Criminalizing Existence: Apartheid, Identity, and Resilience in Trevor Noah’s Born a Crime

Document Type : Research in linguistic and literary studies

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English Department, Faculty of Arts, Assiut University, Egypt

Abstract

The apartheid regime was established in 1948 by the Afrikaner-led government in South Africa. Under this regime, racial discrimination in South Africa was systemized, strict racial segregation was enforced, and non-white citizens were deprived of their core rights solely because of race. Personal narratives, such as Trevor Noah’s Born a Crime: Stories from a South African Childhood (2016), capture the lived experiences of systemic racism, offering insights into the resilience of oppressed groups. This article analyzes the memoir’s exploration of how identity is built and debated within systems of power through the lenses of critical race theory (CRT) and the Nigrescence model (NM) of black identity formation. CRT demonstrates how apartheid’s legal and social systems, such as the Immorality Act, outlawed Trevor Noah’s mixed-race existence; the NM provides a framework for understanding Noah’s journey of struggling with his mixed-race identity under apartheid, navigating societal rejection, and ultimately embracing his blackness as a source of resilience. This analysis sheds light on the lasting impacts of apartheid while celebrating the resilience and creativity of cultural hybridity, affirming storytelling’s power to dismantle oppressive systems.

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