Lest They Forget

I must have read Mark Mathabane’s moving autobiography, Kaffir Boy, pretty close to the time it was first published in the mid-1980s. I remember the quiet power of this book and the way I felt resonations from it months -- maybe even years -- after I’d read it. Mathabane’s book did not leave me untouched.

A couple of decades later and so much has changed. For one thing, Kaffir Boy is based in South Africa and centered around Apartheid and, of course, Apartheid is no more. That doesn’t detract from the power of this book, however, even if it is pleasing to realize that many of the horrors Mathabane wrote about are history. After all, we still read books about the Holocaust, decades after the Second World War. We still read Anne Frank. And we’ve come to read Maus. And so many more. It’s good for us -- healthy -- to remember all of the things humans are capable of: the bad as well as the good. Literature can deliver this in a way that is arguably more personal and immediate than any other medium. Read Kaffir Boy now and -- for a few hours -- the intervening decades may as well not have happened. You share in Mathabane’s confusion and degradation and pain and -- ultimately -- you are part of his triumph. It’s a singularly worthwhile book. Shocking. Horrifying. Uplifting. And, when all is said and done, important.

Some parents in Burlingame, California don’t agree. Kaffir Boy has recently been pulled from the school library and removed from the high school curriculum.

“Part of the reason we felt it was appropriate,” Principal Ted Barone told the San Mateo Daily Journal, “was that kids today see violence through movies, video games and books. There’s so much violence and sexual violence, even in newspapers. We felt it was important because it gets so dehumanized. This is very humanized. You come to love this guy, the main character, it makes it like your best friend went through it.”

But more than a few parents of Burlingame higher schoolers did not agree. Though, in fairness, the Burlingame school system isn’t the only one to wonder if Kaffir Boy is suitable reading for young adults. Mathabane’s book has been on the ALA’s most banned list for many years.

You can read the San Mateo Daily Journal’s piece here.