'The Coloured Boy', novelleanalyse

The story is about a couple, who were driving from South Africa’s biggest city Johannesburg on a hot day, when their tire went flat. They were far away from the nearest town, so the man decides to go out, and change the tire. The man remembered his time as a boy, and how he used to watch and help fixing tires, when they still had inner tubes, which had to be pathed with a path and solution. He took out the tools, and was ready to begin, when he heard a voice. It was an African youth, who spoked and looked like one of the natives, who offered his help. The man accepted, and told the boy, that he would pay him as a reward. The boy was handsome without the typical African characteristics and he was more like tanned than black. The man got suspicious, when he heard the boy whispered to himself in a slightly upper-class British. When the boy was done and got his reward, the man confronted him, but the boy just imitated the man’s wife, and told him his good bye and left.

I feel like the narrator is a caring man, as he feels uneasy, when they have to stop the car out in nowhere, and is afraid of what could happen to Mona and him. It was probably in a time, where the black community was threaten really badly, and was beginning to fight the white’s power over them. At that time some backs was so poor that they would do anything to survive. I get the impression, that the narrator also is kind, as he don’t really talk down to Ismael, but more like equals. I have the feeling the narrator and Mona is a married couple, since they are teasing each other a little.