My traitor's heart

On the Honor’s Essay description, it says that your past students couldn’t imagine what it would be like to read Kaffir Boy without reading My Traitor’s Heart, and I have to say that agree with them. Kaffir Boy and My Traitor’s Heart and two very different books that have different styles of writing and different stories, but are still about the same subjects. Kaffir Boy is written as a kind of autobiography…it follows the story of one and his quest to get out of Apartheid South Africa. My Traitor’s Heart is written differently. It centers around Rian Malan’s life as he comes back to South Africa from living in America. He came back to “face his fears”, you could say. He goes around as a reporter and experiences many things, hears many stories, and writes them all down. So, as you can see, they are two very different books.

When I first started to re-examine Kaffir Boy for this essay, I found it hard to get back into the mindset of a black South Afric...