Out of Bounds — Beverley Naidoo’s South Africa through Children’s Eyes

I knew South Africa mostly from its name and the history that reached me in the news. It was unusual for me to encounter a book by a writer who had grown up there.

Beverley Naidoo’s Out of Bounds is fiction. Its characters are invented, and the historical circumstances that shape their choices are the ones the author grew up with or lived to see.

The way the book brings a place into view through separate lives reminded me of James Joyce’s Dubliners and Park Tae-won’s Scenes from the Stream.

What Apartheid Divided

Apartheid means apartness in Afrikaans. In South Africa it named a system that used law to separate people by race and decide what rights they could exercise.

A white minority government imposed categories including Black, Coloured and Indian and assigned people unequal rights, including where they could live, travel and go to school.

I had read about the laws before. What drew me to Naidoo’s book was the chance to see the distance between knowing a law and being a child who has to work out what it means on the way home.

Seven Stories across Seven Decades

The stories show segregation taking hold, resistance to it and the difficulties people carry with them when the law begins to change.

The children are fictional, but the settings follow historical changes in South Africa.

Each story moves to another set of people and another decade, beginning in 1948 and ending in 2000.

The Dare, 1948

The first story begins in the year the National Party came to power. Through Veronica, a white child, Naidoo shows what racial authority looks like before a child has learned to accept all the adults’ explanations for it.

The Noose, 1955

A boy watches the restrictions take hold around a family classified as Coloured. The place they have lived becomes somewhere they can no longer expect to remain.

• His mother describes being hemmed in by rules that keep arriving from outside the family.
• At a stop marked for non-white passengers, they watch nearly empty buses pass and stop farther along for white riders. Something the boy was once permitted to do is no longer permitted.

The story makes racial classification visible as a procedure with consequences. A person’s ability to get to a place can change because an official uses another category for them.

One Day, Lily, One Day, 1960

Lily, a white child, hears adults turn Black protesters into a threat in the stories they tell. The reader can see the gap between an event and the explanation offered to her.

Her own parents are involved in opposition to apartheid. That gives her a different account to listen to, and reasons to find it hard to know which adult will tell her the truth.

The Typewriter, 1976, and The Gun, 1985

The next two stories concern forms of resistance under conditions that grow more violent.

Police fire on Black demonstrators. By the time of The Gun, the question also includes what young people might do when they no longer believe peaceful action will be enough.

It brought to mind one question from the history of Japanese colonial rule in Korea: what happens to the choices people see before them when peaceful protest is answered with violence?

The Playground, 1995

Rosa goes to a school that had formerly admitted only white pupils. Legal change has opened the gate, but some of the people inside still behave as though it were closed.

She faces hostility from white children. A white friend who knew her when they were younger comes to her aid. That small alliance makes a place for one child without suggesting the work is over.

Out of Bounds, 2000

The last story brings a child from a well-off white household into contact with a Black girl from a nearby informal settlement. The adults around them have reasons to keep their distance. The children get a chance to act on a different reason.

Solani comes looking for water. Rohan remembers being told to keep strangers out, then lets her in to fill her container.

He helps her carry the water home. What he sees in her neighbourhood unsettles him and gives a shape to the place he has been told to keep apart from.

She accompanies him home. The next morning he finds a small wire Mercedes he believes she left for him.

A History Seen at a Child’s Height

Historical events give each story a date, but the people closest to the consequences are children.

Their view is partial, and that is one of its strengths. A law becomes a bus you cannot board, a playground you enter alone or a gate you have to decide whether to open.

Nelson Mandela and the Work of Reconciliation

Nelson Mandela and F. W. de Klerk shared the 1993 Nobel Peace Prize for their role in ending apartheid and laying the foundations for democratic South Africa.

Mandela had spent twenty-seven years in prison. After his release, he pursued reconciliation through a transition that involved many people and remained difficult.

I first encountered much of this history at a distance. Naidoo gave me something a summary could not: a way to see what a change in law did, and did not yet do, for a particular child on a particular day.

Book Information

Out of Bounds

Author

Beverley Naidoo

Publication

10 July 2007 (Korean edition)

ISBN13

9788992263023

View the book on YES24

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