My Children! My Africa!

by

Athol Fugard

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Themes and Colors
Protest, Dissent, and Violence Theme Icon
Apartheid, Race, and Human Connection Theme Icon
Education Theme Icon
The Future of Africa Theme Icon
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in My Children! My Africa!, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Education Theme Icon

My Children! My Africa!, a play about South Africa’s transition from an apartheid (racially segregated) police state to a racially integrated democracy, is set primarily in a classroom. While the play’s three main characters—Thami, Isabel, and especially Mr. M—all see education as the key to living a valuable life, they strongly disagree about where that education should come from. While the schoolteacher Mr. M hopes that he can help young Black students develop critical thinking skills in his classroom, Thami rejects the education system’s colonial curriculum, and Isabel learns that the education system is strictly segregated to ensure that she and other white students have greater opportunities than Black students. In the play, Thami’s true education comes from his community, which teaches him about Black South Africans’ history, art, and culture, and Isabel’s education comes from her visits to the township of Brakwater (where Thami and Mr. M live). Even Mr. M realizes that the government’s Eurocentric curriculum is designed to teach students to accept white supremacy rather than thinking critically about it. Accordingly, the play suggests that education can certainly transform students by expanding their perspectives, but it can also be a tool of repression and control. To be transformative rather than repressive, schools have to teach from the perspective of students and their communities, which requires curricula centered around their specific national histories, political situations, and cultural traditions.

Mr. M’s passion for teaching reflects a deep faith that education can empower students and guide them toward a brighter future. Mr. M tells Isabel that he’s invested in Thami, his star student, because he believes that Thami’s curiosity and passion for knowledge will lead him to change South Africa for the better. He envisions the school system as a way to create more intelligent, empathetic, and responsible citizens who can improve the society in which they live. But when Thami chooses to join the town’s protest movement, Mr. M is horrified to think that he might lose a shot at this bright future. In an impassioned speech just before his death, Mr. M holds up a stone in one hand and a dictionary in the other, which represents Thami’s choice between going to school or participating in the rebellion. Mr. M announces that the stone only represents a single concept, while the dictionary contains all the concepts, ideas, and opportunities in the whole English language. He suggests that rebellion will narrow down Thami’s options for the future, while education will give him a wider range of opportunities.

But the play’s three protagonists also recognize that apartheid South Africa’s education system is designed to control and oppress Black students, not help them fulfill their potential. Rather than learning about their own history, culture, and traditions, Black students are forced to learn about English literature, European culture, and the history of white settlement in South Africa. For instance, when Thami and Isabel join a literature quiz contest, they spend hours studying English writers like Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Lord Byron. They only mention Africa when reading “Ozymandias,” Percy Bysshe Shelley’s famous sonnet about an Egyptian statue. Like the curriculum as a whole, this poem presents Africa through a white colonizer’s eyes, wrongly suggesting that Shelley has more important things to say about Africa than actual Africans. Thami and Mr. M both agree that this curriculum is substandard and oppressive, but they react to it in different ways. While Mr. M tries to teach his students to critique and reject the curriculum, Thami joins the community movement to boycott it altogether.

When the official curriculum fails him, Thami finds the true education he seeks in his community. After he learns about the history of the anti-apartheid struggle from his friends and neighbors, Thami starts thinking critically about his life and place in society. He concludes that this is the kind of education worth getting, because it will prepare Black South African students for the real challenge they have to meet: building an equitable and sustainable future for their nation. In fact, Mr. M fell in love with education under similar circumstances. As a young boy, he looked out over the vast Karoo desert on a school trip and asked his teacher what lay beyond it. The teacher named all the rivers, mountain ranges, and ethnic groups in Africa, which astonished the young Mr. M. When he realized that his teacher could learn so much from books, Mr. M decided to become a teacher, too. This event inspired him because it showed that education could help him understand the world he lived in and live a more meaningful life in it.

Needless to say, there’s a vast difference between the English books that Mr. M teaches in class and the vision of Africa that actually inspired him to become a teacher. Like Thami, Mr. M’s passion for learning started with a curiosity about the world around him and a desire to improve that world through knowledge. But when Mr. M becomes a teacher, he ends up doing exactly the opposite: he teaches young Black South African people someone else’s history, which prevents them from recognizing their own. Because the official curriculum fails South African students, Thami and Isabel have to pursue their education elsewhere: Thami learns from his community and Isabel learns through her visits to Brakwater. Nevertheless, the play suggests that schools can provide a real education if they teach students about their communities’ own history, traditions, and achievements. In fact, beyond just suggesting that the South African education system should be reformed, My Children! My Africa! has also become part of the reform. By documenting anti-apartheid activists’ courage, dedication, and sacrifice, Fugard’s play can help South Africans understand their nation’s rich history.

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Education ThemeTracker

The ThemeTracker below shows where, and to what degree, the theme of Education appears in each act of My Children! My Africa!. Click or tap on any chapter to read its Summary & Analysis.
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Education Quotes in My Children! My Africa!

Below you will find the important quotes in My Children! My Africa! related to the theme of Education.
Act 1, Scene 1 Quotes

You have had to listen to a lot of talk this afternoon about traditional values, traditional society, your great ancestors, your glorious past. In spite of what has been implied I want to start off by telling you that I have as much respect and admiration for your history and tradition as anybody else. I believe most strongly that there are values and principles in traditional African society which could be studied with great profit by the Western Civilization so scornfully rejected by the previous speaker. But at the same time, I know, and you know, that Africa no longer lives in that past. For better or for worse it is part now of the twentieth century and all the nations on this continent are struggling very hard to come to terms with that reality. Arguments about sacred traditional values, the traditional way of life et cetera and et cetera, are used by those who would like to hold back Africa’s progress and keep it locked up in the past.

Related Characters: Isabel Dyson (speaker), Thami Mbikwana
Page Number: 4-5
Explanation and Analysis:
Act 1, Scene 2 Quotes

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.

Related Characters: Isabel Dyson (speaker)
Page Number: 18
Explanation and Analysis:
Act 1, Scene 3 Quotes

The truth is, I’ve seen too much of it Isabel. Wasted people! Wasted chances! It’s become a phobia with me now. It’s not easy you know to be a teacher, to put your heart and soul into educating an eager young mind which you know will never get a chance to develop further and realize its full potential. The thought that you and Thami would be another two victims of this country’s lunacy, was almost too much for me.

Related Characters: Mr. M (Anela Myalatya) (speaker), Thami Mbikwana , Isabel Dyson
Page Number: 20-21
Explanation and Analysis:

Knowledge has banished fear.

Related Characters: Mr. M (Anela Myalatya) (speaker), Thami Mbikwana , Isabel Dyson
Page Number: 23
Explanation and Analysis:
Act 1, Scene 4 Quotes

(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.

Related Characters: Mr. M (Anela Myalatya) (speaker)
Page Number: 27-28
Explanation and Analysis:
Act 1, Scene 5 Quotes

I’ve told you before: sitting in a classroom doesn’t mean the same thing to me that it does to you. That classroom is a political reality in my life—it’s a part of the whole political system we’re up against and Mr. M has chosen to identify himself with it.

Related Characters: Thami Mbikwana (speaker), Mr. M (Anela Myalatya), Isabel Dyson
Page Number: 44
Explanation and Analysis:
Act 1, Scene 6 Quotes

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.

Related Characters: Thami Mbikwana (speaker), Mr. M (Anela Myalatya)
Page Number: 50
Explanation and Analysis:
Act 2, Scene 1 Quotes

MR. M: Do you think I agree with this inferior “Bantu Education” that is being forced on you?

THAMI: You teach it.

MR. M: But unhappily so! Most unhappily, unhappily so! Don’t you know that? Did you have your fingers in your ears the thousand times I’ve said so in the classroom? Where were you when I stood there and said I regarded it as my duty, my deepest obligation to you young men and women to sabotage it, and that my conscience would not let me rest until I had succeeded. And I have! Yes, I have succeeded! I have got irrefutable proof of my success. You! Yes. You can stand here and accuse me, unjustly, because I have also had a struggle and I have won mine. I have liberated your mind in spite of what the Bantu Education was trying to do to it.

Related Characters: Mr. M (Anela Myalatya) (speaker), Thami Mbikwana (speaker), Isabel Dyson
Page Number: 57-58
Explanation and Analysis:

Be careful, Thami. Be careful! Be careful! Don’t scorn words. They are sacred! Magical! Yes, they are. Do you know that without words a man can’t think? Yes, it’s true. […] If the struggle needs weapons give it words Thami. Stones and petrol bombs can’t get inside those armored cars. Words can. They can do something even more devastating than that … they can get inside the heads of those inside the armored cars. I speak to you like this because if I have faith in anything, it is faith in the power of the word. Like my master, the great Confucius, I believe that, using only words, a man can right a wrong and judge and execute the wrongdoer. You are meant to use words like that.

Related Characters: Mr. M (Anela Myalatya) (speaker), Thami Mbikwana
Page Number: 58-59
Explanation and Analysis:
Act 2, Scene 2 Quotes

I ended up on the corner where Mrs. Makatini always sits selling vetkoek and prickly pears to people waiting for the bus. The only person there was little Sipho Fondini from Standard Six, writing on the wall: “Liberation First, then Education.” He saw me and he called out: “Is the spelling right Mr. M?” And he meant it! The young eyes in that smoke-stained little face were terribly serious.

Somewhere else a police van raced past me crowded with children who should have also been in their desks in school. Their hands waved desperately through the bars, their voices called out: “Teacher! Teacher! Help us! Tell our mothers. Tell our fathers.”

Related Characters: Mr. M (Anela Myalatya) (speaker), Thami Mbikwana
Page Number: 61
Explanation and Analysis:
Act 2, Scene 3 Quotes

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?

Related Characters: Mr. M (Anela Myalatya) (speaker), Thami Mbikwana
Related Symbols: The School Bell
Page Number: 62
Explanation and Analysis:

(Picks up his dictionary. The stone in one hand, the book in the other) You know something interesting, Thami…if you put these two on a scale I think you would find that they weighed just about the same. But in this hand I am holding the whole English language. This…(The stone) is just one word in that language. It’s true! All that wonderful poetry that you and Isabel tried to cram into your beautiful heads…in here! Twenty-six letters, sixty thousand words. The greatest souls the world has ever known were able to open the floodgates of their ecstasy, their despair, their joy!…with the words in this little book! Aren’t you tempted? I was.

(Opens the book at the flyleaf and reads) “Anela Myalatya. Cookhouse. 1947.” One of the first books I ever bought. (Impulsively) I want you to have it.

Related Characters: Mr. M (Anela Myalatya) (speaker), Thami Mbikwana
Related Symbols: Mr. M’s Dictionary
Page Number: 63-64
Explanation and Analysis:

Something grabbed my heart at that moment, my soul, and squeezed it until there were tears in my eyes. I had never seen anything so big, so beautiful in all my life. I went to the teacher who was with us and asked him: “Teacher, where will I come to if I start walking that way?”…and I pointed. He laughed. “Little man,” he said, “that way is north. If you start walking that way and just keep on walking, and your legs don’t give in, you will see all of Africa!” […] “Has teacher seen all that?” I asked. “No,” he said. “Then how does teacher know it’s there?” “Because it is all in the books and I have read the books and if you work hard in school little man, you can do the same without worrying about your legs giving in.”

He was right Thami. I have seen it. It is all there in the books just as he said it was and I have made it mine.

Related Characters: Mr. M (Anela Myalatya) (speaker), Thami Mbikwana
Related Symbols: Wapadsberg Pass
Page Number: 67-68
Explanation and Analysis:
Act 2, Scene 5 Quotes

I’ve brought you something which I know will mean more to you than flowers or prayers ever could. A promise. I am going to make Anela Myalatya a promise.

You gave me a little lecture once about wasted lives . . . how much of it you’d seen, how much you hated it, how much you didn’t want that to happen to Thami and me. I sort of understood what you meant at the time. Now, I most certainly do. Your death has seen to that.

My promise to you is that I am going to try as hard as I can, in every way that I can, to see that it doesn’t happen to me. I am going to try my best to make my life useful in the way yours was. I want you to be proud of me. After all, I am one of your children you know. You did welcome me to your family.

(A pause) The future is still ours, Mr. M.

Related Characters: Isabel Dyson (speaker), Mr. M (Anela Myalatya), Thami Mbikwana
Related Symbols: Wapadsberg Pass
Page Number: 78
Explanation and Analysis: