Kaffir Boy: Chapter 10 Summary & Analysis

Food prices, rent, and bus fares all go up, but Mathabane’s father’s wages remain the same. The family again grows desperate for food, so they begin finding cheap alternatives to groceries, including black worms that resemble leeches, weeds that grow near lavatories, and cattle blood, which they get for free from a nearby slaughterhouse. Mathabane hates all of it. They stop drinking blood when the men at the slaughterhouse start charging for it.

One day Mathabane sits in the yard, watching after his siblings while his mother looks for work in town. As he watches stray dogs sniff at a rotting cat’s carcass, he wonders if there’s any way for him to safely get meat from the carcass and avoid the worms that are eating it. Maria, still an infant, smears her own feces on herself because it makes the dogs lick her, tickling her. Mathabane kicks the dogs away and drags Maria to the yard’s communal water tap to clean her. His mother returns home; she couldn’t find a job.

Mathabane asks his mother why their father can’t provide for them, but she has no real answer. When he asks if he and his siblings truly are his father’s children—something he hears his father insinuate when angry at his mother—his mother smacks him hard across the mouth. She quickly apologizes and explains her nerves are brittle because of their poverty, and Mathabane sees how sad she is and forgives her. He accepts that hunger is always with him, present in his days and his dreams. During the days, he finds soccer games to play in the street, so that he can think of something besides food. This is how he develops a love of sports.

In Mathabane’s neighborhood, there is a compound that houses migrant workers from the tribal reserves. One day, he sees a group of boys around his age—between five and seven years old—accompanied by a 13-year-old named Mpandhlani. The boys ask Mathabane if he wants to get food and money, but Mpandhlani tells them that they’ll have to wait until tomorrow. Mathabane joins them the next day, eager to see how they’ll get food and money, and Mpandhlani leads them into the compound, past a grinning guard keeping watch at the gate.

Inside the compound, grown Zulu warriors practice fighting in the yard. One of them winks at the young boys as they walk past. Mathabane feels an inexplicable urge to flee, but all the warriors in the yard make him too afraid to try. Mpandhlani leads the boys into a building in the back of the compound, full of bunks and shirtless men. It smells ghastly. The boys walk to a group of men in the back, who are stoking fires and cooking lots of food and invite the young boys to eat their fill, saying, “The food is free.” There are eight men and 10 boys.

Mathabane refuses to eat, which bothers the men, but Mpandhlani explains that “he’s new.” After the other boys eat their fill, the grown men give them each a handful of coins to keep, except for Mathabane since this is his first time. All of the boys strip naked and line up, touching their toes, while the men smear Vaseline on the boys’ anuses and their own penises. One of the men reassures Mathabane that it’s just “a game” the men and boys play together. Mathabane still doesn’t completely understand what is happening, but panics and flees, sprinting out the building, across the compound, and through the gate before any of the men can catch him.

Mathabane never tells anyone about what he saw, afraid that the Zulu warriors will react with violence if the police come for them. Later, Mathabane learns that child prostitution is common practice in Alexandra and that the police never stop it. On occasion, Mathabane sees Mpandhlani and his crew of young boys, all well-fed. They call Mathabane “a fool” when they see him, as many will throughout his life for not living the way most black people in South Africa do. Mathabane reflects that such foolishness is the only way to truly survive.