Content warning: This section of the guide discusses racism and apartheid.

Born a Crime focuses on Noah’s childhood and young adult life, and every memory is heavily influenced by the effects of South African apartheid. Noah describes apartheid as a purposeful and deliberate form of government-imposed segregation and racism. Because apartheid was so deeply ingrained systemically in South Africa, its detrimental effects persist even since the end of apartheid.

While apartheid began in 1948, it has roots in South Africa’s colonial history. The Dutch East India Company established the Dutch Cape Colony in the region in 1652, and the British Empire captured the colony in the early 1800s. During this period, European colonizers displaced Indigenous populations, enslaved African people, and demanded that Indigenous people carry passes proving that they were not enslaved. After the Slavery Abolition Act in 1833, British colonizers introduced a system of indentured servitude for the Xhosa people, an ethnic group in Southern Africa. In 1894, Prime Minister of the Cape Colony Cecil Rhodes passed an act to limit African land rights, and in 1905 Black people were denied the right to vote. By the early 1900s, there was significant social and economic inequality between white people and people of other racial groups in the region, and white people had complete political control.