Mark Mathabane Biography

Authors and Artists for Young Adults on Mark Mathabane

"What television newscasts did to expose the horrors of the Vietnam War in the 1960s, books like Kaffir Boy may well do for the horrors of apartheid in '80s," Diane Manuel predicted in a 1986 Chicago Tribune Book World review of Kaffir Boy: The True Story of a Black Youth's Coming of Age in Apartheid South Africa. In that book, author Mark Mathabane's first, he recounts his early life in the black township of Alexandra, outside Johannesburg. The eldest of his parents' seven children, the author lived in dire poverty and constant fear, until he almost miraculously received a scholarship to play tennis at an American college. Washington Post Book World critic Charles R. Larson hailed Kaffir Boy as "violent and hard-hitting," while Peter Dreyer in the Los Angeles Times Book Review described Mathabane's autobiography as "a book full of a young man's clumsy pride and sorrow, full of rage at the hideousness of circumstances, the unending destruction of human beings, [and] the systematic degradation of an entire society (and not only black South African society) in the name of a fantastic idea."

The Alexandra of Kaffir Boy was a place of overwhelming poverty and deprivation, of incessant hunger, of horrific crimes committed by the government and citizen gangs, and of fear and humiliation.

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