On I, Rigoberta Menchu and Kaffir Boy: The True Story of a Young Black Youths Coming of Age in Apartheid South Africa: A Comparison Christyn M. Randon Submitted to Dr. Gene Yeager December 2, 2003 Opinions founded on prejudice are always sustained with the greatest of violence. -Francis Jeffrey (1773 – 1850) “It is a man’s own mind, not his enemy or foe, that lures him to evil ways.
Buddha The shock and horror felt by the reader, after mentally absorbing the happenings described in the lives of Rigoberta Menchu and Mark Mathabane, in their autobiographies I, Rigoberta Menchu, and Kaffir Boy: The True Story of a Black Youths Coming of Age in Apartheid South Africa, respectively, is vivid, true, and unforgettable. The settings described in both accounts reek with hostility, fear, poverty, tragedy, and death, and only because another culture refused to be an equal people with them.
Instead of living peacefully and sharing their part of the world with them, they herded them, categorized them, stripped them of their luxuries, and bled them dry so that their own lives might be more comfortable. One cannot imagine such a way of life and not be sick with revulsion upon this realization of the deep-seated evil of those who oppressed the cultures of Menchu and Mathabane. Their accounts are horrendous and eye-opening.
Along with the extreme feelings of repugnance these accounts conjure up, they also bring about a more subdued sense of guilt that sustains itself long thereafter, a guilt which reveals the ignorance that every reader — who is not from apartheid South Africa or Indian Guatemala — has. We are kept from these realities, but by not taking the initiative to find the truth, we also keep ourselves from these realities. These autobiographies force a comparison between the life of the reader and the life of the writer, and allow the readers to see their own lives as comfortable and healthy as they truly are.
The instigation of fear is always the most prominent tool by which a dominant and oppressive culture will overpower another. This is a major similarity found in the oppressors of Menchus community, as well as Mathabanes. This usage of the establishment of fear is brought about by any means possible: violence, cruelty, dishonesty, manipulation, legal tender, exploitation, neglect, or abuse. The humanity of those involved is never considered, and even ignored or made out to be insignificant.
Fear is inherently the most cowardly and disgusting source of power imaginable, and yet both of the cultures mentioned in this book were exploited by its usage. The minds and bodies of individuals were abused and made as an example for their peers, simply as a tactic made to incur submission. Mathabane recalls the sudden and violent police raids made in the middle of the night, in which truckloads of people were shipped away to prison for various and, mostly trivial, reasons.
He recalls the unnecessary violence of such raids: when he was kicked in the side and hit with a truncheon by the policemen, simply because he would not reveal where his parents were. The fear expressed by Mathabane that he felt in these episodes is intense, almost unbelievable, but entirely too complex to deny. Mathabane also recounts many times in which he, himself is made to be the example by his oppressors. Among those instances, he recounts being made to strip naked and march in a bucket of human excrement by the shit-men (or, black men who worked for the government by picking up human waste) because his peers had been jeering them.
Since fear is the foremost tactic, even for the innocent, those who protest their treatment, even the slightest, are promptly and fiercely punished. In I, Rigoberta Menchu, Rigobertas Indian community had already cleared and cultivated land that the Guatemalan landowners came to take away from them. Menchu explains that whenever land is cleared and cultivated, the landowners will show up with authorities. In this particular case, Menchus father had been fighting the impending seizure of their land by the landowners by organizing meetings and drawing up petitions, and the authorities promptly placed him in jail.
The community treated the authorities well, gave them their best food out of fear, but when the time came to force them out, they returned their good favor by destroying their belongings and stealing their furniture. An oppressed society will usually contain many of the same characteristics, as very aptly expressed both in I, Rigoberta Menchu, as well as Kaffir Boy. The most obvious and also the most detrimental of such traits is the extreme poverty which pervades the lives of those who are unlucky enough to be born within the oppressed culture.
The all-inclusive lack of income creates a vulnerability in a segregated society that cannot be simulated with any other need placed upon a group of people. Poverty facilitates hunger, destitution, lack of education, rampant and deadly diseases, early deaths in families, as well as extreme susceptibility to legal authorities. Poverty gives birth to every major weakness that an oppressed society will have towards their oppressors. Without money, the populace has no protection against the law. In these situations, the government obviously holds the majority of the money.
When poverty is pervasive, the legal system is, as Menchu and Mathabane both give account for, ready, willing, and built to use that poverty as their primary means upon those that are oppressed to be excessively punished and kept in jail. The law is deliberate and contrived, using poverty as the all-inclusive means to work against the people that are being oppressed to keep them at their low status. Mathabanes father was arrested and jailed for undue amounts of time for one of the worst crimes a black man could commit (Mathabane, 35): unemployment.
This was one of the many laws which applied to blacks, but not to whites in South Africa. While his father was imprisoned, sometimes for years at a time, the family would simply go hungry since it was unacceptable for Mathabanes mother to derive a work permit. They had no money to pay to the government in order to rescue him, and when he was arrested for unemployment they were not certain he would return home. Mathabane himself would beg for food, but was harshly reprimanded by his mother: an instance which represents the ongoing struggle between cultural pride and sheer necessity for those who cannot provide for themselves.
Menchu also recounts her financial struggles and recognizes them as an attempt to restrict her culture. The deliberate established physical, mental, and emotional separation is an unavoidable similarity within these accounts. The very first paragraph from Kaffir Boy underscores this, beginning with an excerpt of a sign posted outside of his own neighborhood, dissuading the whites from entering black territory. Social ignorance is crucial to maintaining these corrupt societal structures.
Mathabane states that more than 90 percent of white people in South Africa had never seen the area in which blacks were segregated into. Rigoberta Menchus Indian culture was forced into the Guatemalan mountains by the colonization of the white man, and then kept oppressed by the ladino culture. Menchu describes the alien feeling she received when she went to town with her father, where the ladinos lived, and how she became very aware of her grimy appearance. The societal lines were clearly drawn.
When the oppressors and the oppressed are kept apart in separate groups, not only is the lesser group kept from infiltrating the major group, the major group is able to think that such action is justified. Where ignorance is, there is also an abundance of fervor in the lives of the ignorant to overcompensate for what they simply do not know. In the case of rampant racism, people will label unseemly typical characteristics onto the other race in order to justify the oppression of them, apparently in some attempt to prove their own superiority.
Menchu speaks of the ladino lady she worked for and the way she automatically stereotyped her as a dirty, Indian whore. Mathabane describes the typical white man of South Africa: Yet the white man of South Africa claims to the rest of the world that he knows what is good for black people and what it takes for a black child to grow up to adulthood. He vaunts aloud that his blacks in South Africa are well fed and materially better off under the chains of apartheid than their liberated brothers and sisters in the rest of Africa.
But, in truth, these claims and boasts are hollow. (Mathabane, 3) Knowledge is feigned, and people are kept ignorant and passive while the others suffer. The so-called inherent inferiority of the race is emphasized and re-emphasized, while the oppressed become more and more dehumanized. As a result of this dehumanization, many families were broken up, from the authorities taking fathers to jail, from the desperate need for income, or from early deaths due to such tragic causes as malnutrition and such curable, although deadly, diseases.
Several acquaintances of Menchu, including her brother and good friend, were killed in while working in the fields while the plants were being sprayed. Apparently, these deaths in the fields were regular occurrences due to the spraying of the plants. This was, in no way, curbed by the oppressive overseers. When people are dehumanized, death is rampant, because if a human life is not seen as valuable, it will not be held as such. The dehumanization found in this sort of societal setup is entirely typical.
People are seen as numbers or a means by which to achieve a comfortable lifestyle, but never as human beings. It is chilling to read the words that Mathabanes mother spouts when he questions her about the legal system: . . Peri-Urban never sees who we are but the numbers we are . . . (107). One cannot help but be reminded of the happenings of the Holocaust: the numbers tattooed into the victims arms in order to identify them. This is a seemingly insignificant ritual that actually contains much meaning: the oppressors are attempting, in the coldest manner, to control, regulate, and dehumanize their victims.
They are attempting to shield themselves from the face of the person, or the emotion that is so irrevocably attached to them, and to see them only as their identifying number. Religious Imperialism can be found within both accounts, as well, which perfectly exemplifies the attitude that the oppressors took towards the people they placed underneath them. The sending of missionaries not only appears to be an effort to make themselves feel better, but also one to take advantage of their susceptibility; to keep them inactive in the teachings of humility and submission.
It makes sense that the people of apartheid South Africa and Indian Guatemala converted so easily to Christianity: the religions they were currently practicing were not aiding in their destitution. When confronted with Christianity, many felt like there was no other option and either integrated it into the already established culture or converted completely. The Indians of Menchus account took a more humble role towards the introduction of Christianity, integrating it into their own cultural rituals and beliefs.
It took Menchu some time, after becoming a missionary herself, to realize what Catholicism truly was to her culture: Why dont outsiders accept Indian ways? This is where discrimination lies! Catholic Action too submitted us to tremendous oppression. It kept our people dormant while others took advantage of our passivity. I began to see this all clearly. (Menchu, 122) Mathabane speaks of the Christian artistic renderings of whites and blacks: God is white and blue-eyed, while Satan stabs black men, women and children strewn about him with his pitchfork. The Christianity of South Africa was clearly one used to promote racism.
Mathabane saw clearly, at a young age, that his mothers Christianity was a Christianity of expediency . . . latent when things seemed to be going right, active when things were going wrong. Mathabane, 77) The desire to hold on to cultural tradition is also very evident in some characters in these autobiographies. Mathabanes father was bent, even to the point of threatening, on keeping the ritual customs of their forefathers prevalent in their household. Menchus community celebrated the specific holidays of their forefathers, religiously and almost every day of the week.
It is apparent that the consequences for breaking ritual or custom were strict, and that older members of the community grow sorrowful as they see their belief systems give way to those of their oppressors. The effects on the lives of the individuals are staggering. In the autobiographies, both Rigoberta Menchu and Mark Mathabane, at tragically young ages, lament to their parents about having been born at all. In Menchus culture, the community laments over the birth of the child and the sorrow that its life will contain. Individuals become mad with hunger and desperation.
Mathabane speaks of how his mothers personality was forever changed after his father left for an extended period of time and the household had to undergo extreme hunger. Its an understood and accepted sociological fact that, when people are grouped together and made to go hungry and destitute, they will turn against each other. Yet, it became one of the many characteristics contrived by oppressors that the oppressed inherently had that, somehow, made them subhuman. The most shocking fact about these accounts was that they were both very recent, echoing the striking and important fact that racism is not an issue of the past.
Both of the autobiographies shed light on many important things: the poverty that is so rampant in these countries, the extreme hardships their people have to go through, and the emotional pain that they experience in their tremendous and undue tragedies. However, one thing that is revealed in I, Rigoberta Menchu and Kaffir Boy is most crucial and compelling: our own ignorance. I learned to prefer peace to war, cleverness to stupidity, love to hate, sensitivity to stoicism, humility to pomposity, reconciliation to hostility, harmony to strife, patience to rashness, gregariousness to misanthropy, creation to annihilation.
