In Born A Crime, Trevor Noah’s 2016 memoir, the author writes about his experiences growing up with a Xhosa mother and a white father in pre- and post-apartheid South Africa.

Throughout the memoir, he interweaves his own experience with short essays on the region’s history, demographics, and legacy of colonialism and racial oppression under European rule. In doing so, he outlines the major historic mechanisms that ultimately led to the apartheid government of the twentieth century, its effects on the region in practice, and its lasting implications on the daily lives of its people.

Under apartheid, South Africa was racially segregated by law into four groups: “white,” “Black,” “colored,” and “Indian.” Despite the arbitrariness and imprecision of these groups—people were typically classified based on their appearance rather than their actual ancestry—it created a codified caste system that prioritized whites over all other racial classifications. They were given priority status and the full benefits of citizenship, and the other three racial groups were held under their oppressive regime.

The author is born during this time, and he spends his early childhood living under apartheid. His mother, Patricia, is a bright and strong-willed Xhosa woman who wholeheartedly rejects the restrictions on Black people and deliberately subverts the conventions of the time. She leaves her family home in one of the all-Black townships to secretly live in the city, befriending sex workers who teach her to live in white areas undetected. She dates a white Swiss-German man named Robert, who lives in her building and who once owned one of Johannesburg’s first integrated restaurants. She asks him to give her a son—not to serve as a parent, she tells him, but to allow her to raise a child on her own.

Race-mixing was illegal under apartheid, which means Trevor’s very birth is considered a criminal act unto itself. To avoid detection, Patricia moves him through the world as a “colored” child instead of a “mixed” child. Though the biological meaning between the two is effectively the same, their legal status is quite different—a “colored” person is descended from those who had children across racial lines further back in history, while a “mixed” person is born to members of two different races.

During Trevor’s childhood, the implications of these codes are severe: he is unable to be seen in public with his mother or his father, who, it turns out, does want to be involved after all. Trevor can’t be honest about his own identity or openly embrace his connection to his Xhosa or his Swiss-German heritage. He is seen as an outsider in every context that might otherwise be relevant—in Black settings, he’s the white kid. In white settings, he’s the Black kid. In colored settings, he blends in visually but has no cultural or familial reference.

To cope with this sense of statelessness, Trevor learns as many of the languages of those around him as he can. In a place like South Africa, where the multitudes of languages often keep people from being able to understand each other even within their own racial groups, this allows him to move more freely among groups. To speak to someone in their own language is to identify yourself as a member of their community, Trevor reasons.

Patricia raises Trevor to question and defy the limitations placed on him. Sooner than either of them expected, her tenacity pays off—in 1994, apartheid ends and the region sets to work dismantling its broadest restrictions. The pair is able to live more freely, embracing in public the values they have held in private.

Apartheid left a lasting...