Born a Crime: Chapter 5 Summary & Analysis

In the preface to the chapter, Noah notes that missionaries provide the only education available to black South Africans before the beginning of the apartheid government, and “nearly every major black leader of the anti-apartheid movement” gets this kind of education. During apartheid, the government shuts down mission schools and makes sure that blacks are confined to “Bantu schools,” in which they only learn “metrics and agriculture.” “Fully grown teenagers” are taught through songs: “three times two is six. La la la la la.” This is the difference between British and Afrikaner racism: the British promised natives a way to “civilize themselves” and potentially join polite society, while the Afrikaners thought, “why give a book to a monkey?”

Noah explains that he is “a product of [his mother’s] search for belonging.” Her parents are forced to move to Soweto and divorce soon after having her; Patricia is “the problem child” and fights constantly with her mother (Frances) but loves accompanying her father (Temperance) “on his manic misadventures.” She tries to move in with Temperance at the age of nine, but he sends her to live in Transkei, the Xhosa “homeland,” with his sister.

As the middle child and “second girl,” Patricia is unwanted, and she ends up living in a hut with 14 other unwanted children in the overcrowded, infertile “homeland.” She works the fields in the early morning and fights the other children—or sometimes the pigs or dogs—to make sure she has something to eat for dinner. At times “she literally ate dirt” to feel full. But she is lucky to go to one of the only remaining mission schools and learn English, which gets her a job at a nearby factory, which pays her with dinner.

When Patricia is 21, her aunt gets sick, so she has to return to Soweto. This is when she takes the typing course and works as a secretary—but all her money goes to the family, which “is the curse of being black and poor,” having to work endlessly to help everyone else catch up. She soon tires of paying this “black tax” and runs away to live in downtown Johannesburg.

Patricia tells this story in occasional vignettes—never all at once—and only so Trevor wouldn’t “take for granted how we got to where we were.” She thinks it wrong to dwell on past suffering, so she never does, even though she also wants to ensure her son never suffers like she did.

Most Xhosa names become self-fulfilling prophecies; Patricia’s, “Nombuyiselo,” means “She Who Gives Back,” and is fitting: even as a child, she would care for younger, abandoned children. So, to exempt her son from fate, she names him “Trevor, a name with no meaning whatsoever in South Africa, no precedent in my family. It’s not even a Biblical name.” He is free to become whomever he wants.

Patricia also makes sure Trevor speaks English as his first language and gives him as many books as possible—he treasures them and particularly loves fantasy. She “spoke to [Trevor] like an adult, which was unusual.” Unlike school, Patricia teaches Trevor to think.

Apartheid ends gradually, with various laws coming off the books or otherwise losing their force. A few months before its ultimate collapse, Patricia and Trevor move to Eden Park, a colored neighborhood with real, suburban houses, surrounded by black townships. Trevor is uncomfortable having his own bedroom and sleeps in his mother’s bed. They also get a car, the secondhand Volkswagen that often fails to start up (forcing them to hitchhike). But this lets them freely explore—they visit every park and picnic spot imaginable. Patricia refuses to spend money on anything but food and books—all Trevor’s clothes are secondhand and their furniture is always falling apart. Even the food they do get is the cheapest available, the meat often limited to scraps and bones intended for dogs.

However, Trevor “never felt poor because our lives were so rich with experience.” They visit white neighborhoods and other “places black people never went.” In essence, Patricia raises Trevor “like a white kid […] in the sense of believing that the world was my oyster, that I should speak up for myself, that my ideas and thoughts and decisions mattered.” Following one’s dreams depends on the limits of one’s imagination, but Patricia shows Trevor limitless possibilities, even though nobody ever did the same for her. And, most astonishingly, she does this all despite never having known that apartheid was nearing its end. She refuses to bend to “the logic of apartheid” and wants to make sure that, in her words, “even if [Trevor] never leaves the ghetto, he will know that the ghetto is not the world.”