How we cite our quotes: Citations follow this format: (Chapter.Paragraph)
Quote #4
From my experiences with white policemen, I had come to develop a deep-seated fear of white people; and seeing the bloody murders and savage beatings and indiscriminate shootings in the movies, that fear was fueled in phobic proportions. I vowed that never would I enter such a world, and I thanked the law for making sure I could not do so without a permit. Maybe, I repeatedly told myself, white people have placed these restrictions on the movement of black people in the white world because they did not want them to unwittingly wander into an Indian village or into a gladiator arena or into a cowboy shootout, and end up getting killed.
I had sense enough to know that there were white residential areas, where black maids and garden boys worked, and firms like the one where my father worked; but, in the main, I was fully convinced that somewhere in the white world, the events depicted in the movies were everyday occurrences. Otherwise how were those movies made? (8.2-3)
Mark's first encounters with the white world are through the police, who use violence to control and subjugate the black population. Mark is also introduced to the white world through movies, which hardly give Mark an adequate or realistic vision of what life is like outside of the townships.
Quote #5
I watched the evangelist bring in equipment in mud-covered jeeps, while pondering on what could have possibly made my mother say so positively that my father would take us to the tent to listen to what he called "white man's nonsense and lies." Had he not repeatedly refused my mother permission to attend any of the several churches in our neighbourhood? (9.15).
Papa associates Christianity with the white man and hates it. This is a reaction born out of his allegiance to his ethnic religion, and is also a result of what the white man has done to him, his family, and his friends.
Quote #6
Two portraits in particular always had me thinking: one depicting heaven and God; the other, hell and the Devil. The former portrayed God as an old blue-eyed white man with a long white beard, sitting between white, fluffy clouds, flanked by two bearded white men. And all around heaven were groups of angels – all of them white people. The latter portrayed a naked black man, his features distorted to resemble the Devil with a tail, twisted horns like a kudu's, writing vipers around the horns, big wild red eyes, and a wide mouth spewing flames and smoke. He carried a long fork, which he used to stab, one by one, the black men and women and children on their knees about him, begging that he not roast them in the pit of fire. (9.44)
One particularly repugnant use of religion in South Africa was to suggest that whites were pure and godly – the receptacles of God's grace and goodness – while blacks were often considered to be children of the devil.