"Yet the white man of South Africa claims to the rest of the world that he knows what is good for black people and what it takes for a black child to grow up to adulthood.... But, in truth, these claims and boasts are hollow.
"The white man of South Africa ... does not know the conditions under which I was born and had to live for eighteen years. So my story is intended to show him with words a world he would otherwise not see because of a sign and a conscience racked with guilt and to make him feel what I felt when he contemptuously called me a 'Kaffir boy.' [A word of Arabic origin meaning 'infide,' in South Africa it has come to be the equivalent of 'nigger.'].
"When I was growing up in Alexandra it meant hate, bitterness, hunger, pain, terror, violence, fear, dashed hope and dreams. Today it still means the same for millions of black children who are trapped in the ghettos of South Africa, in a lingering nightmare of a racial system that in many respects resembles Nazism. In the ghettos black children fight for survival from the moment they are born. They take to hating and fearing the police, soldiers and authorities as a baby takes to its mother's breast.
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