Native Boy

'When we moved from the farm, my mother was concerned about my survival. How would her youngest child survive township life; how would he transform from a maplazini to an urban township boy?

Thabo Abram Molefe was just six years old when he and his family left their tenancy on a Boschfontein farm. Their destination: a vacant stand in the vibrant, multi-ethnic, rambling Ratanda township just south of Heidelberg, Transvaal – the birthplace of Eugene Terre'Blanche's AWB.

To his new neighbours, Molefe is – and always will be – a 'maplazini', Sesotho for 'sumb country bumpkin'. It is a nickname he works to overcome as he journeys towards adulthood and further education, far beyond the apartheid regime's agenda to forever limit the black man to a life of hardship.

Funny, moving, heartbreaking and heartwarming: Native Boy is an illuminating memoir of a young black man's search for identity, set against the backdrop of a country in the throes of political transition.