Coming up in apartheid South Africa with wit and with Jesus

I guess he had to be a comedian. His memoir's title names his problem: he was Born a Crime. Now he hosts the Daily Show. In the South Africa he was born into in 1984, he was the half-breed child of an illegal relationship between a white man and his Xhosa mother from the rural Transkei. Not to say he was an unhappy accident. His mom knew she wanted a child and got what she wanted. His father was supportive though remote. And young Trevor fit in nowhere among his African kin or his society's rigid racial casts: he was not black African, not colored, not Afrikaans, and certainly not white.

Against all probabilities, Noah's devoted mother raised an independent scamp into the accomplished, gentle, sharp-edged social observer whose wit we now enjoy thousands of miles from his native Johannesburg. This book is a delight.

The book is mostly vignettes from Noah's upbringing, told with vigor and humor. Much of it is about his mother, the mother that walloped him for his own good for any mischief (if she could catch him). She diligently exposed him to every cultural opportunity she knew of, including long days of church: "mixed" and jubilant (suburban megachurch), white (analytical and Biblical), and black (revivalist). The little family unit were faithful participants in all three -- every Sunday! For his mother, Jesus was ever and always her insurance in a crazy, violent world.

His mother taught him practical lessons that stood him in good stead. South African apartheid separated the races into linguistic as well as racial groups; Noah's mom knew how to cross forbidden lines with language, teaching him familiarity with English, Afrikaans, Xhosa, Zulu and some of many other African tongues.

I learned to use language like my mother did. I would simulcast -- give you the program in your own tongue. I'd get suspicious looks from people just walking down the street. "Where are you from?" they'd ask. I'd reply in whatever language they'd addressed me in, using the same accent they used. There would be a brief moment of confusion, and then the suspicious looks would disappear. "Oh, okay. I thought you were a stranger. We're good then."

There's a fluency I wish I had here in California. No wonder Noah knows how to talk to Ammurricans.

The book offers plenty of glimpses of South Africa's system of racial apartheid which excluded four fifths of the population from any power in their nation until 1994 -- and whose legacy still deforms this rich and troubled country. For example this, explaining one of the ways that the young Noah did fit in, while highlighting the contradictions in the lives of women like his mother :

The fact that I grew up in a world run by women was no accident. Apartheid kept me away from my father because he was white, but for almost all the kids I knew on my grandmother's block in Soweto, apartheid had taken away their fathers as well, just for different reasons. Their fathers were off working in a mine somewhere, able to come home only during the holidays. Their fathers had been sent to prison. Their fathers were in exile, fighting for the cause. Women held the community together.  Wathint' Abafazi Wathint' imbokodo! was the chant they would rally to during the freedom struggle. "When you strike a woman, you strike a rock." As a nation, we recognized the power of women, but in the home they were expected to submit and obey.

He does not sweeten the moral horror of the system under which he was raised:

Apartheid was a police state, a system of surveillance and laws designed to keep black people under total control. A full compendium of those laws would run more than three thousand pages and weigh approximately ten pounds, but the general thrust of it should be easy enough for any American to understand. In America you had forced removal of the native onto reservations coupled with slavery followed by segregation. Imagine all three of those things happening to the same group of people at the same time. That was apartheid.

Yet for all this, Noah found a generous moral center. An enormously talented young man, he could easily have ended up just another casualty of poverty without considerable luck, his imaginative ambition, and the moral compass his mother had beaten into him. During a time when he was making a living fencing stolen goods in a black township, he recalls acquiring a digital camera -- a camera that still had on its chip the pictures belonging to the family that had "lost" it. He describes understanding vividly that his hustle was hurting others he never had seen.

In society, we do horrible things to one another because we don't see the person it affects. We don't see their face. We don't see them as people. Which was the whole reason the hood was built in the first place, to keep the victims of apartheid out of sight and out of mind. Because if white people ever saw black people as human, they would see that slavery is unconscionable.

We live in a world where we don't see the ramifications of what we do to others, because we don't live with them. It would be a whole lot harder for an investment banker to rip off people with subprime mortgages if he actually had to live with the people he was ripping off. If we could see one another's pain and empathize with one another, it would never be worth it to us to commit the crimes in the first place. ... That camera made me confront the fact that there were people on the other end of this thing I was doing, and what I was doing was wrong.

After the period chronicled in this book, Noah left South Africa for Los Angeles when he'd been threatened by his mother's violent second ex-husband who had repeatedly attacked his mother. We have been lucky to have attracted this migrant.