Kaffir Boy by Mark Mathabane opened my eyes to an entire different world I thought did not exist. From reading this book I discovered what apartheid was and why this system was set up. I found out that the system separated the blacks form the whites and this as a result had bad effects. This system only encouraged prejudice and discrimination to a point were the black people were treated like animals and not human beings. This story is very powerful because Mark does a very good job illustrating the prejudice and discrimination he and his family experienced through out their entire life.
             Mark or Johannes as he was called in book, was raised in a part of Alexandra that was extremely poor and where apartheid was very prevalent. As a consequence, Mark and his family constantly experienced prejudice. Prejudice is a prejudgment based solely on the category of that a person belongs to (Leeder 04). When Mark was five years old he was already experiencing this, the police constant raided the neighborhood he lived in. They knocked at every house and if nobody opened the door they would knock it down because this people were thought to be bad just because of how they look and were they live. As a kid, Mark had a very bad picture of who white people were and he dreaded them because all his experiences with them had been bad. Most of the white people were prejudiced against blacks and in some white schools, the kids were thought that they were not the same,
             My teachers tell us that Kaffirs can't read, speak or write English like white people because they have smaller brains, which are already full of tribal things. My teachers say you're not people like us, because you belong to a jungle civilization. That's why you can't live or go to school with us, but can only be our servants (mathabane 192).
             A white boy said this to Mark when he visited the white world for the first time.
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