Mark Mathabane

Mark Mathabane was born in South Africa in 1960, the oldest of seven children. As a black child in South Africa, Mathabane felt the full weight of apartheid’s oppression throughout his childhood. As detailed in Kaffir Boy, his autobiography, Mathabane excelled in school, but his education was constantly challenged by poverty, racism, police brutality, and gang violence. He took up tennis as a teenager, and mentors and coaches soon recognized his athletic potential. He formed positive relationships with several white foreigners in South Africa who did not abide by apartheid’s strictures, which gave him glimpses of the outside world and the freedom it offered. Mathabane’s profile in South African tennis steadily rose, though it was disrupted for several months when he participated in the Soweto Uprising in 1976, a student protest movement against the apartheid government’s forcing of the Afrikaans language on black students. White police opened fire on unarmed students, turning the protest movement into months of angry mobs, riots, and violence, in which an estimated 700 people died—mostly at the hands of police. After graduating secondary school, tennis star Stan Smith helped Mathabane get an athletic scholarship to a college in South Carolina, though he changed schools twice before graduating with an economics degree in 1983. Although Mathabane eventually worked as a lecturer and college professor, his literary success began shortly after college. In 1986, Mathabane published Kaffir Boy, which became a national best-seller and garnered him interviews with Oprah Winfrey and President Bill Clinton at the White House. Mathabane wrote his follow-up autobiography Kaffir Boy in America in 1989, as well as several biographies about his family members, and two novels, Ubuntu and The Proud Liberal. Mathabane lives with his wife and children in Portland, Oregon.