Kaffir Boy Fear Quotes

My father's metamorphosis was now complete. In his new personage he was always cold, sullen, distant, contemplative; always wrinkling his brow and scratching his balding head and wringing his heads and muttering curses and complaints, especially on Fridays. Our emotional lives and his now moved on vastly different planes. My sisters could no longer run up to him, as he came through the door from work, and welcome him with a hug or a kiss as other children did their fathers on Fridays. They tried it once, but he simply shoved them aside and warned them never to do it again. He never even said goodnight to any of us at bedroom. I dearly and desperately wanted to love him as I loved my mother. I tried, persistently but in vain, to reach out for his love and understanding, and each time he reciprocated by becoming more distant and inscrutable, more morose and frightening to me. Gradually I came to fear him, to fear even the sound of his voice, even the sight of his shadow. I came to spend days and nights wishing he were dead; wishing he were blotted out of my life; wishing that a better father had taken his place. (20.53)

It soon became evident that the reason my father lived for the moment was because he was terrified of the future – terrified of facing the reality that I was on the way to becoming a somebody in a world that regarded him as a nobody, a world that had stripped him of his manhood, of his power to provide.

Years of watching him suffer under the double yoke of apartheid and tribalism convinced me that his was a hopeless case, so long as he persisted in clinging to tribal beliefs and letting the white man define his manhood.

His suffering convinced me that there was no way he could come to understand reality the way I did, let alone understand the extremes of emotions which had become so much a part of me and were altering my perspective toward life, that I no longer seemed his son, and he, to me, seemed no longer the father whose blood still ran in my veins.

By pining for the irretrievably gone days of drums, of warriors, of loinskins, of huts and of wife-buying, I knew that he could never travel, in thought and in feeling, the course my life was embarking upon, because everything he wholeheartedly embraced, I rejected with every fibre of my being.

The thick veil of tribalism which so covered his eyes and mind and heart was absolutely of no use to me, for I believed beyond a shadow of a doubt that black life would never revert to the past, that the clock would never turn back to a time centuries ago when black people had lived in peace and contentment before the coming of the white man. (33.31-35)

One of my sisters – despite my insistence that everything be kept secret – told one of her friends that "her brother would soon be going to America," and soon all Alexandra knew. I began to receive threats that everything would be done to stop me from going. Each time I went to play tennis in a white neighbourhood, I thought I was being followed. The police began stopping me in the streets and demanding my papers: luckily my pass was in order. I began wishing that I were leaving the next day, instead of in a year's time. Anything could happen in a year.

I couldn't afford to cut off my relationship with white tennis players, which probably would have placated the militants, and not give the police the excuse to lock me up; if I did that, how would I prepare myself to face the rigors of American collegiate tennis? I continued with my life as before, and hoped for the best. (53.143-144)