The "Kaffir Boy" by Mark Mathabane

The “Kaffir Boy” by Mark Mathabane was a story about a grandmother and her grandson going to work for a white women in a region of Africa. The white people of that area having luxurious things such as houses, facilities, and schools while the original people that had lived there for generations are living in poverty. The hypocrisy of this is crazy and is seen when the character Clyde comes into play to really drive the point of the hypocrisy within the story. On lines 141 to 147, when in the main character's mind he’s realizing the hypocrisy between him and not only Clyde but the whole idea that the white people having everything and black people have nothing. Now that's been always but not entirely true because you see and read the way the black people were treated there and then you see it in our own country. So that is nothing new but when Clyde started making claims about the black people not being able to do certain things on line 165 to 170, but we see that Clyde is gathering these stereotypes from the teachers at his school on lines, 169-170 when he says, “ they have smaller brains, which are already filled with tribal music….My teachers you’re not people like us, because you belong to a jungle civilization.” Now when Clyde said this I felt that his perspective of these people were all the way off because of his teachers and I could see where the dangers of a short story are seen. He doesn't know how these people live and he can only believe one perspective cause that is all he sees and does not take into the fact of what they go through and the conditions they were dealt, because of these short stories. Short stories are not only seen in this instance but also many more, so it leaves you to think more and look deeper beyond the short stories you are told about whomever or whatever particular culture.