Trevor Noah throws shade over SA’s past and present exemplary comedic tradition because his narrative is one of self-creation in dire loneliness, writes Gabriel Crouse.
If drones covered the earth with text-seeking cameras they would notice a near-global shift just about now. Novels, pop non-fiction and celebrity hardbacks would be steadily replaced by textbooks, heavy tomes, agendas and Excel print-outs.
The warm inclusive light by which we read disrupted by the cold, competitive light of school and work. Few texts could survive both contexts and it is usually wise to keep things in their place. An exception must be made for Trevor Noah’s Born a Crime.
Unusually a South African writer has been on the festive-season best-seller list around the world, positively reviewed in almost every major publication in English, enthusiastically interviewed on most liberal American television and radio platforms as well as at home.
In local bookstores special shelves were erected to show off this unanimously applauded book. But it raises serious questions that no one has had the courage to ask.
Born Free is a commonly accepted name for a generation, familiar and contentious. Born a Crime sounds so new. Why? And why is it that South Africans only attend to this story after its author has been celebrated overseas? Noah had a successful career in South Africa as a stand-up comedian, but why is it so hard to find his name among the great collaborative comedic projects beamed on to our television sets and into our movie houses over the past decade?
If it is true that South Africa once again assumed the mediocrity of one of its own, we have heard the world’s response and collectively tried to make up the difference by shoving Noah’s book under Christmas trees this year.
But that is just another strategy for evading the question;setting the cycle on repeat.
The obvious answer to the first question is that since it was illegal for whites and non-whites to have sex the number of people, like Noah, who were ‘Born a Crime’ approaches zero. Too few #BornCrimes to earn a hashtag or social identity without ingenious individual effort. In an environment that sustains immense reductions like “African” and “white monopoly capital” as preferred terms of identity, Noah’s story could only survive on our fringe.
In the centre of the English world’s media-web, in New York City itself, the nuance could be understood, repackaged and broadcast around the world to everyone’s benefit. This is a decent approximation of the narrative Noah’s many South African fans would have accepted, but refused to announce.
This would also explain why the South African media has been universally forgiving of what would otherwise be a cardinal sin of public relations.
In the build-up to Noah’s debut at The Daily Show he repeatedly stated that he had nothing to learn from South African comedy, that ours is a back-water without a “stand-up scene” due to the oppression of apartheid.
A bizarre line to take and to a theatre-lover especially frustrating. Bucking the yoke of oppression, Percy Mtwa and Mbongeni Ngema wrote Woza Albert! three years before Noah’s birth.
That play toured the world and received more thoughtful and moneyed accolades than Noah has and possibly ever will, and formed part of an extensive tradition of “poor theatre” that protested using wit and pathos, in a style very close to stand-up.
More broadly the creative resistance to apartheid turned parts of Joburg like Hillbrow and Yeoville into seductively lit laboratories for cosmopolitan and audacious experiment.
This critic is 27 years old, and many Joburgers of his generation are accustomed to the nostalgic glaze that settles over our elders’ eyes when they reflect back on the 1980s. Here South African comedy flourished. Here is where a Swiss German named Robert and a Xhosa named Patricia agreed to issue new life. Here Trevor Noah was born.
That Noah is completely disinterested in this element of his comedic pedigree fits the same narrative that explains his dominance in the West after mere success at home: we underrate our own.
He casts shade over performance artists like Stephen Cohen and Evita Bezuidenhout, comedians like Mark Lottering, Jon Vlismas, David Kau and Kagiso Lediga, movies like Bunny Chow and Straight Outta Benoni, television shows like The Pure Monate Show and Crazy Monkey and our internationally noted funny adverts. While local comedians grumble about this in bars, they refuse to make public complaint against the man on comedy’s highest throne.
No special allowances were made for him here, and he returns the favour; fair enough.
Besides, Noah, according to Noah, is the Mozart of comedy. A born crime, Noah was kept indoors until he was 6, forcing him to learn to entertain himself. And within his eclectic cultural life this was natural.
As a small boy he defecates in the kitchen, having forgotten his blind grandmother’s presence.
He hides the litter in the bin but when his mother returns there is a fracas. His family assumes that the house has been cursed and the neighbourhood is gathered to exorcise the demons. Noah, speaking fluent English, is asked to make the most important prayer in the elaborate ritual since God gives English prayers priority. An elaborate joke that has lasted two decades and will keep shining like gold. Another stroke of genius. When Noah’s father runs away from him in public, Noah believes it is a game. But Noah’s father is worried that the police will associate him with his son and start asking dangerous questions.
Noah’s father is running almost for his life. Noah did not need South African thespians or comedians to educate him in the higher arts of wit, he was born a comedian.
So the pieces start to fall into place. Noah throws shade over South Africa’s past and present exemplary comedic tradition because his narrative is one of self-creation in dire loneliness. If the facts lined up this would be a vindicating narrative.
It is important that the facts line up though, especially when they are facts a political commentator reports regarding his own origin. This is the stuff of character.
Here is a further summary of Noah’s origin story according to Noah.
From the early 1980s the apartheid government reformed many of its racially oppressive laws under international pressure.
But sex between whites and non-whites, he implies, would not be reformed since “during apartheid one of the worst crimes you could commit was having sexual relations with a person of another race”. So “race-mixing becomes a crime worse than treason”.
Noah and his family were able to “be less furtive” only just before Madiba was released, when Noah was nearly 6.
This creates parallels between Noah’s story and Mandela’s. Mandela was treasonous, though tried for sabotage. Noah’s parents were treasonous too. He blames apartheid for the fact of his father’s absence.
Here are the facts Noah omits. Noah’s father carried a European passport, which would have put the authorities in a tentative position given South Africa’s yearning for Western approval.
Rather than considering “race-mixing” to be “worse than treason” the law against it was considered an embarrassment. In 1982, a year before Noah’s conception, the New York Times ran a story under the headline, “Love Finds a Way Through South Africa’s Race Laws”.
It was about a mixed couple publicly invited by then Prime Minister PW Botha to return from exile to SA with their children to live in peace.
One shocker is that Indian-South African wife Mrs Whiteley was spat on by aggressive Liverpool bigots when she was in exile and returned to the occasional stare from out-of- towners in apartheid Pietersburg, a fate she clearly preferred.
This will strike the sceptical reader as barely relevant.
Botha and others are justifiably notorious for putting on a good show and keeping up vicious practices in secret. But according to lawyer Kobus Lowies, a prosecutor in Johannesburg courts between 1978 and 1986, charges arising from inter-racial sex were vanishingly rare in that era. “In all that time I never, ever charged anyone under the Immorality Act for sex across the colour-line...”
A second prosecutor concurred. In a decade as a prosecutor he handled a single case involving sex across the colour line, and that was mostly a pornography charge, a white man caught in possession of lewd pictures of his black girlfriend.
But the most unnerving omission in Noah’s account is still to come.
The provisions of the Immorality Act that forbade his parents from sex and marriage were repealed when Noah was 2. If he was imprisoned by his mother and grandmother until Madiba’s release nearly four years later (itself a fact contradicted by his claim that he was so conspicuous in his grandmother’s part of Soweto that he would be used as a landmark to direct strangers) this could not simply be ascribed to any law on the books.
From World War II through the 1970s all non-whites were barred from decent political and economic participation; to be born a crime in that era would be one more scar on top of too many.
The semi-generation before the Born Frees, those born in the 1980s, graduated at a time when, at least de jure, all persons had equal opportunity.
A cruel effect might have been had on this generation were it not for the fact the relevant provisions of the Immorality Act were de facto and then de jure cut out while we were babes in the woods.
Tragically, there are so many ways this generation was afflicted by apartheid.
Bad access to decent schools and other public services, being brought up by parents whose hopes had been mangled into despair. But Noah’s mother was ambitious and he was well schooled, even privately schooled.
He moved around different parts of Johannesburg and picked up the residue of different rich cultures. And to blame apartheid for the absence of his father is rendered absurd by his own mother’s explanation that she chose a white man precisely because she wanted to be a single mother and hoped the law would keep the father at bay.
When that stopped working, it seems she found another man to do the job. The true story of Noah makes him an indirect victim of apartheid. But the editorialised fiction he presents allows American interviewers to celebrate him as a reminder of how recently the knife of violent racism was swung by the iron fist of apartheid.
To someone with a sick sense of humour, Noah’s ascent to The Daily Show and the popularity that has set like concrete after Born a Crime’s release would amount to a practical joke. A joke far more elaborate than Noah’s stint in the kitchen as a boy.
The worst bigotry in recent American politics was manifest in the overdrawn “Birther” scandal, doubting Barack Obama’s story of his own birth and upbringing.
Now there really is a (much less) important black man in American politics who owes his success, partly, to mischaracterising the facts about his birth.
In this ugly rehearsal of history farce came first, then tragedy. And possibly worse, for nearly two decades the right dismissed Jon Stewart’s The Daily Show and its fans as ideologues who bend the facts and ignore the truth when it suits them.
Stewart could rebut them by drawing attention to his own integrity. With Noah the crosstalk amounts to Santa calling the Easter Bunny a figment of someone else’s imagination and then being told “well what about you?”
The holiday is over folks. Donald Trump is about to be president of America.
South Africa faces a dangerous succession battle.
The time for regurgitated fairy tales is over.