Kaffir Boy Fear Quotes

My father came back, and our lives became somewhat normal again. But my instincts told me that that normalcy could be shattered at any moment – by another arrest. At this point in my life I realized that, willy-nilly, black people had to map out their lives, their future, with the terror of the police in mind. And that that terror led to the hunger, the loneliness, the violence, the helplessness, the hopelessness, the apathy and the suffering with which I was surrounded.

My father's repeated arrests gave me insight into the likely nature of my own future. As a black boy, the odds were heavily stacked against my establishing a normal, stable family when I came of age…

Knowing that, my heart sank, and I began to wonder whether life – black life – was really worth living. (18.1-3)

Many of those who came settled in our neighbourhood and, as a result, before long my playmates included boys from various tribal reserves. These boys brought with them voodoo superstitions, more mysterious than the ones I already held. My sensibilities became sharpened to the point where I began paying singular attention to little oddities hat previously I had dismissed without thought, now thinking that they were manifestations of witchcraft. For instance, I would be sitting outside at night, and a shiny object would suddenly streak across the sky and vanish mysteriously. I would bolt into the house and tell whichever adult was around that I had seen a witch. To my surprise some of the people around me would openly and publicly support my claims of witchcraft sightings, so that soon I began walking around with the paranoiac attitude that every strange thing that no adult could explain was the "deeds of witches," that strangers were not to be trusted, that every crone was a potential witch and out to get me. (18.4)

With almost three years of constant police terror behind me, I had now become, at seven years old, so conditioned to expecting predawn police raids that each time my mother awakened me in the middle of the night, I would spring up and ask, "Are they here? I didn't hear any noises," thinking that the police had invaded the neighbourhood. And on many occasions it turned out they had. (19.1)