Passport to knowledge mark mathabane autobiography
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As they head to school, they are stopped by a woman carrying a scuttle of coal on her cloth-covered head. Mark's voracious reading teaches him English. The author’s mother asked if he heard the woman’s sad tale. He tries to run away, but his mother and grandmother bind his hands and feet.
They make their way to the principal’s office, who tells them to untie the author.
Though Mark is censured by the black community for his decision, and though he is breaking the law by traveling to white sections of Johannesburg to play tennis with whites, Mark continues doing what he's doing. Black tennis players decide to boycott the Open, saying they won't be part of efforts to make the apartheid system appear acceptable.
Mark doesn't want to be used by whites either, he wants to make an informed decision.
Mark starts playing tennis at the club and Horn becomes his unofficial sponsor, paying for Mark's entrance fees in tournaments. With the tennis racket that the Smiths send, Mark starts hitting a ball around at tennis courts in Alexandra. Helmut compares apartheid to the Holocaust. Throughout his childhood, Mark suffers hunger, witnesses violence, and learns to hate and fear whites.
At his mother's insistence, he starts school and promises to stay there.
(Stan was in the country playing at a tournament.) Stan pays for Mark to participate in the South African Breweries' Open. Once Mathabane sees the canes behind the principal’s desk, he gives up the idea of escaping.
Kaffir Boy Summary
Mark Mathabane is born into a poverty-stricken black family in South Africa during the apartheid years.
He seeks the opinion of people he respects, and is ultimately advised to participate because it will open doors for him. The author learns that protesters have broken into the welfare office at the stadium to steal food, and he does to the library at the Coloured School, which is on fire, to find books.
Kaffir Boy
At age 7, the author learns he is to go to school, which he regards as a waste of time because there are many kids who do not go and who seem to live the life that the author wants—of caddying in the white world and sleeping in abandoned cars.
He meets a liberal German named Helmut who is disgusted by apartheid. They begin to play tennis at different all-white courts and to search in vain for restaurants that would serve both of them. The Tennis Ranch is dominated by Germans and other European expatriates, rather than white South Africans. He is sore after she scrubs him thoroughly. The Afrikaans papers paint the ANC as Communist rabble rousers who tried to turn blacks towards supporting a Russian satellite.
The author speaks candidly before the people at the bar, explaining that the police had caused the destruction and that the blacks in South Africa want to live peacefully with others.
The police begin rounding up students again, so the author stays all day at the tennis ranch. Mark earns a tennis scholarship to Limestone College in South Carolina and leaves for the U.S.
in 1978.
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The Smiths send comic books and classics like Treasure Island home with Granny for her grandson. He is obviously an intelligent young man and quickly rises to the top of the class, despite the fact that the school metes out frequent punishments to Mark because his family is often late paying school fees and can't afford the uniforms and books.Though he hates it at first, he grows to love learning; it opens another world for him.