p> . . . [we] lived under constant police terror and the threat of deportation . . . ; . . . at ten I contemplated suicide . . . ; . . . in 1976 I got deeply involved in the Soweto protests, in which hundreds of black students were killed by the police, and thousands fled the country to escape imprisonment and torture (ix).
Ironically, the ticket to freedom for Mathabane came through the "white" sport of tennis, at which he excelled. Tennis allowed the author to develop a talent which gave him the opportunity to transcend apartheid, and it also led him to see that not all whites were the racist monsters he had believed them to be. This fact allowed him to have some hope that whites could also be included in the fight for racial liberty in South Africa.
Mathabane also acknowledges, however, that he had to give up traditional connections with his past in order to escape apartheid, or at least in order to change his own racial identity enough to make escape possible. He writes that his book is "about how, in order to escape from the clutches of apartheid, I had to reject the tribal traditions of my ancestors. . . . Apartheid had long adulterated my heritage and traditions, twisted them into tools of oppression and indoctrination" (xi).
The fact that Mathabane wants to send a message to the white people of South Africa (and the watching world) is emphasized by the fact that he begins his book noting that whites in South Africa are deliberately kept in the dark with respect to the daily tribulations endured by blacks under apartheid. For example, whites are legally prohibited from visiting black ghettos:
. . . More than 90 percent of white South Africans go through a lifetime without seein
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