Born a Crime

Content warning: This section of the guide discusses racism and apartheid.

Born a Crime focuses on Noah’s childhood and young adult life, and every memory is heavily influenced by the effects of South African apartheid. Noah describes apartheid as a purposeful and deliberate form of government-imposed segregation and racism. Because apartheid was so deeply ingrained systemically in South Africa, its detrimental effects persist even since the end of apartheid.

While apartheid began in 1948, it has roots in South Africa’s colonial history. The Dutch East India Company established the Dutch Cape Colony in the region in 1652, and the British Empire captured the colony in the early 1800s. During this period, European colonizers displaced Indigenous populations, enslaved African people, and demanded that Indigenous people carry passes proving that they were not enslaved. After the Slavery Abolition Act in 1833, British colonizers introduced a system of indentured servitude for the Xhosa people, an ethnic group in Southern Africa. In 1894, Prime Minister of the Cape Colony Cecil Rhodes passed an act to limit African land rights, and in 1905 Black people were denied the right to vote. By the early 1900s, there was significant social and economic inequality between white people and people of other racial groups in the region, and white people had complete political control.

South Africa underwent significant socioeconomic change during the Second World War as many Black people moved to urban and industrial areas to work due to labor shortages, yet social services and housing did not meet this increased demand, resulting in overcrowding and increased crime. Black people demanded rights and reform. White people resented these changes, in particular white Afrikaners (those descended from Dutch settlers), since they generally had a lower socioeconomic status than those descended from British settlers. The National Party, an Afrikaner faction, began to campaign for a system of complete racial segregation to remove Black people from designated white areas which, they claimed, would lead to the protection of white jobs and property. In 1948, the party won the general election and began to institute the policies of apartheid, which gave white people disproportional political representation, land ownership, state protection, access to skilled work, and vastly better public services and education.

The Population Registration Act of 1950 separated people into four groups: white, Black, “colored” (people with multiracial heritage, as Noah is designated), and Indian (descended from people who arrived from British India in the late 1800s). For people with multiracial backgrounds, their families were often separated, and Noah narrates his experience of government policies fragmenting his family in Born a Crime. Black people were divided into 10 major ethnic groups, including Zulu (the largest) and Xhosa (the second largest). Apartheid encouraged conflict between these groups to keep Black people divided instead of united in resistance. Noah discusses these conflicts in Born a Crime, particularly regarding the fact that different languages make it difficult for people to relate to one another. The Group Areas Act in 1950 segregated people into different areas according to their race; many people were forcibly removed from land that was declared white-only. Noah relates details of Soweto, a government-designated ghetto for Black South Africans where his mother’s side of the family was forced to live. In the 1950s, tens of thousands of Black people were forcibly removed from Johannesburg to Soweto.

The title of Noah’s biography alludes to apartheid laws regarding marriage and sexual relations between people of different races. The Prohibition of Mixed Marriages Act in 1949 prohibited marriage between white people and people of any other racial group, while the Immorality Amendment Act of 1950 extended this ban to sexual relations. Noah was born in 1984, and the acts were repealed in 1985, meaning that his parents broke the law in having him and were at risk of prosecution.

Several factors led to the end of apartheid in the early 1990s. The economy collapsed as the segregated system could not sustain the evolving needs of capitalist industrialization, including cheap labor, and Black people had little purchasing power to support the economy. International resistance to apartheid grew as people protested the regime, and South African leaders worried that the Soviet Union would attract Black people to communism. Anti-apartheid activism in South Africa led to the reinstatement of voting rights first for “Colored” people and Indians and then for Black people; pass laws were repealed, and Black people were given more property rights. Between 1990 and 1993, the National Party negotiated with the African National Congress, a political party opposing apartheid led by Nelson Mandela, who was released from prison after being incarcerated for 27 years. Finally, in 1994, there was a fully representative general election. The ANC won the election, and Mandela became President of South Africa.