Between the Seasons: Stories from a South African Childhood

Before the new season begins, we return to where Trevor's story was first written: South Africa.

In the laughter and struggles of childhood, lie the roots of who he became.

These are the tales we gather now.

Our journey begins where Trevor's family always began with prayer.

In the townships, prayer was more than faith.

It was identity, a reminder of where you belong.

This is the awkward part, how you start a conversation.

It's the worst part of everyone.

Why don't we start with a prayer?

This is actually why our grandmother started meetings with prayers.

Oh, yeah, the cuttings.

Because it's an awkwardness.

Yeah, because it's to cut the awkwardness.

Because now you can't just come together and be like, your son has a drug problem and your husband is cheating.

If you start with a prayer, then it opens up.

But But it was also a township power move because everyone here will know whose house this is.

Because you can't lead a prayer at

somebody else's house.

When you pray in a South African household, right?

First of all, like, I don't know if your grandmother did this.

My grandmother used to give her address and she used to give like where she's from and her name and everything.

No, really, my grandmother would do that.

She'd be like,

and then she'd be like,

what a location.

Yeah,

who you are, where you're from, whatever.

And I remember I asked her once, i I was like why are you doing this and then she was like why do i assume he knows where i am you know she said i she said trevor i i must just assume that god is always listening to me she said oh yeah yeah yeah that's not fair and if you think about it most south african like prayer in general i think is very like considerate of god it's very much like we know that you're doing stuff and we know that like you know what i mean yeah but

i think because of missionaries we never as black people thought that god is with us god was brought to us huh so we always always have to identify ourselves and also separate ourselves from the non-believers.

It's funny.

Now that you say the missionary thing,

I actually think a lot of that was real.

Is that like, because I always think about this, I go like, imagine being

a black person anywhere on the continent, right?

These people come with religion, right?

And then they tell you.

that the reason things are going bad in your life is because you don't have this this god in particular because there was religion.

There were different religions all over the continent, all over South America, all over these places.

They would force,

you know, the native people, they would force them to buy goods from them that nobody else wanted to buy at predetermined prices.

They would say they would do the work of like donkeys and mules and all of that stuff.

But the main thing was they also came in with religion.

So everywhere in the world, I can see this vibe where people have come in with religion saying to you, hey, all these bad things that are happening to you are because you don't worship God.

And then it must have been weird because the natives are like, you are the bad thing that's happening to us.

They're like, yes, exactly.

If you had prayed.

And you have penicillin.

This wouldn't be happening to you.

But I thought you didn't need penicillin because you can pray.

Yay.

It's not cancer time yet.

Trevor's mind moved to its own rhythm.

Some saw disorder, yet it was a gift.

A gift that once left him shoeless or on the side of the road on his way home.

My record with my mom, the story that she keeps bringing up, is one day I came home from school,

I had no backpack and I had no shoes.

Come on.

And then my mom said to me, and my cousin always tells a story as well because he says that day I got one of the old-time beatings.

And he says he remembers like watching me going but this could have been avoided he was also a child and he was like he says he watched me and he he thought to himself but he could have avoided this and what had happened was i came home and apparently my mom was like where's all your stuff and i said to her i said the bag got heavy put it down so i put it down i literally left it on the side of the road very loud

to me logical yeah and then she said and what happened to the shoes and i said the shoes were new and i didn't want to finish them so i left them somewhere close to school so that I don't have to wear them out on the way home.

Because you know, like your shoes would get worn out on the sides, right?

Like we couldn't afford new shoes the same way other kids could.

So I noticed kids always had like a flat heel on their shoe.

Look at how observant you are though.

Exactly.

And then my shoes had the slant that looked terrible.

So I was like, okay, if I can preserve my shoes, then I won't get laughed at as much.

So I'll leave the shoes near school and then walk home barefoot.

And we went back and everything was where it was, which means my plan worked technically.

Technically, yeah, but she couldn't understand.

And my brain, I remember thinking, this made sense.

And to me, to me, it makes complete sense.

Yes.

As children, Trevor and his friends turned the streets into playgrounds, claiming space where none was given.

He remembers how community can be built from nothing but bricks and courage.

I think

the truth is that we think we don't have the third spaces, but

it's just because we've made every space a private space.

Like I was just thinking this walking around like parts of Brooklyn the other day.

I've noticed a dip in how many block parties there are.

Just that was a simple event where you closed the streets.

Yeah.

You agreed, neighbor at the end, neighbor at the end, we all agree.

On Saturdays, we are going to close our block

and everyone's going to just open their door and like walk out and the the kids can kick a ball and can hit a ball.

And I've seen a few parts of New York where they do it now.

Like, this is like in Manhattan, by the way, like Chelsea, somewhere there.

Okay, I remember driving one day, and I was irritated because I was in the car trying to get to an airport, and the road was closed.

But I love the fact that, like, I saw someone hitting a ball, a baseball, and then people running.

The whole street was just closed.

And I was like, oh, we've been tricked into thinking the thing that's right outside our door is not a third space.

No, but that's not a third space.

Why is that?

It's a home.

Third spaces are like actual, I'm talking about parks,

libraries.

No, no, no, no.

They have decimated that.

I'm with you.

And I'm telling you that when I grew up, they didn't exist.

Black kids couldn't go to a library.

Oh, yeah, you grew up with a library.

There was no park.

During apartheid, none of this exists.

But I have the full childhood that you're talking about.

Okay.

Because the third space was the street.

Okay, I get what you're talking about.

Your grandmother told you.

When you travel around the world, sometimes you don't see girls, but you always see boys playing in the streets.

Yes.

The third space is the street.

That's right.

So you go, you tell the kids.

Okay, we need to get rid of these SUVs.

I would let my son play in the street if Americans didn't have these huge ass cars.

And I'm like, if he runs in front of the car.

Yes, but that's what I mean by close the street.

Yeah, yeah.

So I go, I would love to live in a society where we go.

Like we used to do this on,

I wish I could like take you to the picture in my brain.

We as the kids ran the streets as if we were adults.

So we would close the street with

responsibility.

Yeah, we would take bricks and we would put them at the beginning of each road and close each road.

And then when a car would need to turn into the street, because this is like a road, you know, it's not a public, I'm not talking about like main roads.

So if you're listening to this permission, I'm talking about a highway.

Yes, I'm not talking about a highway.

I'm not talking about a main road.

I'm talking about like your neighborhood.

Yeah, your neighborhood.

It was a township, but it was still a neighborhood.

We'd put bricks there.

A car would need to turn.

There would be kids stationed at every corner and you'd shout, koloi, you know, car.

And then you'd run there together.

You'd move the bricks.

Everyone would clear the road.

The car would drive either through where it needs to go to, or it would like stop at the house that it's stopping at.

And then we'd put the bricks back on the road and then we'd continue playing.

And because I agree with you, I'm not saying like go play in the street, but I'm saying sometimes we look at problems in life and they seem insurmountable because we're looking at them the wrong way.

Okay, no phones and no, this and no, and where now are we going to build third space?

How much is a third space?

Where do you get it?

How do we build a park?

Do we get permits?

Guys, everyone, if you are lucky enough to have a house, if you're lucky enough to be renting a space, if you literally have the third space right outside your door, you just have to claim it back.

Yeah, you literally just have to claim it back collectively.

In his home, drugs and drink were shadows never touched.

But one day,

Trevor's mother offered him a cigarette and a sip, teaching him that even temptation could be faced with honesty.

I think about growing up and my perception of drugs.

So I didn't touch weed my whole, I, okay, so I'll even take it before even like drugs, drugs.

My mom doesn't drink, my mom doesn't smoke.

My dad doesn't drink, my dad doesn't smoke.

All right.

So I grew up in a home where that wasn't a thing, my grandmother, et cetera.

And

my mom said to me when I was 13, 12, 13,

maybe even younger, she came to my room and she had cigarettes and she had beer.

And she said to me, Do you want?

And I was like, oh, this is a trap.

Obviously, this is a trap.

And I was almost disappointed.

And I was like, come on, lady.

I'm going to fall for a trap like that.

You're going to come into my room and offer me cigarettes.

And she was like, do you want to try them?

And I was like, no, because these are bad things and we shouldn't.

And then she said to me, listen, Harry,

you're going to encounter alcohol.

You're going to encounter cigarettes and things.

So if you're going to use it, I would rather know that you use it and then you use it at home.

And then I don't worry that now you're out in the world using it you know hiding it from me and then getting into situations where you can't share that you're not you're using it harm reduction exactly

which is wild i mean my mom is my mom is like super religious and super strict and super very progressive yeah and so then she didn't even know how to like light a cigarette so we have to go we have to go to an uncle of mine and then he was like trava what's up and she said he wants to try cigarettes and the guy's like okay you want to smoke and he gave us the cigarettes.

And I puffed with him.

And I was like, this is trash.

This is so.

I was like, how is the taste in your mouth?

You know what I mean?

It tastes like someone's like eating everything disgusting and then farting it into your oral cavity.

And then the alcohol beer just tastes like old water that has, you know, dribbled down a sewer.

I'm a bad bro.

I don't like, I don't like it.

So I didn't like any of that.

And then drugs was almost in the same category for me.

Because of that initial experience.

Yeah.

Okay.

Yeah.

In fact, drugs, the way I grew up was, you are a loser.

You are going to end your life.

That's how I knew drugs.

That hasn't changed now.

That was just when you got up.

That's how I knew drugs.

That's all I was told.

These are the things that will happen when you take drugs.

So I didn't touch weed.

I smoked weed for the first time when I was 21.

Okay.

That's how, like, anti-drug, I used to judge people and I would look at them and I would say to them, it is a pity that you've chosen to do this with your life.

I used to say that to my cousin.

In South Africa, thinness was not beauty.

Not at all.

It was struggle to gain weight was to be blessed.

Trevor recalls how the meaning of a body can change depending on where the story is told.

Now, I think that one of the things that our whole fascination with Ozempic is based on is, and it's interesting, you know, Christiana, I wonder if you have thoughts with little kids, right?

Part of beauty is thinness as it's taught to you from a really early age, like fatness, queerness, darkness, all of these things are like coded as signs of deviance.

Like you, you learn as a really young child in Disney movies, in anything, like beauty is really coded as morality.

And there's this Protestant work ethic thing, right?

It's something that you should achieve through hard and punitive work and discipline, right?

And when people use those epic, it's like, you cheated.

You skipped the hard work part, you know?

Yeah.

And so you, you got the thing we demanded of you, but now we find this a vaguely immoral thinness.

Like you worked hard to achieve the right thing.

Okay.

Yeah.

I hear what you're saying.

It's funny because I don't know how it was for you growing up, but so I have, I've had an interesting journey with weight and how I perceive it and fatness, et cetera, because I grew up in South Africa.

Genuinely, growing up, this is such a weird thing to try and explain to people.

In South Africa, You did not get made as much fun of if you were fat.

Like, so like a fat fat person, you'd just be like, I mean, I don't even remember if we had that many names, but I remember all the ones for skinny people were Styxmanzanza.

It was,

that was my favorite ones.

Sticks Manzanza, Skinny Manili.

It was like, there were all these names where it was just like you're a twig, you're thin, you, and it was a sign there of

a lack of having.

If you got married and you didn't gain weight, people would say that your marriage is not going well.

Literally, they'd be like, Is your wife not treating you well?

Aye, man, ah, ah, ah, no, man, look at you.

If I would come home from the States, and like many times I would, I come back from America and I gain weight.

And so, whenever I go home, people be like, Ah, you're looking good, man.

You're looking good.

America's treating you well.

You're looking Trevor, Norman, you're looking good.

Look at your cheeks.

You're looking good.

And then, and so, where I grew up, fatness was considered like sort of a choice.

And then being skinny was like, oh, your life is not going well and you're not making the right choices.

So it's interesting how it flips, you know, and I'm sure it's time as well.

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As a child,

Trevor learned that even authority could be questioned.

Around the dinner table, disagreement birthed new ways of seeing.

He explores how questioning can spark creativity.

There's some classic research looking at families, looking at what does it take to raise a creative child.

And it turns out that creative children come from families more often than not that had regular arguments and disagreements.

Really?

Yeah.

So

if you want to raise a creative kid, you can at least increase the probability.

I'm not sure if it's causal, but by arguing with your spouse a little bit more.

What do you think that is?

I have an idea, but I'd love to know what you think that is.

Well, I want to hear your hunch before I tell you what I think because I've

talked about this for a long time.

Okay, so here's what I think it is.

I think the reason children who grow up in houses that are a little more argumentative might be a little more creative is because they're existing in an environment where there isn't one way to think.

And so what happens is they're both stumbling on what I like to call third thoughts, right?

I had

this idea when I was working on the daily show with my team.

And I'd say, I think everyone everyone has a thought right

and then like you can have a second thought even by yourself but i think there's this elusive third thought that can only come from two different thoughts clashing together and forming a third thought that isn't from one specific place and so i think if you are watching people who don't agree as a child people who you generally love or you care for etc

you are listening to a person and you are agreeing with them maybe or just seeing seeing their point of view.

You're looking at another person, agreeing with them and seeing their point of view.

And then maybe you are holding both, including a third, which might be yours, which is another opinion of it.

And that might force your brain to think of more things than just the things that exist, which I think is what creativity fundamentally is.

I love this.

Okay, so your theory is cognitive complexity.

comes from seeing people argue.

Okay.

That you don't have to do it.

I need to remember all the...

You make some of my ideas sound way smarter and fancier than they are, which I like.

Cognitive complexity, write that down.

All right.

I just give you terms for things you already know.

Okay, okay, okay, cool.

I also think you learn to be a non-conformist through that same process.

Oh, interesting.

That instead of just defaulting or deferring to whatever an authority figure tells you, you realize, well, there are two different authorities in the room and they don't agree.

And you,

I think that can both lead to cognitive complexity, but it can also lead to more courage when it comes to challenging the status quo.

Because there's not a right answer coming from above.

There is not one coming from above.

You know, it's funny you say this.

My mom is very religious, extremely, extremely religious.

But I also think she is one of the most progressive thinkers I've ever come across in my lifetime.

And one thing I always noticed as a child was how sometimes she would disagree with the sermon that the pastor gave when we'd leave church.

And I'd be like, huh.

And I'm just a kid.

I'm just sitting in the passenger seat listening.

And she goes, I didn't agree with that.

I didn't, I didn't,

I hear where the pastor was coming from but i think he was

that that story of joseph is not about and then she'd go into her thing and and then i'll be like but he's the pastor and she's like yeah he's a guy who reads the bible he's not god yeah but he's not god he's like we also have the bible and it was an interesting way for me to view even religion is going like huh don't assume that the person who stands on the pulpit

has

like a monopoly on knowledge.

You too have the book that you can read.

And so that makes me wonder.

Now, I'm like, huh, was that part of me?

You know, wouldn't okay.

I like this.

I like it too.

I mean, you can see both of those effects playing out.

Yeah, yeah, definitely.

You're not just going to assume that the pastor's answer is gospel.

Right.

And then you're also not going to be afraid to question what somebody in power says.

Trevor was part of the first generation to sit in classrooms across color lines.

A fragile experiment.

Very fragile, if I'm to be honest with you.

Shaped by apartheid's shadow he recalls what it meant to grow up in that moment of change

you know i i was talking to a friend of mine the other day dale and we were talking about how at our school they had a program where because we were the first generation that was like literally i you and i were the first generation how old are you dan 31 31 yeah so we were the first generation of kids that went to school with kids of a different race.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Literally, I sometimes think about about how crazy that was when I go, like, literally, the first year in my school that there were black kids, Indian kids, colored kids, with white kids.

That was the first time that had ever happened.

You guys were round one.

You were the first child.

We were literally

so wrong.

Our teachers had never seen a black child in front of them in a classroom before.

Our parents had to wear their Sunday best.

You were the first drop-off.

Drop-off?

Our parents didn't even know what a drop-off was.

I mean, drop-off.

Just think about that as a concept.

I remember being shocked that when I went to school,

kids were dropped off by their parents in a vehicle that they owned.

Like one child got out of one car.

Meanwhile, when the black kids got there, it looked like a circus trick where like one car and they'd open a door.

And then like,

you're 15.

And that's how we just traveled around.

The back of every bucky, the back of every van was all of us.

You know what I mean?

But that exposure, like our school had this program where they went,

we want every kid to go and stay at another kid's house who they're friends with they weren't even like they're not like a stranger yes but they said hey you guys are friends that was a deliberate program yo yeah

it was amazing to see

to talking about like exposure therapy it was amazing to see how the black kids weren't particularly surprised by what they experienced because many of them had moms who were working for white people.

So they had seen a glimpse of a white life.

I made a sense of it, yeah, for sure.

Let me tell you something.

Every single white kid who went to go and live with a black family for a weekend,

every single one of them went home and said the same thing.

They said, mom and dad, do you know how black people live?

And not in like a righteous way, just as like a child.

Like a curious way.

Like a 14-year-old, 15-year-old, they went, yo,

do you know how they live?

Do you know how they come to school every day?

Do you know that they have to take three buses to get

strangers?

Do you know that they don't have hot water in the morning at their house?

You have to make a fire and then heat it up, and then they call that out, and then you have to do it again for each person.

And they have to, you know, they don't have their own bathrooms.

You know that their toilet's outside.

I go to school with this kid.

I see myself as his direct competition in that way.

But I'm going, how is he doing math when he woke up like that?

In the spinning of a simple roundabout, young Trevor found joy in bringing people together.

He uncovers how that childhood game revealed the purpose guiding his life.

Oh, yeah.

Okay.

Tell me

an early, specific happy childhood memory, something I can relive with you.

An early, specific happy childhood memory.

Childhood memory.

Damn, this is an interesting one.

Let me think.

Because there's many.

How old?

Give me an age and I'll tell you.

I don't care.

No, but when does childhood end?

42.

Okay.

No, no, I'm being serious, though.

I want when you're a child, like under, you know, in school.

Like

one of my happiest childhood memories is me.

The only one who's ever asked me, what do you mean by childhood?

Because I think your memories at different ages are very

early specific childhood memories.

Yeah, so, okay, when I think of young young, one of my favorite memories was

playing

on the roundabout at a park near my house.

This is something, a specific time, not just a thing you did.

No, no, no.

This is a specific one.

Okay, yeah, go.

And we were all seeing how, we were all teaming up.

I got a bunch of people together to see how fast we could make this thing spin.

But like it was, it was a monumental effort.

Do you know what I mean?

Because everyone had to be at the right place, swinging the thing at the right time to get it.

Our goal was to make it fly.

That was the dream.

We thought if we spin it hard enough, it's going to take off.

And this, this was a, but that was one of my, when I think back, I go like, wow, what a day.

What a day.

And of all the amazing things you had happen in this magical childhood that you've talked about, what specifically was it about?

This one thing that stands out so much that you want to talk about it now?

It's collaboration.

I chose the people I was doing it with.

We didn't pick the random kids who we knew had no coordination because the thing's going to smack you in the hands, right?

So we got the strongest, fastest, smartest, like, you know, most affable.

We put the people together and we were like, this works.

So it wasn't like if you were the small kid, then your job might have been to be more on the inside.

If you were were the big kid, your job was to push.

But we put people together and it matched in many ways, right?

And the most important thing, funny enough, Simon Sinek, the most important thing was that we were having fun.

And I mean this genuinely.

We were having, we had a purpose, but man, we were having fun.

So you

so now what I'm doing is I'm looking for the connection between those things and saying, okay, that's the common factor, right?

Which is you, where you find great joy is when you can bring the right people together to do something that matters and have a ton of fun doing it.

Yes.

Okay.

And that's sort of your purpose in life, which is to bring people together to do something bigger than themselves and have a good time doing it.

Right.

And if everything you do in your life, you can, is that, is that, is that

the merry-go-round, we go to call merry-go-round.

Yeah.

And everything in your life is like that roundabout.

That is what a game on is.

And so the opportunity for you is to remind yourself of that.

Right.

So whether you get a Lego merry-go-round or a picture of a merry-go-round, or just that merry-go-round,

I like sentimental things.

The merry-go-round is, it's your, it's your talisman.

It's the thing that reminds you of why you get out of bed today.

All you want to do in life is work tirelessly to create the merry-go-round, right?

And the thing is, is because you have vision, we're going to make this thing fly.

Yeah.

Okay.

So

people go, huh?

And you go, you, you, you, and you.

Yeah.

Okay.

And now they're all coming in and you're having a blast.

And whether it succeeds or fails, it didn't fly.

It did not fly.

It did not fly.

It did not fly.

It did not fly.

So it actually failed, if we're really honest with ourselves.

But it didn't matter because it was the joy of the together and the fun, even with the vision that made it worth it.

You'd never said at any point, and I freaking nailed it.

No, that's not the point.

Right?

The point wasn't the result.

No.

The point was the people that are.

The outcome is a bonus.

I always say this.

The outcome is a bonus.

And so this chapter ends.

Childhood stories fade,

but their lessons remain,

carrying us until we meet again.