![]() ![]() Zulu women were well-behaved and dutiful. The stereotypes of Zulu and Xhosa women were as ingrained as those of the men. She told him to mind his own business, and when he heard her speaking in Xhosa, that really set him off. My mother didn’t suffer lectures from strange men. As we rode along, he started lecturing my mother about being in a car with a man who was not her husband. This driver was a particularly angry one. In addition to being violent gangsters, South African minibus drivers are notorious for complaining and haranguing passengers as they drive. We were the only passengers in the minibus. That’s what we wanted in the first place.” So we got out of the first car and climbed into the minibus. It looked like they were going to kill this guy. Being unregulated, minibuses were also very unreliable. Drivers who stole routes would get killed. The one thing you didn’t do was steal a route from a rival group. There was bribery and general shadiness that went on, a great deal of violence, and a lot of protection money paid to avoid violence. Different groups ran different routes, and they would fight over who controlled what. Because the minibus business was completely unregulated, it was basically organized crime. Necessity being the mother of invention, black people created their own transit system, an informal network of bus routes, controlled by private associations operating entirely outside the law. Under apartheid the government provided no public transportation for blacks, but white people still needed us to show up to mop their floors and clean their bathrooms. ![]() We waited and waited for a minibus to come by. In this excerpt from his new memoir, “Born a Crime: Stories From a South African Childhood” (Spiegel & Grau), Noah describes one of the more dangerous incidents faced by his family: His childhood experiences were a fixture of his stand-up comedy routines, and the comedian gained further attention as a correspondent, and later host, of “The Daily Show” on Comedy Central. Born mixed-race, he grew up in South Africa during the system of racial segregation known as apartheid. ![]() Trevor Noah has always thought of himself as an outsider. ![]()
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