In the pre-chapter prologue, Noah describes the history of childhood education for Black South Africans. Under British rule before apartheid, they were taught British literature and English to “Christianize and Westernize” them (61). Under apartheid, they were put in “Bantu schools” that taught them only how to labor for the Afrikaners’ government.

Noah recounts his mother’s childhood. Her parents divorced when she was young, and because she was a defiant tomboy, she clashed with her mother. She wanted to live with her father, but he sent her away to live with his extended family in the Xhosa homeland, Transkei. She labored on a farm and got barely anything to eat. The mission schools were still active in Transkei, so she was taught English. She used this to get a factory job and then, after she turned 21 and returned to her mother’s home, a typist job.

Her mother took all of her typist’s money to try to pull their house and family in Soweto “back up to zero” (67). Patricia ran away to the city to “make her own way in the world” (67).