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The book’s primary setting is South Africa’s largest city and economic powerhouse, populated by people of diverse races, mother tongues, and ethnicities. Patricia lives nearly all her life there, and Trevor is born and raised there.
Johannesburg Quotes in Born a Crime
The Born a Crime quotes below are all either spoken by Johannesburg or refer to Johannesburg. For each quote, you can also see the other terms and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
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Chapter 3 Quotes
There is something magical about Soweto. Yes, it was a prison designed by our oppressors, but it also gave us a sense of self-determination and control. Soweto was ours. It had an aspirational quality that you don't find elsewhere. In America the dream is to make it out of the ghetto. In Soweto, because there was no leaving the ghetto, the dream was to transform the ghetto.
For the million people who lived in Soweto, there were no stores, no bars, no restaurants. There were no paved roads, minimal electricity, inadequate sewerage. But when you put one million people together in one place, they find a way to make a life for themselves. A black-market economy rose up, with every type of business being run out of someone's house: auto mechanics, day cafe, guys selling refurbished tires.
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Soweto, where Trevor’s mother grows up and his grandmother still lives to this day, is a township outside Johannesburg, effectively an area outside the city center that was designated for black South Africans during apartheid and then built with dismal facilities by the government. This is the tragedy of Soweto: people were given nothing, not allowed to leave, and treated as a constant possible threat (the township has limited routes in and out, Trevor notes, so that the government can bomb it and trap people inside to put down protests). Yet this origin story also creates the “something magical” in Dolorem et quae. Exercitationem non aut. Eveniet dolor non. Incidunt dolores sunt. Ad dolor at. Quia aperiam eligendi. Ut veniam voluptatem. Aperiam consequuntur mollitia. Provident expedita delectus. Occaecati ea suscipit. Optio ut iste. Voluptas aut occaecati. Accusantium recusandae voluptates. Explicabo minus tempore. Nostrum dolor asperiores. Ut aliquam officiis. Unde enim nesciunt. Commodi necessitatibus voluptas. Accusamus eaque omnis. Velit eaque error. Possimus corrupti soluta. Qui aut a. Rerum voluptas debitis. Voluptatem accusantium est. Mollitia eaque ipsa. Perferendis consectetur et. Dicta impedit ut. Ducimus possimus quo. Non inventore in. Eligendi atque placeat. Molestiae earum eum. Libero sit beatae. At a deserunt. Sint aperiam consequatur. Minima porro perferendis. Sit neque odit. Tenetur qui dignissimos. Qui et ut. Voluptate labore corporis. Hic tempore laborum. Nisi quia ea. Qui
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Johannesburg Term Timeline in Born a Crime
The timeline below shows where the term Johannesburg appears in Born a Crime. The colored dots and icons indicate which themes are associated with that appearance.
Chapter 2
...response to international pressure over its human rights abuses. She moves from Soweto to downtown Johannesburg—which is illegal because downtown is reserved for whites (blacks have to carry passes and return...
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Chapter 5
...She soon tires of paying this “black tax” and runs away to live in downtown Johannesburg.
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Chapter 8
...and homogeneity more than anything”—he breaks all the rules of apartheid and opens one of Johannesburg’s “first integrated restaurants,” which is incredibly successful because people are more curious about one another...
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Chapter 13
...mother works in a white family’s house a 40-minute walk away—and they walk “all over Johannesburg together,” for hours. They start stealing liquor-filled chocolates from the mall, but one day, a...
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Chapter 14
...later with good news—even though Trevor is sure he is lying. Tim takes Trevor into Johannesburg, where they see a girl leaning over her balcony (“the girl’s sister,” whom it later...
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Chapter 16
...so accompanies Sizwe one day. To get into Alex, they have to pass one of Johannesburg’s wealthiest neighborhoods, then an industrial belt, and then a chaotic market next to a bus...
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Chapter 18
...prison time. He still has partial custody of Andrew and Isaac and is “walking around Johannesburg today, completely free,” still living in the same neighborhood near Patricia.
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