Kaffir Boy Book Report

Have you ever wondered how a society could function, even with horrific events occurring in the shadows of the government every day? How does tragedy, conflict, or adversity contribute to how people and/or societies function? Usually, we don’t acknowledge the dark side of society and we just proceed on with our life. It’s as if we want to avoid the truth without even knowing it. We don’t typically worry about the lives of people living in substandard conditions and people that have to face discrimination in their everyday life. Kaffir Boy, an autobiography by Mark Mathabane, talked about the life and struggles that he had endured through while living in apartheid South Africa. What is apartheid? Apartheid is a policy or system of segregation or discrimination on grounds of race, and in this book, apartheid played a dominant role. Kaffir Boy was about one man’s liberation from apartheid to freedom.
Today in our current society, we still see racial discrimination towards African Americans, and we haven’t seen any progress in resolutions. As discrimination increases, more protests and violence follow. Mathabane’s autobiography is relevant to our society today because he had dealt with racial discrimination in his own country, with

The book was in the perspective of someone who was forced to lived in apartheid, and I believe Mathabane’s purpose for this book was to inform people outside of South Africa about what apartheid was and why it needed to be abolished because it could not be reformed. In the Apartheid Regime every Black African living in the ghetto, the age sixteen and up, had to have a passbook that was in order, in order to live in the city they resided in. In chapter 6, Mathabane had realized that the passbooks were the black man’s passport to existence (36). This was how the government controlled and manipulated the Black Africans, and this is what apartheid