It was a township where many of the black residents either spent hours searching in garbage dumps for scraps of food discarded by Johannesburg whites or prostituted themselves for meals. It was a place where "children grow up accepting violence and death as the norm," as Charles Larson reflected. One of Mark Mathabane's childhood memories is of his being startled from sleep, terrified to find police breaking into his family's shanty in search of persons who emigrated illegally--as his parents had--from the "homelands," or tribal reserves. His father, Jackson Mathabane, was imprisoned following one of these raids and was repeatedly jailed after that. Mathabane recalls in
Kaffir Boy how his parents "lived the lives of perpetual fugitives, fleeing by day and fleeing by night, making sure that they were never caught together under the same roof as husband and wife" because they lacked the paperwork that allowed them to live with their lawful spouses.
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