Mark Mathabane was weaned on devastating poverty and schooled in the cruel streets of South Africa's most desperate ghetto, where bloody gang wars and midnight police raids were his rites of passage. Yet armed only with the courage of his famiily and a hard-won education, he raised himself up from the squalor and humiliation of apartheid to win a scholarship to an American university.

This extraordinary memoir of life in the hopelessness of apartheid is itself a triumph of the human spirit over hatred and unspeakable degradation. For Mark Matahabane did what no "kaffir" from the rat-infested alleys of Alexandra was supposed to do- he escaped to tell about it...