Brakwater (“The Location”) Term Analysis

I’ve actually been into it quite a few times. With my mom to visit Auntie, our maid, when she was sick. And with my dad when he had to take emergency medicines to the clinic. I can remember one visit, just sitting in the car and staring out of the window trying to imagine what it would be like to live my whole life in one of those little pondoks. No electricity, no running water, no privacy! Auntie’s little house has only got two small rooms and nine of them sleep there. I ended up being damn glad I was born with a white skin.

I am not shy about making eye contact. Well, when I did it this time, when it was my turn to speak and I stood up and looked at those forty unsmiling faces, I suddenly realized that I hadn’t prepared myself for one simple but all-important fact: they had no intention of being grateful to me. They were sitting there waiting to judge me, what I said and how I said it, on the basis of total equality. Maybe it doesn’t sound like such a big thing to you, but you must understand I had never really confronted that before, and I don’t just mean in debates. I mean in my life!

I discovered a new world! I’ve always thought about the location as just a sort of embarrassing backyard to our neat and proper little white world, where our maids and our gardeners and our delivery boys went at the end of the day. But it’s not. It’s a whole world of its own with its own life that has nothing to do with us. If you put together all the Brakwaters in the country, then it’s a pretty big one—and if you’ll excuse my language—there’s a hell of a lot of people living in it! That’s quite a discovery you know. But it’s also a little—what’s the word?—disconcerting! You see, it means that what I thought was out there for me…no! it’s worse than that! it’s what I was made to believe was out there for me…the ideas, the chances, the people…specially the people!…all of that is only a small fraction of what it could be.

Knowledge has banished fear.

(Thumping his chest with a clenched fist) I’ve got a whole zoo in here, a mad zoo of hungry animals … and the keeper is frightened! All of them. Mad and savage!

Look at me! I’m sweating today. I’ve been sweating for a week. Why? Because one of those animals, the one called Hope, has broken loose and is looking for food. Don’t be fooled by its gentle name. It is as dangerous as Hate and Despair would be if they ever managed to break out. You think I’m exaggerating? Pushing my metaphor a little too far? Then I’d like to put you inside a black skin and ask you to keep Hope alive, find food for it on these streets where our children, our loved and precious children go hungry and die of malnutrition. No, believe me, it is a dangerous animal for a black man to have prowling around in his heart. So how do I manage to keep mine alive, you ask. Friends, I am going to let you in on a terrible secret. That is why I am a teacher.

I look around me in the location at the men and women who went out into that “wonderful future” before me. What do I see? Happy and contented shareholders in this exciting enterprise called the Republic of South Africa? No. I see a generation of tired, defeated men and women crawling back to their miserable little pondoks at the end of a day’s work for the white baas or madam. And those are the lucky ones.

[…]

Does Oom Dawie think we are blind? That when we walk through the streets of the white town we do not see the big houses and the beautiful gardens with their swimming pools full of laughing people, and compare it with what we’ve got, what we have to call home? Or does Oom Dawie just think we are very stupid?

My head is rebellious. It refuses now to remember when the Dutch landed, and the Huguenots landed, and the British landed. It has already forgotten when the Old Union became the proud young Republic. But it does know what happened in Kliptown in 1955, in Sharpeville on twenty-first March 1960 and in Soweto on the sixteenth of June 1976. Do you? Better find out because those are dates your children will have to learn one day. We don’t need Zolile classrooms anymore. We know now what they really are—traps which have been carefully set to catch our minds, our souls. No, good people. We have woken up at last. We have found another school—the streets, the little rooms, the funeral parlors of the location—anywhere the people meet and whisper names we have been told to forget, the dates of events they try to tell us never happened, and the speeches they try to say were never made.

Mr. M alone in Number One Classroom. He is ringing his school bell wildly.
MR. M: Come to school! Come to school. Before they kill you all, come to school!

Silence. Mr. M looks around the empty classroom. He goes to his table, and after composing himself, opens the class register and reads out the names as he does every morning at the start of a new school day.

Johnny Awu, living or dead? Christopher Bandla, living or dead? Zandile Cwati, living or dead? Semphiwe Dambuza…Ronald Gxasheka…Noloyiso Mfundweni…Steven Gaika…Zachariah Jabavu…Thami…Thami Mbikwana…

(Pause) Living or dead?

There is nothing wrong with me! All I need is someone to tell me why he was killed. What madness drove those people to kill a man who had devoted his whole life to helping them. He was such a good man Thami! He was one of the most beautiful human beings I have ever known and his death is one of the ugliest things I have ever known.