Kaffir Boy: Chapter 21 Summary & Analysis

When Mathabane’s mother starts hinting that Mathabane be attending school soon, he vows to never go. He runs with a gang of older boys who thinks school is a waste of time, unnecessary for survival in their world, and he believes them. One morning, his mother wakes him at four in the morning and forces him to bathe, which he almost never does. Granny arrives and she and his mother dress Mathabane in his father’s clothes, folding and tucking them to fit his small frame. When Granny lets slip that they’re taking him to school, Mathabane fights and tries to escape, so Granny takes a length of rope and ties his hands and feet. They carry Mathabane to school, meeting a woman on the way who remarks that she wishes she’d hauled her own son to school; instead he became a tsotsi. Now he’s dead.

They meet the principal at school, who warmly greets Mathabane’s mother and says that he’s heard much about Mathabane already. His mother tells the principal it took nearly a year to get the birth certificate and all the paperwork in order, but Mathabane is finally ready. The principal sympathizes that the paperwork is horrible, but as important for children as passbooks are for adults. Looking through the paperwork, the principal raises the concern that Mathabane is half-Venda, and this is not a Venda school. When his mother tells the principal that the family speaks Shangaan when Mathabane’s father is not present, the principal agrees to make an exception.

With registration settled, Mathabane’s mother and Granny take him home, and Mathabane leaves to play soccer with friends. Part of him wants to run away and never attend school, but he remembers the woman grieving her lost son and thinks perhaps he ought to. When he gets home, a neighbor tells him that his parents were fighting. Mathabane’s father won’t let him inside and threatens to come out and kill him. Mathabane says he’ll kill his father too, and then runs to Granny’s house, where he finds his mother with a bruised and swollen face.

Mathabane’s mother doesn’t want to talk about the fight, but Granny pushes her to tell Mathabane what caused it. Mathabane’s father is furious that Mathabane’s mother enrolled him in a “useless white man’s education,” and Mathabane’s father doesn’t want his mother to work to pay the school fees, since it makes his father look bad. Granny mentions that, technically, Mathabane’s father does own his mother, since he paid the “bride price” for her, but his mother wants to leave his father. Mathabane’s mother tells him that she wants him to go to school because so he can  “have a future” rather than turn out like his father. She assures Mathabane that education “will open doors where none seem to exist” and make him “a somebody in this world.”

When Mathabane’s mother tells him that she never had the chance to go to school, though she always wanted to, he vows to attend school “forever.” Mathabane realizes that the family is now firmly divided into two sides: his mother who wants him educated versus his father who wants him to remain ignorant. He chooses his mother’s side.