11/9/2023 0 Comments Born a crime trevor noah audioAs domestic and international opposition to apartheid grew from the 1950s through the 1980s the South African government became increasingly violent and repressive, slaughtered and imprisoned thousands of dissidents, and even developed nuclear weapons. Of course, as Trevor Noah’s very existence proves (and he argues repeatedly in Born a Crime), these racial classifications were messy and changeable in practice, because race is a construct rather than a set of clear biological categories. Apartheid also created separate zones for each group to live in and prohibited intermarriage among people from the different groups. Apartheid guaranteed the white minority most of the nation’s land, wealth, and political power gave coloreds and Indians limited political rights and forced native black Africans to labor in what was effectively a form of slavery and to live in cramped slums (townships) and depleted rural areas (homelands or bantustans). Unlike with racism in countries like the US, there was no illusion of anything like “separate but equal” rather, the apartheid government openly proclaimed an ideology of white supremacy. The population was divided into four groups: whites, Indians, coloreds, and blacks. South Africa officially gained independence from the UK in 1931, but the Afrikaner-led National Party won the 1948 elections, closely studied government-enforced racial segregation policies around the world, and implemented the most effective to create the system of laws and governance known as apartheid. The most notable was the 1913 Natives’ Land Act, which effectively made it illegal for blacks to own land. The British then fought and won wars against both the Zulu and the Boers before uniting with the latter in the early 20th century to impose increasingly repressive laws on the native population. Around the turn of the 19th century, the British took over the Cape of Good Hope and began forcing the Dutch settlers (also known as Afrikaners or Boers) to move inland and form the Boer Republics. Dutch settlers took South African natives as slaves and mixed with the native Khoisan population, creating a distinctive mixed-race population known today as the Cape Coloureds, as well as fighting a number of wars against the Xhosa. In order to understand why the end of apartheid was so significant, it is crucial to understand the broader history of European colonialism and racism in South Africa, which largely begins with the establishment of a Dutch colony at the Cape of Good Hope in the 17th century. The earliest years of Trevor Noah’s life were also some of the most consequential years in the history of South African history because they saw the erosion and ultimate defeat of the nation’s racist apartheid regime, which was then replaced with a democracy led by Nelson Mandela and the African National Congress. By 2014, he landed a recurring role on Comedy Central’s The Daily Show, then took over the hosting role in 2015, which propelled him to international fame. He hosted a number of major South African television shows and became one of the nation’s most prominent comedians before moving to the United States, where he was completely unknown, in 2011. After he finished high school, humor transformed from a means of coping with suffering to the foundation of his career: after a year DJing and selling CDs in the Johannesburg suburbs, he gained a substantial following in South Africa by hosting a youth radio show called Noah’s Ark and doing stand-up comedy. Born a Crime covers his life until the beginning of his career in the early 2000s, following his close relationship with his beloved mother, his attempts to articulate his complex identity in a nation that still clung tightly to racial hierarchy, and his struggle to overcome the poverty and violence that surrounded him. Born to a Xhosa mother and a Swiss-German father in Johannesburg, Trevor Noah’s very existence as a mixed-race person was technically illegal until the end of South Africa’s white supremacist apartheid regime in 1994.
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