associated especially with the era of apartheid, when it was commonly used as an offensive racial slur, & its offensiveness has only increased over time. It now ranks as perhaps the most offensive term in South African English.
(Group read suggestion from Mia DeGiovine Chaveco, book club co-founder.)