Kaffir Boy Hate Quotes

Phineas was one of thousands of black migrant workers in Alexandra forced to live hundreds of miles from their families because of Influx Control laws, which discouraged black family life in what the government called "white South Africa." In the township, no other group lived as unnaturally as the migrant workers. Housed mostly in sterile single-sex barracks, they were prey to prostitution, Matanyula [sex with young boys, paid for in food], alcoholism, robbery and senseless violence; they existed under such stress and absorbed so much emotional pain that tears, grief, fear, hope and sadness had become alien to most of them.

Stripped of their manhood, they hated the white man with every fibre of their being. Anger would leap into their eyes each time the words white man were uttered. Rage would heave their chest each time something or someone reminded them that it was the white man who kept their families away from them. Each time I saw that anger and hate, I knew that they felt a pain so deep it could not be expressed; that though they laughed and chaffed with one another, as they tried in vain to drown their sorrows in gourds of liquor, something inside them was slowly dying.

There is a death far worse than physical death, and that is the death of the mind and soul, when, despite toiling night and day, under sweltering heat, torrential rain, blistering winds, you still cannot make enough to clothe, shelter and feed your loved ones, suffering miles away, forcibly separated from you. (29.103-105)

A million times I wondered why the sparse library at my tribal school did not carry books like Treasure Island, why most of the books we read had tribal points of view. I would ask teachers and would be told that under the Bantu Education law black children were supposed to acquire a solid foundation in tribal life, which would prepare them for a productive future in their respective homelands. In this way the dream of Dr. Verwoerd, prime minister of South Africa and the architect of Bantu Education, would be realized, for he insisted that "the native child must be taught subjects which will enable him to work with and among his own people; therefore there is no use misleading him by showing him the green pastures of European society, in which he is not allowed to graze. Bantu education should not be used to create imitation whites."

How I cursed Dr. Verwoerd and his law for prescribing how I should feel and think. (31.3-4).

Thus my consciousness was awakened to the pervasiveness of "petty apartheid," and everywhere I went in the white world, I was met by visible and invisible guards of racial segregation. Overtly, the guards---larger-than-life signs that read, European Only, Non-European Only, Whites Only, Non-Whites Only, Slegs Blankes, Slegs Nie-Blankes – greeted me, and led me as a blind man would be led to the door I should enter through, the elevator I should ride in, the water fountain I should drink from, the park bench I should sit on, the bus I should ride in, the lavatory I should piss in.

The invisible guards, however, did not greet me as conspicuously to orient me about my place in life. Instead, remarks such as "You're in the wrong place, Kaffir," "We don't serve your colour here, Kaffir," "Who do you think you are, Kaffir?" "Are you mad, Kaffir" told me it was still the guards of Jim Crow talking. (32.40-41)