Born a Crime: Chapter 3 Summary & Analysis

In his historical preface, Noah explains how South African Christianity combines the colonizers’ religion with traditional beliefs. In South Africa, traditional shamans remain more common than Western doctors, and witchcraft cases frequently go to court, like when someone gets killed by lightning and an enemy of theirs gets charged with murder by witchcraft.

Trevor Noah grows up surrounded by women; the only important male figure in his early life is his grandfather, the ironically named and happily-divorced Temperance Noah, who is gregarious and extremely popular among Soweto’s women. He is bipolar, but the family does not know that until much later; he does bizarre things like driving a woman to her home three hours away because “no beautiful woman should have to wait for a bus,” or trying to start a boxing match, at the age of 80, with 12-year-old Trevor. Since she and Trevor are her father’s heirs, Patricia always worries about his other family members trying to poison them.

The house in Soweto is usually full of women: Trevor’s aunt Sibongile, who dominated her wannabe abusive husband Dinky, and his grandmother Frances Noah, who is old but sharp and commanding, “still to this day very active and very much alive.” There is also Koko, Noah’s elderly and blind great-grandmother, who spends her days sitting in the house’s warmest spot by the stove, observing the family and chatting with Frances.

This woman-centric household is the norm in Soweto: whereas Trevor is merely estranged from his father because of race, other children’s fathers are either imprisoned, fighting apartheid from abroad, or working elsewhere in the country. Women keep the community running and replace their husbands with God: religion is central to life and nightly meetings are commonplace, with prayer followed by songs and often five minutes of “amen.” On Tuesdays, prayer is at Frances Noah’s house; Trevor loves singing and praying, and Frances loves his prayers because he speaks English, and “everyone knows” that “English prayers get answered first.” Frances has him pray for everyone present, and Trevor is delighted to be “helping people.”

Soweto is “magical” because of its “aspirational quality”; it has little infrastructure and no formal businesses, but everyone manages to “find a way to make a life for themselves.” It’s possible to buy anything out of someone’s house. Because they have little money, people buy their groceries and build their homes piecemeal: they get a piece of land from the government and gradually build it up from a shanty to a multi-room house over the course of generations. Frances Noah’s house has two rooms—everyone sleeps on the floor in one of them, and the other is for everything else. They also rent out shanties in their backyard and, like everyone else in Soweto, have a driveway but no car.

The one thing that is impossible to improve is the toilet: there’s no running water indoors, and people share communal toilets with other families. Newspaper substitutes for more expensive toilet paper, and the flies are a source of constant fear for young Trevor. One day, at age five, when pouring rain promises a perilous journey to the outhouse, Trevor decides to go inside—the adult Trevor interjects, joking that defecating is a powerful and profound act, which forces everyone to “forget how famous or how rich we are” and have “a moment of pure self-awareness.” So that day, Trevor savors the comfort of going inside on the piece of newspaper—until he realizes that Koko is still there, sitting by the stove, sniffing the air and realizing “that something was wrong.” Trevor slowly finishes, freezing whenever Koko asks, “who’s there?” He stashes the newspaper under the rest of the trash.

Later that day, when Frances comes home, Koko exclaims that “there’s something in the house,” which she could hear and smell before. Frances can smell it too—and when Trevor’s mother gets home, so can she. She discovers the “shit in the bottom of the dustbin” and proclaims that it must be the work of a demon. She wakes Trevor up in a frenzy and takes him outside to burn the soiled newspaper. He is horrified as all the neighborhood’s grandmothers file in for a mass prayer meeting.

Patricia makes Trevor pray to “kill the demon,” but he knows he cannot pray for “God to kill the thing that left the shit,” so stumbles through a halfhearted prayer for the whole “big misunderstanding” to be cleared up. After “amen,” the meeting disbands, and Trevor apologizes to God; he realizes that “this was not cool,” especially because he distracted God from more important business.