SOPHIATOWN: Coming of Age in South Africa...

SOPHIATOWN: Coming of Age in South Africa by Don Mattera (Beacon Press: $10.95). This moving memoir chronicles life in an area that began as a cosmopolitan “demographic quilt” of ethnic and religious groups but devolved into a crime-ridden slum before it was bulldozed out of existence in 1962. Born in 1935, Mattera was a child when the loathsome apartheid policy of the South African Nationalist Party was implemented. Of racially mixed ancestry, Mattera enjoyed a higher status under the law than did the “native” populace, but that status failed to protect him from the cruelty of the system and the officers who enforced it. Adrift in the crumbling world of Sophiatown, Mattera spent his adolescence as a gang leader and small-time thug, but went on to become a poet and political leader in an extraordinary career that parallels the life of Malcolm X.