Mathabane makes clear that his life was not one which proveed all hope of escaping the "prison house of apartheid" (v). He was born and embossed in the midst of the worst that the system had to offer:
. . . I was born of illiterate parents who could not afford to pay my fashion by dint of school, let alone pay the rent for our go after and put enough food on the table;
. . . [we] lived nether constant police dismay and the threat of deportation . . . ; . . . at ten I contemplated suicide . . . ; . . . in 1976 I got deeply involved in the Soweto protests, in which hundreds of black students were killed by the police, and thousands fled the solid ground to escape imprisonment and torture (ix).
Ironically, the ticket to freedom for Mathabane came through the "white" sport of tennis, at which he excelled. Tennis allowed the germ to develop a talent which gave him the opportunity to transcend apartheid, and it similarly led him to see that not all whites were the racist monsters he had believed them to be. This situation allowed him to have some hope that whites could also be included in the fight for racial liberty in sulfur Africa.
Mathabane also ack instanterledges, however, that he had to give up traditional connections with his past in order to escape apartheid, or at least in order to wobble his own racial identity enough to make escape possible. He writes that his record book is "about how, in order to escape fr
. . . More than 90 percent of white South Africans go through a lifetime without seeing firsthand the in piece conditions under which blacks have to survive. . . . My score is intended to visual aspect him . . . a world he would otherwise not see. . . . (3).
The fact that the write would have any hope that he could change the apartheid system is something of a miracle, considering the perspective he had as a child with regard to both whites and the blacks who helped uphold apartheid. He tells the story of a raid on his shantytown by police and the terror with which the encounter was filled.
Most important, the story of the raid underscores the fact that apartheid could not survive without the complicity of blacks who helped implement it, and other blacks who behaved as if they had no prime(prenominal) but to wallow in fear. The book is designed to show that all South Africans are made less human by implementing or tolerating apartheid. All are victims of a system of racist hate and fear which demeans the humanity of all. This is why the author stresses again and again that apartheid cannot be merely reformed, but quite must be done away with entirely.
The author in part learned to take advantage of opportunities from his mother, who expressed her emancipation from her husband at one point by joining the Christian church---not for spiritual but for practical reasons, which her son was spanking enough to note: "Hers was a Christianity of expediency" (77). Son course learned from his mother that there were certain things one had to do and to be in order to get ahead socially and economically: "I need a job . . . and haven't you discover that all the Christians have jobs?" (77).
Throughout the book, Mathabane emphasizes his own philosophy that eschews hatred and aims instead at equality:
shuddered to think how he would match to, how he would combat the nightmarish life I had undergone that now lay before him. How would he deal with the fear, the frustration, the hate, th
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