Every Day I Woke up Knowing That Today

Date 19 November 2016 Page 52,53,55,57,59,70,71

‘EVERY DAY I WOKE UP KNOWING

THAT TODAY COULD END UP

WITH ME IN JAIL OR DEAD’

Trevor Noah was born illegally under

South African apartheid to a black

mother and white father – and brought up in secret in Soweto. So how did he

end up presenting one of America’s

most influential TV shows?

By Will Pavia

’ve been talking with Trevor Noah about picked his replacement: this South African the common assumption that he is, comic with an international following who essentially, a lucky bastard. “It’s very was good on Twitter. Noah seemed extremely strange,” he says. “Especially when I got young, awfully handsome and very self- to America and got The Daily Show, and assured. I remember reading that he had a so on, people just looked at me at face South African mother and a Swiss father and value, like, ‘Oh look at him. He’s well- thinking that he probably spent a brief time I dressed, he’s well-spoken, he’s probably in his mother’s country and then attended a a jock and he’s lived a comfortable life.’” private school in Lausanne with European royals and the children of various dictators. I thought so too. Jon Stewart, who had hosted The Daily Show for nearly 17 years, “People assumed that I came from a place announced that he would step down. Much of privilege,” said Noah. “It was like, ‘Here’s wailing and gnashing of teeth followed, for this guy and this is probably just another thing Stewart was a demigod of late-night television that’s gone great in his life.’” and his show had become a lodestar for liberal In fact, his luck was of a different variety. America. He was supposed to be offering It was lucky that he was so quick. It was lucky topical satire, but increasingly viewers that the police did not catch him. had turned to him for news, guidance and He was born mixed race in a nation that consolation. He savaged the conservative specifically outlawed racial mixing. Growing establishment and the circus that is American up, he was evidence of his mother’s crime. television news, one of his outraged The mere act of going outside had to be done monologues was credited with altering the surreptitiously and in disguise. After apartheid, course of legislation in Congress and he when ethnic violence erupted in the townships, fostered a huge stable of comedians and he remembers his mother forcing her way past presenters who then went off to become film burning tyres and blockades to get him to stars or to host other late-night shows: Steve school on time. As Noah grew older there was Carell, Stephen Colbert, John Oliver. trouble on the home front too, in the shape of Now he was leaving, and the network had a drunken and increasingly violent stepfather.

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PORTRAIT Maarten de Boer

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Plus, by Noah’s telling, he was a very naughty boy. The story of his life is full of chase scenes in which he runs, hell for leather, from spankings, from the long arm of the law and from the swinging fists of his stepfather. Luckily, for the sake of his continued existence, he was fast. Still, you can imagine how it might have gone horribly wrong. “Oh yeah,” he agrees, cheerfully. He’s sitting in an armchair at one end of a large corner office in midtown Manhattan, with windows looking north, over a small park, and west, towards the Hudson River. “In my world, with all of my friends, every day we woke up knowing that today could end with me in jail or dead,” he says. “That just becomes a part of life. It’s like walking with a limp. Someone looks at you and goes, ‘Wow, look at that limp,’ and you’re like, ‘Oh, this thing? I’ve always lived like this.’” Noah is tall, broad-shouldered and clean- cut, although he has not yet shaved and his chin and cheeks bear the wisps of a light beard. He’s wearing a blue-grey cable-knit jumper, dark slacks and brown, laceless leather shoes that he rests on the rim of a glass coffee table. Across the office behind him there’s a long table that must serve as both his desk and a conference table. There’s an iMac at one end, a large swivel chair and smaller chairs tucked in around the other end – presumably for writers and producers to sit in and discuss jokes and running orders. Beyond the desk are pieces of gym equipment for pull-ups, push-ups and bicep curls, and there’s a little changing room off to the left containing his suits and shirts. Outside this office, over several floors of this old brick building, comedy writers, comedians, researchers and production people are preparing for that night’s broadcast of The Daily Show, which is filmed in a studio next door, and broadcasts four nights a week. Noah is running the show. He’s 32. “I don’t discount luck,” he says. “My mom would say it’s because she prayed but, yeah, I don’t discount luck.” I would also not discount the fact that Noah, since boyhood, has been a chap with an eye for the main chance. At his secondary school in South Africa, a midday assembly was followed by a race for the tuck shop that dispensed lunch. The longer you spent in the queue, the less was left of your lunch break. “I was still the fastest boy in school,” he writes in his memoir, Born a Crime: Stories from a South

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African Childhood. “And I had no shame … I was always the first in line.” So he began offering to buy other people’s lunch, for a commission. The business proved a runaway success. “I would take five orders a day, high bidders only,” he writes. “I had all these rich, fat white kids, who were like, ‘This is fantastic’ … If you paid me extra you could tell me where you’d be and I’d deliver it to you.” As the “tuck shop guy” he would flit through the different social and racial groups at his high school like a marijuana dealer, the guy everyone half-knows, who is welcome at every party. He’s still a hard man to catch – quick, charming, clever and rather self-contained. He thinks the latter quality dates to the first five years of his life when as the child of an illicit union, he could not have friends or go outside much. “I lived inside my head. I still live inside my head,” he writes. “I have to remember to be with people.” Noah’s mother’s family had been relocated to Soweto, but miraculously she had landed a job as a secretary with the pharmaceuticals company ICI on the edge of Johannesburg. She scored a rented flat in the middle of the city, overcoming laws prohibiting black people from living there by persuading a local German expatriate to put his name on the lease, and

got about town by dressing as a maid. GETTY IMAGES THIS PAGE: GETTY IMAGES. BY PREVIOUS SPREAD: CONTOUR

Constantly fearful of being found out, Hosting The Daily Show she spent a lot of time in the company of a and, below, with Bill reliable Swiss-German restaurateur named Clinton in September Robert who lived on the same street. He had started one of the city’s first mixed-race NOAH RECALLS SEEING

HIS WHITE FATHER AND SHOUTING, ‘DADDY!’ HE

PANICKED AND RAN AWAY

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exile, fighting for the cause. Children grew up, restaurants – a steak place that was eventually shut down following official demands that he he says, in a world ruled by women who led have a separate lavatory for every ethnicity protests on the streets and gathered each night that dined there. In time she made a proposal. for long prayer meetings and Bible readings. She wanted a child but did not want a Noah says he can “quote you anything” from the Bible. Still, I ask. He nods and husband. Perhaps he could help her with this? Under South Africa’s Immorality Act, “any recites his favourite verse from St John’s native female who permits any European male Gospel. “Every day my mum sends me emails to have illicit carnal intercourse with her” about scripture, too, until this day,” he says. was guilty of an offence that carried up to The book offers a Just William-like catalogue four years in jail. Nevertheless, after some of high jinks. There is the time that Noah persuasion, Robert agreed to be her accomplice accidentally burned down the house of a white in the crime. After Noah was born, his mother family, and the time that he inadvertently could wrap him up and carry him to visit his caused his family to think that their house father, who found he wanted to be involved. had been cursed by a demon. Grannies from Yet Noah was an awkwardly big baby. He could all over the township were summoned for a pass for “coloured” – a distinct racial group marathon prayer session to purge the evil spirit. in South Africa, descended from the mixed Noah’s misdeeds are apparently legendary children of white Dutch colonists, black slaves in his family, and it was apparent, even to him, and indigenous bushmen. So she placed him in that he was not punished for them as severely a coloured crèche and asked a coloured lady as his cousins. His mother would remove her who lived in their apartment building to come belt and beat him heartily, if she could catch with them when they went to the park. People him (receiving a spanking from his headmaster would take this other woman to be his mother. at primary school, Noah says that he once Noah’s mother would be a few steps back, started laughing at how soft the blows were dressed as a maid. Occasionally his father came by comparison – an incident that caused the too, walking on the far side of the street like a principal to send him to a psychologist). But his plain-clothes detective tailing a drug dealer. grandmother told Noah’s mother that she was “I remember the normalcy of everything,” afraid to hit a white child. His grandfather, who Noah says now. “I remember walking with had married another woman and lived with her my mum’s friend, who was my complexion. family, would call Noah “Mastah”. I remember my mum dressing like a domestic And it was not just his family who treated worker, but I didn’t know why she was doing him differently. “Don’t forget that according that. In my head that’s how my mum dressed to the country (under apartheid), I was also … In my head I just never walked next to my privileged. I was superior to my mother and father in public.” my cousins and my grandmother and my His mother tells a story of Noah as a grandfather, the whole black side of the family. toddler spotting his father in a park and I was one class above them in society, so even shouting, “Daddy!” and running towards him. the country said that I was privileged.” His father panicked and began to run away. As a boy, he became good at speaking to Noah thought it was a game and gave chase. other people in their own language. His mother It sounds heartbreaking, for a middle-aged was Xhosa and also spoke English, Afrikaans, man to have to flee from his son. “For the kid German, Zulu and Sotho. Noah did too, and it was a great experience. It was like, ‘This is when strangers stared at his pale skin and fun. I wish my dad would run with me and asked him where he was from, “I’d reply in he does,’” says Noah. “You don’t realise the whatever language they’d addressed me in, restrictions that have been placed upon you, using the same accent they used,” he writes. which is a blissful place to be.” “There would be a brief moment of confusion, Noah and his mother spent part of each year at his grandmother’s two-room house in Soweto. By night, the family would lie together on mattresses in the bedroom: Noah, his cousins, his mother, an uncle, an aunt, his gran and great-grandmother. Fathers in the neighbourhood tended to be absent, he writes – away working in a mine or incarcerated or in

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bequeathed Noah the means of production and ‘ANGER IS NOT MY DEFAULT soon our lad was making out like a bandit. He SETTING. MAYBE WE’VE bought a massive cordless telephone; he dined in McDonald’s. “I was living the dream,” he GOT TO THE POINT WHERE writes. “None of it would have happened without Andrew.” The gift made him realise SATIRE IS USELESS’ that “you need someone from the privileged world to come to you and say, ‘OK, here’s what and then the suspicious look would disappear.” you need and here’s how it works.’” Once it saved him from a mugging. At school it After he left school, he graduated from became a party trick – he could talk to anyone. burning CDs to DJing at street parties. Yet for all of his chameleon qualities, Noah still felt obliged, at a certain point, to pick a side. Arriving in a large public primary school, an aptitude test placed him in the top class, which was mostly white. At the end of his first day, he asked to be placed in the lower class, which was mostly black. “You can exist in purgatory as long as you want, you can try, but at some point you have to choose,” he says. “People think of it in a confrontational way. They think of it in terms of conflict. It has nothing to do with that. You just realise, at some point, as a biracial person, that you have to choose.” The choice still threw up some odd quirks. In his memoir, Noah describes stealing liquor Noah with Jon Stewart chocolates from a shop in a mall, with a in 2015 black friend named Teddy. Spotted in the act, the two teenagers fled, security guards at their heels. “You couldn’t catch me in my neighbourhood,” he writes. Teddy was caught, arrested and expelled from school. Noah was summoned to the headmaster’s office the next day and asked to look at CCTV footage from the mall, in front of the principal and several police officers. Teddy claimed to have been alone, the principal said, but they could see that there was someone else involved. The headteacher paused the tape “with me, from a few metres out, freeze-framed in the middle of the screen”, and asked, “Do you know of any white kids Teddy hangs out with?” Noah was baffled. He feared a trick. They began listing the names of white students until “I wanted to jump up and point at the TV and say, ‘Are you people blind?’ ” he writes. “These people had been so f***ed by their own construct of race that they could not see that the white person they were looking for was sitting right in front of them.” So his luck held. Noah steadily expanded his business interests, from tuck-shop runner, to pirate CD sales. Initially he served as a middleman for an older white student named Andrew who owned a computer and CD writer but felt afraid to collect payments from poorer black customers. When Andrew graduated, he

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White friends were going off on gap years, Noah left South Africa after his television Noah and his school business associates went show “ran out of celebrities to interview”. He to sell CDs on a street corner in Soweto and was in London, wandering aimlessly through to hustle for gigs. They had a dance crew that Harrods, when Jon Stewart called. “He said, ‘I included an extraordinarily talented dancer really like what you do. I’d love for you to pop by the show if you get a chance,’” Noah says. called Hitler – a name that does not bear the same resonance in South Africa. People would But Noah was doing a run of shows at stand around him in a circle chanting, “Go the Soho Theatre. “He said, ‘I understand, but Hitler!” Hitler went down a storm everywhere, I think there will be a time when you appreciate Noah writes, except at a Jewish school which having a home, being able to do comedy from hired them to perform one day. “You people one place and building something. When that are disgusting,” a teacher shouted at him, and time comes, just pop in, we’ll hang out.’” Noah, hearing the “you people” and thinking Noah did. He made a few appearances as she had taken offence at the way that Hitler one of The Daily Show’s “correspondents”, and was gyrating, replied, “Listen lady, we’re free when Stewart announced his departure, he now. We’re gonna do what we’re gonna do.” told Noah, “I’ve put your name in the hat.” For black South Africans, the name Cecil Noah says his response was, “What Rhodes was considered far worse, Noah says. does that mean? What is the job? How am “He did more to the country. The effects of his I supposed to do it?” rule are felt today. He pillaged half a continent.” Presumably you’d never been in a position But Hitler murdered six million people, I say. where you had all these people reporting to “But the numbers,” he replies. “Just considering you, I say. Except when you were running the thing worth counting. Do you get what I’m your CD empire. “Which was a lot more saying? The only time black people were ever stress, trust me, my friend. That’s funny. counted was during the slave trade and that I did have my CD empire.” He then points was because they were seen as a commodity.” out, gently, that he also headed a highly rated Noah’s life stories were now serving as television show in South Africa. “But nothing powerful material for his act, although some like this,” he says. “Nothing on this scale.” are altogether too dark to play for laughs. Abel, Stewart had been compared to Edward the mechanic his mother married when Noah R Murrow, the wartime and McCarthy-era was a boy, had become increasingly violent and unstable, he writes. He recalls his mother broadcaster who was a steady voice in attempting to file reports of abuse to amused tumultuous times. Liberal Americans longed police officers, who said they could not to hear his voice in this raging inferno of an interfere in a domestic matter and told her to election season. Instead, Noah appeared on calm down. She left Abel eventually, but one their screens, like a handsome young priest at a Sunday morning, when Noah was established funeral. You could see he was good, but people as a comedian and television presenter, he were busy thinking of what they had lost. received a call from his stepbrother, informing “That’s just time,” he says. “You have to put him that his mother had been shot in the head. your head down and grind through it.” Abel had been waiting for her and the The other charge laid against him is that he children when they came home from church, is not angry enough. “Anger is not my default armed with a revolver. He fired, and the bullet setting, that’s what I try to explain to people,” struck Noah’s mother in the buttock, he writes. he says. “You’re supposed to use humour as a She fell to the ground and Abel stood over tool to poke holes in arguments and ideas. If her and put the gun to her head. The gun everything of yours is straight down the barrel, misfired several times and his mother and his is that satire? No, I don’t believe that it is.” stepbrother scrambled into the car where one He shrugs. “Maybe we’ve got to the point final shot, fired as they drove away, struck her in society where satire is useless,” he says. The in the back of the head, so that she slumped news often looks satirical now. Watching Alec forward in the passenger seat. Baldwin playing Trump on Saturday Night Live, Amazingly, she survived. Just as amazingly, “I was like, ‘I don’t know, Trump is funnier.’” Abel escaped with three years’ probation for A generation now watch comedy shows to attempted murder, he writes, because he had get the news, garlanded with a few jokes, he no criminal record. Because the police had says. The British comedian John Oliver has never charged him with domestic abuse. won awards, and a giant audience, by offering k

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Last Week woman and the black man have a lot in that very thing on his weekly show, Tonight. “John Oliver’s not satire,” says Noah. common,” he says. “They’ve been through “It’s comedy and news. Very good news, great certain degrees of the same suffering. Pay journalism, fantastic stories.” inequality, voting rights restricted.” In a recent live show, broadcast minutes He thinks he actually knows “more about after the third presidential debate, to which a woman’s world than a man’s because that’s Trump had invited President Obama’s the only world I grew up in. If you take me shopping, I can help you find high heels faster ONE SUNDAY MORNING, HE than I can help you with a pair of slacks.” Oh my God, I say. You must be beating HAD A CALL TELLING HIM them off with a stick. I realise in retrospect that “beating them off with a stick” was perhaps the THAT HIS MOTHER HAD wrong phrase to use in this context. “Oh no, not at all, don’t worry,” he says. He BEEN SHOT IN THE HEAD is dating a New York estate agent. “We met through friends on social media,” he says. “I’ve met so many people on social media.” estranged half-brother, Noah made himself the butt of a rather brave joke. A man pretending His job sounds all-consuming. What else to be his half-brother stood up and declared does he do? “Chris Rock gave me the best that back home, Noah was known as “Ebola”. advice. He said, ‘Don’t forget living is working. “Because you were terrible in Africa, and you’ll You’re an artist; your life inspires your work so never catch on in America.” The Daily Show you need to go live …’ That’s what I do.” viewership has plunged to just over half of what it was under Stewart, but he’s credited with Continues on page 70 drawing a younger, more diverse audience. And he’s doing well in terms of YouTube subscribers. He offers a unique perspective on American life. “In South Africa and America, black people have gone through very similar experiences,” he says. “I’d say we are more closely linked than most countries in the world, black South Africans and American black people.” As a kid, he remembers the police surging through Soweto in armoured personnel carriers. Playing at his grandmother’s house, he would hear gunshots and smell tear gas. He arrived in America to see newly militarised police departments confronting rioters in Missouri, Maryland and Ohio. “It’s quite a shock to go from a world where you’re trying to phase that out and you see them ramping it up,” he says. “Strangely enough, tear gas has nostalgia for me, you know?” As in South Africa, he sees a populace “that sees protest as their only recourse”. He thinks the townships, in some ways, were more hopeful than the ghettos of American cities. “In South Africa there was never a chance you would leave. People just started improving the place they were in,” he says. In America, the dream was to get out. “I think that is one thing that’s missing, an idea of people coming up within the communities and having that affluence spread like a virus.” And he has a fairly visceral perspective on domestic abuse and women’s rights. “The

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MY SECRET SOWETO CHILDHOOD

hen I was born, my mother hadn’t seen her family in three years, but she wanted me to know them and wanted them to know me, so the prodigal daughter returned. We lived in town, but I would spend weeks at a time with my grandmother in Soweto, often during the holidays. W In the city, as difficult as it was to get around, we managed. Enough people were moving around, black, white and coloured, going to and from work, that we could get lost in the crowd. But only black people were permitted in Soweto. It was much harder to hide someone who looked like me, and the government was watching much more closely. In the white areas you rarely saw the police, or if you did it was Officer Friendly in his collared shirt and pressed pants. In Soweto the police were an occupying army. They didn’t wear collared shirts. They wore riot gear. They were militarised. They operated in teams known as flying squads, because they would swoop in out of nowhere, riding in armored personnel carriers – hippos, we called them – tanks with enormous tyres and slotted holes in the side of the vehicle to fire their guns out of. You didn’t mess with a hippo. You saw one, you ran. That was a fact of life. The township was in a constant state of insurrection; someone was always marching or protesting somewhere and had to be suppressed. Playing in my grandmother’s house I’d hear gunshots, screams, tear gas being fired into crowds. My memories of the hippos and the flying squads came from when I was five or six, when apartheid was finally coming apart. I never saw the police before that because we could not risk the police seeing me. Whenever we went to Soweto my grandmother refused to let me outside. Behind the wall, in the yard, I could play, but not in the street. Children could be taken. Children were taken. The wrong colour kid in the wrong colour area, and the government could come in, strip your parents of custody, haul you off to an orphanage. To police the townships, the government relied on its network of impipis, the anonymous snitches who’d inform on suspicious activity. There were also the blackjacks, black people who worked for the police. My grandmother’s neighbour was a blackjack. She had to make sure he wasn’t watching when she smuggled me in and out of the house. My gran still tells the story of when I was three years old and, fed up with being a prisoner, I dug a hole under the gate in the driveway, wriggled through and ran off. Everyone panicked. A search party went out and tracked me down. I had no idea how much danger I was putting everyone in. The family could have been deported, my gran could have been arrested, my mom might have gone to prison, and I probably would have been packed off to the group home for coloured kids. My mom was forever trying to rein me in. My mom was smart and had a sharp tongue, but by the time I was seven or eight I was quicker in an argument. She’d get flustered because she couldn’t keep up. So she started writing me letters. That way she could make her points and there could be no verbal sparring back and forth. If we were having a real, full-on argument or if I’d gotten in trouble

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at school, I’d find more accusatory missives waiting for me when I got home.

Dear Trevor, “Foolishness is bound up in the heart of a child; the rod of discipline will remove it far from him.” – Proverbs 22:15 Your school results this term have been very disappointing, and your behaviour in class continues to be disruptive and disrespectful. It is clear from your actions that you do not respect me. You do not respect your teachers. Learn to respect the women in your life. Because the way you treat me and the way you treat your teachers will be the way you treat other women in the world. Learn to buck that trend now and you will be a better man because of it. Because of your behaviour I am grounding you for one week. There will be no television and no video games. Yours sincerely, Mom

I’d go to my room, get out my pen and paper, sit at my little desk and go after her arguments one by one.

To Whom It May Concern: Dear Mom, First of all, this has been a particularly tough time in school, and for you to say that my results are bad is extremely unfair, especially considering the fact that you yourself were not very good in school and I am, after all, a product of yours, and so in part you are to blame because if you were not good in school, why would I be good in school because genetically we are the same. Gran always talks about how naughty you were, so obviously my naughtiness comes from you, so I don’t think it is right or just for you to say any of this. Yours sincerely, Trevor

The letter-writing was for minor disputes. For major infractions, my mom went with the ass-whooping. Like most black South African parents, when it came to discipline my mom was old-school. If I pushed her too far, she’d go for the belt or switch. That’s just how it was in those days. Pretty much all of my friends had it the same. One thing I respected about my mom was that she never left me in any doubt as to why I was receiving the beating. It wasn’t rage or anger. It was discipline from a place of love. My mom was on her own with a crazy child. I destroyed pianos. I s*** on floors. I would screw up, she’d beat the s*** out of me and give me time to cry, and then she’d pop back into my room with a big smile and go, “Are you ready for dinner? We need to hurry and eat if we want to watch Rescue 911. Are you coming?” “What? What kind of psychopath are you? You just beat me!” “Yes. Because you did something wrong. It doesn’t mean I don’t love you any more.” “What?” “Look, did you or did you not do something wrong?” “I did.” “And then? I hit you. And now that’s over. So why sit there and cry? It’s time for Rescue 911. William Shatner is waiting. Are you coming or not?” n

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Below: Soweto. Left: Noah, aged five