Born a Crime

Content warning: This section of the guide discusses racism, apartheid, and domestic abuse.

“The genius of apartheid was convincing people who were the overwhelming majority to turn on each other. Apart hate, is what it was. You separate people into groups and make them hate one another so you can run them all.”

These are the opening lines of the memoir, demonstrating just how destructive and divisive apartheid was for the South African people. The white government used apartheid to control the Black majority, getting them to fight against one another instead of coming together to fight a common enemy.

“My whole family is religious, but where my mother was Team Jesus all the way, my grandmother balanced her Christian faith with the traditional Xhosa beliefs she’s grown up with, communicating with the spirits of our ancestors.”

This describes the cultural diversity of South Africa. Although heavily influenced by outside cultures, the native South Africans still retain much of their original way of life.

“Apartheid was a police state, a system of surveillance and laws designed to keep black people under total control. A full compendium of those laws would run more than three thousand pages and weigh approximately ten pounds, but the general thrust of it should be easy enough for any American to understand. In America you had the forced removal of the native onto reservations coupled with slavery followed by segregation. Imagine all three of those things happening to the same group of people at the same time. That was apartheid.”

While this quote describes apartheid more generally, in Noah’s life this translates to his family registering their race with the government, being forced to live in racially segregated ghettos, and not being allowed to publicly see his dad because he’s white.