Born a Crime summary

It’s always said that opposites attract, and, if one were to judge by Noah’s parents, one would be forced to say it’s true. They couldn’t have been more different.

Noah’s dad, Robert, a man of Swiss-German descent, had moved to South Africa in the late 1970s. He was quiet and withdrawn, and he never understood the country’s racism; in fact, he later opened one of the first mixed restaurants in Johannesburg. However, because of apartheid, Noah could only visit his father infrequently, and by the time he was 13 they’d lost contact. It wasn’t that his father was uninterested in his son. In fact, when a 24-year-old Noah finally managed to visit him, he found his father had been meticulously pasting newspaper clippings about Noah’s career into a large scrapbook.

Just like his mother, Noah grew up in poverty. There was little food and sometimes they even had to make soup that consisted of nothing but water and bones. Much of his childhood was spent in Soweto, a township of Johannesburg into which one million Blacks had been corralled. It was built by the apartheid regime as a managed ghetto; its two entry roads could easily be blockaded and, if the regime ever deemed it necessary, it could be bombed from the air.

During school holidays, Noah stayed at his grandmother's two-room house. There, he slept on the floor along with his mother, grandmother, great-grandmother, aunt, uncle and cousins. The toilet was a fly-infested outhouse – a hole in a concrete slab and some old newspapers to wipe with.

Nelson Mandela was freed from his life sentence in 1990 and, a year later, apartheid officially came to an end. But for many people this triumph merely signaled the beginning of a whole new range of problems. Sure, Blacks could now theoretically hold power, but it wasn’t at all clear who actually held it. The end of apartheid segued into a power struggle between the Zulus and the Xhosas, the two largest tribes. Many thousands died.

In these unstable times, Noah’s mother remained resolute and strong. For instance, one Sunday when Noah was nine, he, his mother and his half-brother Andrew were forced to take public minibuses to church. Their wreck of a car just wouldn’t start. At that time, buses, which were unregulated, were extremely dangerous – drivers and operators fought turf wars over the routes.

To be “coloured” during apartheid was an official classification. It meant you had neither fully Black nor fully white ancestry. It came with its own problems of identity. Where did you belong? This quandary was only compounded by the end of apartheid.

During apartheid, “coloured” people had been told they could “become” white. That’s to say, they could be reclassified: if you mixed with whites, you and your descendants would also be white.

Noah’s business acumen extended to more than just being the tuckshop guy. By the age of 16, he was selling bootleg CDs full of tracks he’d downloaded from the internet at home. He’d been lucky: there was no way he could afford a CD writer himself, but an older and richer white school friend had given him one, which had got him started burning.

Before too long he moved on from pirating CDs to burning his own mixes and even deejaying at parties. With his massive library of downloaded tracks, he could play for much longer than the DJs who were just using vinyl, and he got more and more popular. Soon, he was getting bookings from all over town. He even had his own dance crew who performed while he deejayed.

The DJ jobs were good for Noah, but otherwise it was hard for Blacks to find employment in post-apartheid South Africa. Technically, now that apartheid laws had been revoked, there were equal work opportunities for all. However, although many Blacks were well educated and qualified, they found that systemic racism prevented them from actually getting a job. Law or no law, a racist Afrikaner shop owner is still unlikely to employ a non-white.

Crime was one of the few ways Blacks could earn money. If you hustle hard, it doesn’t matter what color your skin is; you can earn a living from crime.

While Noah was growing up and finding his way in the world, his mother had issues of her own to manage. Primarily, this meant dealing with Abel, a car mechanic whom she’d met when Trevor was six or seven. The two married and had two children.

The relationship soon became abusive. Though charming, Abel was also an alcoholic who could get violent when he was drunk. His Tsonga name, Ngisaveni, was rather fitting: it translates to “be afraid.”