# Bedtime Biography: Born a Crime by Trevor Noah - Blinkist

Introduction

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You’ve almost certainly heard of the world-famous South African comedian Trevor Noah. Maybe you know him as host of The Daily Show. Or perhaps you’ve seen some of his stand-up comedy, where he’s known for his uncanny impressions, his impressive knack for languages, and the ability to make painful anecdotes hilarious. 

What you might not know is that he had quite the extraordinary upbringing in South Africa – and that he overcame great odds to achieve his fame. At the center of his story is the love and strength he received from his unforgettable mother.

Settle in, and get cozy. This one’s a heart-warmer!

Chapter 1

We begin our story not too long ago, but in a world governed by very different rules.

Trevor Noah was born in Johannesburg in 1984. At that time, South Africa was still under apartheid – a rigid and convoluted system of racial oppression and segregation.

Trevor’s mother, Patricia, was Black – a Xhosa woman from Soweto. His father, Robert, was a white, Swiss-German man. Under apartheid law, interracial affairs were illegal, and so Trevor was quite literally born a crime.

It wasn’t like having an interracial affair under apartheid was a minor misdeed, either. No, the government did anything but turn a blind eye to such crimes. Entire police squads were dedicated to the sole purpose of peering into windows and arresting or beating any interracial couples they found. The official penalty was five years in prison.

When you think about it, such a law was fundamental to a racist system like apartheid. After all, if sexual relations between Black and white people did occur, they would compromise the racist idea that it was unnatural for races to want to mix. Simply put, it would undermine institutionalized racism and was therefore considered one of the worst crimes you could commit under apartheid. 

But this didn’t prevent a headstrong woman like Patricia Nombuyiselo Noah from creating the life she wanted.

Patricia and Robert met while living down the hall from each other in an apartment complex in Johannesburg. She was 24 and he was 46, and they both frequented Johannesburg’s underground nightlife for integrated crowds. 

It was a lively and growing scene, where merely dancing with a person of another race was an act of political resistance. Sometimes the events would be shut down by the police; sometimes they wouldn't. Attendees could never be sure whether they were going to spend the night on the dance floor or in a jail cell. It was always a gamble.

Robert had immigrated to South Africa in the late 1970s. He was quiet and withdrawn, and he never understood the country’s racism; in fact, he later opened one of the first mixed-race restaurants in Johannesburg.

In contrast, Patricia was ambitious, fiery, and driven. She'd grown up poor. When she was still a girl, her father had sent her away to live with her aunt in the Transkei, the apartheid-designated “homeland” of the Xhosa people. He didn’t want her. In the Transkei, she lived in a single hut with 14 other undesired relatives.

Despite these setbacks, she was determined to succeed. She studied English, which was widely regarded as the language of upward mobility. As soon as she could, she got a job at a local sewing factory. It was tough; she barely earned enough to eat. So she decided to take typing classes to get ahead. Eventually, she made enough money to move back to her family’s home in Soweto.

Soweto was a township on the outskirts of Johannesburg that had been earmarked by the government for black people only. It was built by the apartheid regime as a managed ghetto; its two entry roads could easily be blockaded, making escape impossible. If the regime ever deemed it necessary, the population could be corralled and bombed from the air. Trevor later realized that if the township was a target, his family’s home was essentially the bull’s-eye.

When she was 22, Patricia got hired as a corporate secretary in Johannesburg. Until the early 1980s, all white-collar jobs were, by law, reserved for white people. However, international opposition to apartheid was putting increased pressure on the government to abolish such laws. And so, to appease its critics, the government initiated some minor reforms. One such reform was allowing Black people to work low-level office jobs.

Though she was pleased to have the job, Patricia was tired of commuting to Johannesburg from Soweto. She was sick of living with her family, with whom she had a complicated relationship. She decided to move into the city of Johannesburg itself.

The only problem? It was illegal for Black people to live anywhere in Johannesburg except Soweto.

Patricia wasn’t the type of person to be troubled by arbitrary laws. First, she hid and slept in public restrooms. Several times, she was caught without a "passbook" – identity documents that all Black South Africans over the age of 16 were required to carry in white areas. The fine was 50 rand, or nearly half her month’s salary.

By befriending local prostitutes, she learned her way around Johannesburg. They taught her to smoothly slip past the police by wearing a cleaner’s uniform, and how to secure a secret flat in town. It was in this apartment complex where she met Robert, who lived down the hall. She enjoyed his company and felt comfortable with him. They went out dancing together and would stay up all night talking. 

Even though they were just friends and not in a romantic relationship, Patricia decided to have a child with Robert. Later in life, she told Trevor that she’d wanted a child all to herself. She wanted to live life on her own terms. The child would be someone to love – and someone who would love her unconditionally in return, without the baggage of a husband.

Chapter 2

What’s remarkable about Patricia’s choice to have a child with a white man is that she couldn’t have known – nobody could have – that apartheid would end just a few years later. It wasn’t only risky for her to have an interracial affair with a white man, it was risky to even be seen with her own son – Trevor’s lighter skin led people to believe he was of a different race. And that would simply raise too many questions. 

When walking down the street in Johannesburg with her own little boy, Patricia would often have a lighter-skinned neighbor accompany her. They’d pretend that the neighbor was Trevor’s mother. Even now, when Trevor Noah looks through old photo albums, he’s amused to see many photographs of himself as a toddler with this neighbor. His mother is trailing behind, appearing to photobomb each picture.

In Johannesburg, there was a significant population of “colored” people – the official classification for people who were of mixed heritage. Due to Trevor’s appearance, many people assumed that he was registered as colored with the apartheid government, and thus expected him to interact only with other colored people.

To be colored during apartheid was an official racial category, and it came with its own problems of identity. After all, just where did you belong? 

Trevor, though, was never in any doubt. He was Black. He spoke several Black South African languages and had grown up with his Xhosa mother and relatives. At school, he’d been friends mostly with Black kids, and at one point he’d asked to be moved from a predominantly white classroom group to a Black one.

In Soweto, Trevor certainly stuck out. Soweto’s population of nearly one million people was 99.9 percent Black. At the time, there were no lighter-skinned neighbors who could accompany him down the street. He was even used as a landmark for people giving directions: “See that house on the corner? There’s a light-skinned boy living in it. Take a right there.”

Growing up, Trevor also knew his father, but contact with Robert had to be even more discreet and minimal. They could only spend time together indoors, with the curtains drawn. If they left the house, Robert would have to cross the street. 

At one point, when Trevor was a toddler, the three of them tried to visit a park together in Johannesburg. Robert attempted to maintain a safe distance, but Trevor kept trying to catch up to him, yelling “Daddy! Daddy! Daddy!” When Robert ran away, panicked, Trevor ran after him, thinking it was just a game. 

As Trevor grew older, the sneaking around that apartheid required took a toll on his relationship with his father. He gradually lost contact with Robert and didn’t see him for eleven years. They met again when Trevor first started to find success as a comedian in his mid-twenties.

It wasn’t that Robert was uninterested in his son. In fact, Trevor found that his father had been meticulously pasting newspaper clippings about Trevor’s career into a large scrapbook. He and Robert picked up right where they’d left off, watching Formula 1 together. Robert began cooking the same meals for his son that Trevor had loved as a boy, like Rösti – a Swiss fried potato dish.

Robert was, by nature, a taciturn man, which only made Trevor more eager to get to know him better. Many of the days that Robert and Trevor spent together were passed in silence, but every so often Robert would drop a detail about his life. Trevor compared getting to know his father to watching a TV series. He’d get a tidbit of information in one episode, but he’d have to wait a week until he could find out more.

Chapter 3

Much of Trevor’s early life was marked by poverty. He was raised by a single mother, in a state that actively oppressed Black people. There was little food; often, they’d have to eat caterpillars to survive.  

During school holidays, Trevor stayed at his grandmother's two-room house. There, he slept on the floor along with his mother, grandmother, great-grandmother, aunt, uncle, and cousins. There was no indoor plumbing. 

Trevor’s mother, though, was as determined as ever. She didn’t want him paying what she termed the "Black tax." By this, she meant the money poor Black people spent trying to make up for their parents' poverty, a process that had been ongoing for generations. To break out of this cycle, she did everything she could to educate Trevor. She spent her meager income on “how-to” books, encyclopedia volumes, and the Bible. She quizzed him on what he read, initiated debates with him, and took him on day trips around the city. It was all done to get Trevor thinking about life beyond his immediate circumstances. 

In some ways, all this care and effort was wasted on Trevor. He proved to be a real rascal. He was a hyperactive prankster, infatuated with knives, and had pyromaniacal tendencies. He destroyed instruments, talked back to teachers, and shoplifted candy.

One of Trevor's most mischievous shenanigans occurred at the tender age of seven.

At the time, Patricia had been dating a Tsonga man named Abel for about a year – a man she would eventually marry.

Abel was a mechanic who lived in the garage apartment of a white family’s house in the suburbs of Johannesburg. Patricia would visit him, often with Trevor in tow.

One day, Trevor was playing with a kid in the neighborhood and showing him how to use a magnifying glass to burn his name into a piece of plywood. They were sitting in a wooden shed, filled with paint, on top of a mattress stuffed with straw. The flammable nature of their surroundings was lost on the two children.

At one point, the boys got hungry and left for a snack. When they returned, they realized the shed door had locked from the inside. Trevor noticed smoke coming through cracks in the window frame. They ran to get help, but by then the entire shed was ablaze.

The fire quickly moved to the roof, and then to the main house. By the time the fire brigade arrived, it was too late. The shed and the entire house were burned to ashes.

The other kid snitched on Trevor and told the family that Trevor had brought the matches. But Trevor, for once, wasn’t punished for his mischief. How were you supposed to punish a seven-year-old for starting a fire? Sue him for arson? Even Patricia was too shocked to give Trevor a spanking.

The only building on the property left unscathed was Abel’s garage apartment. Even then, Trevor had a keen sense of irony and found this deeply hilarious.

Nobody else was amused. The white family kicked Abel out. 

Abel, newly homeless, was furious. “Your son has burned down my life!” he yelled at Patricia, and a huge fight erupted.

From then on, Abel lived with the two of them. Trevor had solidified his reputation as the neighborhood’s ultimate mischief-maker; people started calling him Trevor the Terror.

Chapter 4

In 1990, Nelson Mandela was freed from his life sentence. Trevor remembers watching it on television; everyone was happy, but he didn’t understand why. A year later, right around the time Trevor burned down the house, apartheid officially came to an end. 

But this triumph merely signaled the beginning of a whole new range of problems. Post-apartheid South Africa was a difficult territory to navigate, particularly for Black people. 

The triumph of democracy over institutionalized racism is often called the Bloodless Revolution. And it’s true, few white people died. But this name conceals the fact that many thousands of Black people were killed. Apartheid's approach of separating people into arbitrary silos – identified and defined along ethnic lines, with unequal and limited access to resources – inevitably created tensions. 

As such, the end of apartheid segued into a power struggle between the different political parties that represented the diverse Black South African population. Some of the subsequent tensions led to violence within these Black communities. This, as well as the unfulfilled expectations that "freedom" would bring, exacerbated these issues. 

The neighborhood where Patricia and Trevor lived at the time, Eden Park, was a hotspot of much of this violence. About once a month, the two would drive home together to find their neighborhood on fire. Trevor remembers feeling like he was inside an oven as they edged their car through the flames.

During those unstable times, Patricia remained resolute and strong. One Sunday, when Trevor was nine, he, his mother, and his newborn half-brother Andrew were forced to take public minibuses to church. Their wreck of a car just wouldn’t start. At that time, buses, which were unregulated, were extremely dangerous – drivers and operators fought turf wars over the routes.

Night had fallen. They were almost home, but then the driver and Patricia got into an argument. The driver had started to lecture her for getting in a car with a man who wasn’t her husband. Patricia, not one to tolerate a lecture from a stranger, told him to mind his own business. Then she said something in Xhosa to Trevor. This enraged the Zulu driver. 

The driver called her insulting names, threatened to teach her a lesson, and began to speed on, making sure she had no chance whatsoever of getting off the bus. Patricia yelled right back at him, calling him names and wagging her finger at him from the backseat. The man could have easily committed an act of violence against the three of them. Such acts were far from uncommon at the time. 

But Patricia knew what was called for and didn’t panic. As they slowed at an intersection, she forced open the doors, pushed Trevor out, and leaped after with Andrew in her arms, protecting him as they fell. From there, they ran as quickly as they could until they were safely home.

Nowadays, when Trevor sees someone jump out of a car in a film – simply rolling over and dusting themselves off – he’s amused by the inaccuracy of such scenes. Falling out of a moving car is way more painful than that.

Chapter 5

Trevor also navigated his own way through post-apartheid South Africa by tapping into his ability with languages. At the time, there were eleven official languages in the country. Trevor set about learning several, which helped him more than once. On one occasion, he overheard a gang of approaching Zulu boys discussing their plan to mug him. Before they got to him, he piped up in Zulu and suggested they attack someone else. Shocked that he spoke Zulu, they left him alone.

Being a polyglot also helped him during the pains of puberty. Adolescence is uncomfortable for anyone, but it didn’t help that Trevor was prone to acne, nor that his family’s impoverished status meant he never had the right clothes. But Trevor had the language skills; he didn’t have to limit himself to one social group and soon grew adept at floating between them. 

He also made friends by establishing himself as the "tuckshop guy" at his high school. There was always a huge line at the tuckshop, which is a small snack-food store, to buy candy after assembly. So Trevor started a business – he’d take orders during assembly and deliver the goods on commission. His customers came from all sorts of backgrounds, and before too long he learned to operate between the rich kids, the nerds, and the jocks. The money he earned from this endeavor, though minimal, gave him his first taste of financial independence. 

Through these dealings, he also began to hone his comedic skills. As he skipped from group to group, he discovered that he was always welcome as long as he cracked a few jokes. It was the start of his career.

Trevor’s business acumen extended to more than just being the tuckshop guy. By the age of 16, he was selling bootleg CDs full of tracks he’d downloaded from the internet at home. He’d been lucky – there was no way he could afford a CD writer himself, but a wealthier school friend had given him one.

Before too long, he moved on from pirating CDs to burning his own mixes and even deejaying at parties. With his massive library of downloaded tracks, he could play for much longer than the DJs who were just using vinyl, and he got more and more popular. Soon, he was getting bookings from all over town. He even had his own dance crew who performed while he deejayed.

The DJ jobs were good for Trevor. Contrary to mainstream rhetoric, it was hard for Black people to find employment in post-apartheid South Africa. Technically, now that apartheid laws had been revoked, there were equal work opportunities for all. However, systemic racism prevented many Black people from actually getting a job – no matter how well-educated and qualified they were. Law or no law, a racist Afrikaner shop owner was still unlikely to employ a nonwhite person.

Crime was therefore a tempting option; it didn’t matter what color your skin was, you just had to hustle hard.

Trevor came to crime, too. He and his friends used the money he earned from selling CDs and deejaying to finance a credit-and-loan business. It didn’t last long, though. A police officer shot Trevor’s computer while shutting down a party, and the hard drive was destroyed. Bereft of his tracks, Trevor couldn’t even deejay.

Chapter 6

A big part of why we know of Trevor Noah today is because he managed to avoid falling into a cycle of crime and punishment. His career took off quickly in his early twenties – but even then there was still trouble at home, and his family still lived in poverty.

Abel and Patricia were married for several years and had two children together, but the relationship soon became abusive. Though charming, Abel was also an alcoholic who could get violent when he was drunk. 

Abel was a brilliant mechanic but a terrible businessman. Somehow, no matter how hard he worked – and he had a steady stream of loyal customers – they could not get out of debt. His frequent bouts of drinking didn’t help. 

Patricia, ever practical, decided to step in. She quit her corporate job and started running the business end of the auto shop. Supported by her skills in managing the books, making the schedules, and balancing the accounts, Abel’s shop started to do notably well. People began commenting that the shop was doing splendidly since his wife took over. These comments wounded Abel’s pride and enraged him. 

One night, when Trevor’s half-brother Andrew was still a baby, Abel got drunk and beat up Patricia. She went straight to the police to press charges – but, unbelievably, the police officers refused to do anything.

Patricia found herself trapped, living in constant fear that Abel might kill her and her children if she tried to escape.

Trevor just couldn’t deal with all of this pain. It was too much to watch the abuse his mother was enduring. Why didn’t she just leave? He didn’t yet understand how adult relationships work, and how domestic violence can keep its victims ensnared in a dangerous situation. Gradually, Trevor distanced himself from his mother. He moved out once he finished school and let himself drift away. His career took off quickly, and he began to receive bigger and better comedy bookings, even on television. 

Patricia did eventually break free from Abel. She even remarried.

But Abel wasn’t done with her. After church one Sunday, Abel confronted Patricia and her new family. He told her that she had ruined his life.

He then shot her twice.

When Trevor found out, he was incredibly distraught. He rushed to the hospital, where the nurses refused to treat Patricia because she didn’t have health insurance.

Trevor said he would pay for it, but the nurses were skeptical. It was a very high sum.

Fortunately, Trevor was earning good money as a comedian by then – and no amount of money was too much to save the life of his beloved mother.

Incredibly, Patricia survived. She was back to work within the week.

Perhaps even more incredibly, Abel wasn’t sent to prison. Officially, he had no prior convictions, and so he only received three years of probation for the attack – an injustice that shows there is still much to achieve to make South Africa a fair society.

Nowadays, Trevor lives in New York City and Patricia in South Africa – but her influence on him is evident in everything he does. He created a comedy special in her honor, and he dedicated his book to her, in which he wrote: “Thank you for making me into a man.”

The End

You’ve reached the end of this Bedtime Biography. Thank you for listening. Why not pause listening now so you can stay in a relaxed state? And if you’re off to bed now, I wish you a good night’s sleep.