Kaffir Boy Tradition and Customs Quotes

My mother's vast knowledge of folklore, her vivid remembrance of traditions of various tribes of long ago and her uncanny ability to turn mere words into unforgettable pictures, fused night after night to concoct riveting stories.

On some nights, she would tell of chiefs, witch doctors, sages, warriors, sorcerers, magicians and wild, monstrous beasts. These stories were set in mythical African kingdoms ruled by black people, where no white man had ever set foot. She would recount prodigious deeds of famous African gods, endowed with unlimited magical powers; among them the powers of immortality, invincibility and invisibility, powers which they used to fight, relentlessly and valiantly, for justice, peace and harmony among all black tribes of the Valley of a Thousand Hills.

[…]

As we had no nursery rhymes nor storybooks, and, besides, as no one in the house knew how to read, my mother's stories served as a kind of library, a golden fountain of knowledge where we children learned about right and wrong, about good and evil. (12.3-4, 9).

Another thing that awed me was their almost total lack of information outside their own milieu. They never stopped asking us about goings-on in the city and about the world of white people. Even though I had never been beyond the confines of Alexandra to know what Johannesburg was really like, I told them secondhand stories about it. They believed me completely, and thought me vastly knowledgeable; I felt superior to them. The way they went about their daily life reminded me of my mother's stories about primitive tribes, and I felt a slight revulsion at being connected, through my father, to what everyone in the city called a "backward" way of life. My father, on the other hand, seemed very much at home; I wondered why. (15.8)

On the day that my father and I returned from the tribal reserve my mother gave birth to a baby girl, my third sister. In keeping with tribal tradition, she and the baby remained in seclusion for about two weeks, and for that period my father, George and I had to be housed by neighbours, for the presence of males was forbidden during seclusion. The day the baby was born, I spied, in the dead of night, midwives, under a cloak of great secrecy, digging small holes near the house. When I asked what the holes were for, I was told that "sacred things from my mother and the new child" were being buried to prevent witches from taking possession of the stuff and using it to affect the well-being of both (16.1).