In Kaffir Boy, who is Johannes?

Mark Mathabane is both the author and narrator of Kaffir Boy. Johannes is the Afrikaans name Mark Mathabane's parents give him at birth. At the beginning of the story, he is a cold, hungry, frightened, five-year-old, at the mercy of the Alexandra police raids. By the end of the story, he has finished secondary school at the top of his class, secured a banking job with a decent salary, won a tennis championship, and received a scholarship to an American college. He can speak, read, and write in several languages.

In 1973, when he meets with Wilfred Horn to request permission to play tennis at his all-white camp, "for some reason," Mathabane says, "I gave my name as Mark." Perhaps he was already trying to weaken the paper trail that would lead to Johannes Mathabane and get him into trouble with white South Africans who were not as liberal as Horn. In his 1994 book African Women, Mathabane's sister Florah explains that Johannes took the name Mark in 1976 during the student protests in Soweto. Clearly, this was an attempt to hide his identity from the police.

Without his mother's refusal to give up, without her persistence in obtaining his birth certificate, her talking him out of suicide, her willingness to work as a housecleaner, her love and faith, he might not have made it. From her, he says, "I learned that virtues are things to be always striven after, embraced and cultivated, for they are amply rewarded." I realized "that vices were bad things, to be avoided at all cost, for they bring one nothing but trouble and punishment."