Born a Crime: Stories from a South African Childhood (One World Essentials)

by Trevor Noah

language, even more than color, defines who you are to people.

Maybe I didn’t look like you, but if I spoke like you, I was you.

People are getting hurt, and just because it’s not happening to you doesn’t mean it’s not happening.

I decided I’d rather be held back with people I liked than move ahead with people I didn’t know.

a knowledgeable man is a free man, or at least a man who longs for freedom.

“Learn from your past and be better because of your past,” she would say, “but don’t cry about your past. Life is full of pain. Let the pain sharpen you, but don’t hold on to it. Don’t be bitter.”

As modestly as we lived at home, I never felt poor because our lives were so rich with experience.

We tell people to follow their dreams, but you can only dream of what you can imagine, and, depending on where you come from, your imagination can be quite limited.

But the highest rung of what’s possible is far beyond the world you can see.

From an adult’s point of view, I was destructive and out of control, but as a child I didn’t think of it that way. I never wanted to destroy. I wanted to create. I wasn’t burning my eyebrows. I was creating fire. I wasn’t breaking overhead projectors. I was creating chaos, to see how people reacted.

I remember the thing that caused the trauma, but I don’t hold on to the trauma. I never let the memory of something painful prevent me from trying something new. If you think too much about the ass-kicking your mom gave you, or the ass-kicking that life gave you, you’ll stop pushing the boundaries and breaking the rules. It’s better to take it, spend some time crying, then wake up the next day and move on. You’ll have a few bruises and they’ll remind you of what happened and that’s okay. But after a while the bruises fade, and they fade for a reason—because now it’s time to get up to some shit again.

I believed that Fufi was my dog, but of course that wasn’t true. Fufi was a dog. I was a boy. We got along well. She happened to live in my house. That experience shaped what I’ve felt about relationships for the rest of my life: You do not own the thing that you love.

Relationships are built in the silences. You spend time with people, you observe them and interact with them, and you come to know them—and

Regret is an eternal question you will never have the answer to.

But with what raw materials are the poor to make something of themselves? People love to say, “Give a man a fish, and he’ll eat for a day. Teach a man to fish, and he’ll eat for a lifetime.” What they don’t say is, “And it would be nice if you gave him a fishing rod.” That’s the part of the analogy that’s missing.

But when you read through the history of atrocities against Africans, there are no numbers, only guesses. It’s harder to be horrified by a guess.

He has been given more potential, but he has not been given more opportunity. He has been given an awareness of the world that is out there, but he has not been given the means to reach it.

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.

Nelson Mandela once said, “If you talk to a man in a language he understands, that goes to his head. If you talk to him in his language, that goes to his heart.” He was so right. When you make the effort to speak someone else’s language, even if it’s just basic phrases here and there, you are saying to them, “I understand that you have a culture and identity that exists beyond me. I see you as a human being.”

Everything I have ever done I’ve done from a place of love. If I don’t punish you, the world will punish you even worse. The world doesn’t love you.

Don’t fight the system. Mock the system.

The way my mother always explained it, the traditional man wants a woman to be subservient, but he never falls in love with subservient women. He’s attracted to independent women. “He’s like an exotic bird collector,” she said. “He only wants a woman who is free because his dream is to put her in a cage.”

That’s when I realized the police were not who I thought they were. They were men first, and police second.

I saw, more than anything, that relationships are not sustained by violence but by love. Love is a creative act. When you love someone you create a new world for them.

“You cannot blame anyone else for what you do. You cannot blame your past for who you are. You are responsible for you. You make your own choices.”