Mathabane’s Mother (Magdalene) Quotes in Kaffir Boy
My father was now a completely changed man; so changed that he now began drinking and gambling excessively, and from time to time quarreling with my mother over money matters and over what he called my mother’s streak of insubordination not befitting “the woman he bought.” But he still tried, in his own way, to be a father and a husband.
“You and Papa should not have had me. I’m not happy in this world.”
As we had no nursery rhymes nor storybooks, and, besides, as no one in the house knew how to read, my mother’s stories served as a kind of library, a golden fountain of knowledge where we children learned about right and wrong, about good and evil.
“Education will open doors where none seem to exist. It’ll make people talk to you, listen to you and help you; people who otherwise wouldn’t bother. It will make you soar, like a bird lifting up into the endless blue sky, and leave poverty, hunger, and suffering behind. […] Above all, it’ll make you a somebody in this world.”
Worst of all, I found among members of some churches a readiness to accept their lot as God’s will, a willingness to disparage their own blackness and heritage as inferior to the white man’s Christianity, a readiness to give up fighting to make things just in this world, in the hope that God’s justice would prevail in the hereafter.
Mathabane’s Mother (Magdalene) Quotes in Kaffir Boy
My father was now a completely changed man; so changed that he now began drinking and gambling excessively, and from time to time quarreling with my mother over money matters and over what he called my mother’s streak of insubordination not befitting “the woman he bought.” But he still tried, in his own way, to be a father and a husband.
“You and Papa should not have had me. I’m not happy in this world.”
As we had no nursery rhymes nor storybooks, and, besides, as no one in the house knew how to read, my mother’s stories served as a kind of library, a golden fountain of knowledge where we children learned about right and wrong, about good and evil.
“Education will open doors where none seem to exist. It’ll make people talk to you, listen to you and help you; people who otherwise wouldn’t bother. It will make you soar, like a bird lifting up into the endless blue sky, and leave poverty, hunger, and suffering behind. […] Above all, it’ll make you a somebody in this world.”
Worst of all, I found among members of some churches a readiness to accept their lot as God’s will, a willingness to disparage their own blackness and heritage as inferior to the white man’s Christianity, a readiness to give up fighting to make things just in this world, in the hope that God’s justice would prevail in the hereafter.
