Comedian Trevor Noah has once again recounted the difficulties of growing up as a child of a mixed-race relationship, saying that his father's name is not even on his birth certificate.
In an extract from his book, Born a Crime and Other Stories, Trevor opened up about his relationship with his father.
He wrote how his mother asked his father (a German/ Swiss expat) to help her have a child and how, when Trevor was born, she had to lie that his father was from Swaziland.
"My father isn't on my birth certificate. Officially, he's never been my father," Trevor wrote in the extract, published in Drum.
He also remembered how the family would sometimes attempt to visit the park, but had to hide the fact that they were together because of the strict apartheid laws of the time.
"My mother tells me that once, when I was a toddler, my dad tried to go with us. We were in the park, he was walking a good bit away from us, and I ran after him, screaming, 'Daddy! Daddy! Daddy!' People started looking. He panicked and ran away. I thought it was a game and kept chasing him," Trevor wrote.
Trevor said he would spend Sunday afternoons watching Formula 1 racing with his father, but that eventually stopped and his father moved to Cape Town.
After a lengthy and difficult search, Trevor eventually tracked his father down
Trevor told Late Night With Seth Meyers earlier this year that his father had never watched him perform live. But in his book he said that he discovered during their reunion that his father had been following his career all along.
"While I was eating he went to pick up this book, an over-sized photo album, and he brought it back to the table. 'I've been following you,' he said, and opened it up. It was a scrapbook of everything I had ever done, every time my name was mentioned in a newspaper, everything from magazine covers to the tiniest club listing.
"He smiled broadly as he took me through it, looking at the headlines. It was everything I could do not to start crying. It felt like this 10-year gap in my life closed right up in an instant," Trevor wrote.
