He was able to diffuse the situation when he spoke to them in Zulu. Once, when he was being followed by a group of Zulu guys, he heard them say in their own language that they were going to mug him. From her, Noah learned that language is power (and because of this Noah learned to speak several languages.) “It became a tool that served me my whole life,” he explains. Noah guides us through the early years of his life, years that were marked by trips to church, “at least four nights a week”, poverty, and his mother’s no-nonsense but loving approach to parenting. The doctors took her up to the delivery room, cut open her belly, and reached in and pulled out a half-white, half-black child who violated any number of laws, statutes, and regulations – I was born a crime. Estranged from her family, pregnant by a man she could not be seen with in public, she was alone.

…on February 20, 1984, my mother checked into Hillbrow hospital for a scheduled C-section delivery. Needless to say, my parents committed that crime,” Noah explains. “During apartheid, one of the worst crimes you could commit was having sexual relations with a person of another race. His father, a white man, is of Swiss/German descent. His stories weave together to form a moving and searingly funny portrait of a boy making his way through a damaged world in a dangerous time, armed only with a keen sense of humor and a mother’s unconventional, unconditional love.Noah was raised mostly by his mother, Patricia Nombuyiselo Noah. Whether subsisting on caterpillars for dinner during hard times, being thrown from a moving car during an attempted kidnapping, or just trying to survive the life-and-death pitfalls of dating in high school, Trevor illuminates his curious world with an incisive wit and unflinching honesty. The stories collected here are by turns hilarious, dramatic, and deeply affecting. It is also the story of that young man’s relationship with his fearless, rebellious, and fervently religious mother-his teammate, a woman determined to save her son from the cycle of poverty, violence, and abuse that would ultimately threaten her own life.

Finally liberated by the end of South Africa’s tyrannical white rule, Trevor and his mother set forth on a grand adventure, living openly and freely and embracing the opportunities won by a centuries-long struggle.īorn a Crime is the story of a mischievous young boy who grows into a restless young man as he struggles to find himself in a world where he was never supposed to exist.

Living proof of his parents’ indiscretion, Trevor was kept mostly indoors for the earliest years of his life, bound by the extreme and often absurd measures his mother took to hide him from a government that could, at any moment, steal him away. Trevor was born to a white Swiss father and a black Xhosa mother at a time when such a union was punishable by five years in prison. Trevor Noah’s unlikely path from apartheid South Africa to the desk of The Daily Show began with a criminal act: his birth. NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY Michiko Kakutani, New York Times The compelling, inspiring, and comically sublime story of one man’s coming-of-age, set during the twilight of apartheid and the tumultuous days of freedom that followed.

Born a crime trevor noah audio book