OR#2 Kaffir Boy by Mark Mathabane

What are the major struggles and conflicts that your characters encounter? How do the characters face the conflicts and how does going through these conflicts help the characters to learn more about themselves?

Mark Mathabane faces very seroius struggles as a black growing up in apartheid Africa. Being black was basically a crime in the environment where mathabane and his family grew up. Unfair laws along with racist tendencies of the government, led to very serioius events in Mathabane's childhood that shaped his personality. First of all in his youth, Mathabane was forced to know how to survive without his parents in a dangerous situation. The police in Mahtabane's town were called the Peri-Urban and they constantly held raids to arrest any blacks with passbooks that were "out of order". Due to the fact that Mathabane's parents were illiterate and minimally educated, getting their passbooks in order was virtually impossible, and in order to escape arrest and the brutality of the police, his parent's were forced to flee and hide. They had to leave their children behind because they would be too hard to travel with and when the police entered the home of Mathabane, he (being the oldest child) was forced to deal with them. He would make up lies of his parents where abouts so the police would not suspect they were hiding in the house, and he would try to calm his brothers and sisters until the return of his parents. This created a deep rooted fear of white people and the police. Mathabane recalls, "The brutal encounter with the police had left indelible scars. The mere sight of police vans now had the power of blanking my mind" (28). The Peri-Urban constantly haunted him throughout his entire childhood, and caused a shadow of fear over his family all the time.
During several of these Peri-Urban invasions, Mathabane's father was arrested, either for not having his passbook in order or for being unemployed. He would be taken away for long periods of time, and the family would have no idea where he was or when he would return. Mathabane's fathers was the only source of income in his family becasue his mother didn't work, therefore with the absence of his father, starvation and eviction seemed to be unavoidable outcomes. The lack of money forced Mathabane and his family to resort to extreme lengths for obtaining food. First they began going to junk yards to dig through trash trying to find objects of value like food or furniture. Unfortunately after finding a dead baby girl in one of the packages they stopped digging through junk yards (47). Then they resorted to eating things like locust, black prickly worms called "sonjas" (similar to leeches), weeds, and blood bought from a slaughter house (62). Though Mathabane thought this food was exceedingly disgusting, hunger motivated him to digest such things. These circumstances caused Mathabane to no longer hate his father, because his presence meant food, and taught him to cope with his hunger struggles.