My Children! My Africa! is set in the final years of the apartheid regime, a white supremacist government that ruled South Africa from 1948 until the 1990s and imposed strict racial segregation on the population. The play follows the relationships among three people: the privileged white student Isabel Dyson, the brilliant Black student Thami Mbikwana, and the dedicated, idealistic Black schoolteacher Mr. M. When a militant protest movement sweeps over their town, Thami and Mr. M clash over their competing visions of political change. Thami believes the movement is just, even if it’s violent, while Mr. M insists that true justice can only come about through nonviolent persuasion, even in response to a violent government. Rather than choosing one of its characters’ sides, the play presents both Thami and Mr. M’s views as valid in their own ways. It shows how violent resistance can be justifiable in response to a violent government, but also that this violence is often ineffective. It also rejects the idea that activists can change society by simply joining existing institutions, but it affirms that people must win hearts and minds if they want to achieve justice and equality. As such, My Children! My Africa! shows that speaking out against injustice is a legitimate form of political action, but also that activists must openly resist the government through this speech if they want to change a repressive, authoritarian society.
In My Children! My Africa!, Mr. M and Thami embrace opposite political strategies to fight South Africa’s oppressive apartheid system. Mr. M becomes a teacher because he hopes that young Black students can build a better society if they learn critical thinking skills. He believes that politics is fundamentally about shared ideas and values, which means transforming political institutions requires using reason and persuasion. Meanwhile, Thami believes that the best way to fight for freedom is by joining the community’s rebellion. He thinks that politics is fundamentally about power, which means that transforming society requires organizing the community and taking over political institutions, using force if necessary. Right away, then, readers see that the issue of how to dismantle apartheid doesn’t have an easy answer.
Mr. M and Thami see the glaring flaws in each other’s strategies: Thami points out that an oppressive government can’t easily be persuaded, while Mr. M shows that violence can be inadequate and counterproductive. Thami insists out that persuasion won’t work against the authoritarian apartheid government, which ignores appeals to morality because it doesn’t care about Black people. Moreover, Thami thinks that Mr. M is naive to join the school system in the hopes of transforming society. While Mr. M has always hoped to do good, he actually spent his days teaching a biased government curriculum designed to brainwash Black students into accepting their subordinate role in society. Because South Africa’s existing institutions are based on racism and exclusion, Thami doesn’t think that young Black students can change society by joining them. Rather, the most they can hope to do is receive a salary for helping oppress other Black people, like Mr. M. By the same token, Mr. M rejects Thami’s political tactics. He fears that his students are sacrificing their potential by joining a pointless protest movement, which the government will crush with disproportionate, deadly violence. And he’s proven right about this: the police tear gas and arrest his young students, and Thami is forced into exile. In this way, neither Mr. M nor Thami’s preferred methods are without flaw.
But while there are important problems with both Thami and Mr. M’s visions of political change, the play suggests that they are both also right in critical ways: Thami is right to be suspicious of “old-fashioned” institutions and consider violent resistance justified, while Mr. M is right to view persuasion as the real key to achieving political change. First, the play suggests that violence can be justified in response to situations like apartheid. For instance, after a group of protestors kills Mr. M, Thami justifies their actions as “self-defense”—by going to the police, Mr. M got many community members arrested, indirectly perpetuating violence against them. The only way for the community to stop him was through violence, so Thami concludes that killing Mr. M was legitimate self-defense, even if it was also a “blind and stupid” mistake. If violence is justified but ineffective, then the play argues that true political change requires persuasion. In an impassioned speech just before his death, Mr. M holds as stone in one hand and a dictionary in the other, as though comparing the power of persuasion to the power of physical force. As he has already told Thami, he doesn’t believe that stones and bombs can stop an armored tank from killing innocent people, whereas words can persuade the driver to switch sides. Words, Mr. M exclaims, are “magical.” Especially when they’re faced with overwhelming force—like the community members against the apartheid government—persuasion is the only way to transform society.
Although Thami and Mr. M are forced to choose between joining the rebellion or defending the government, the play shows that there’s a better, third option: dissent. This relies on persuasion rather than violence, but it necessitates working outside the system rather than inside it. Fugard presents this solution at the very end of the play, when Isabel promises to dedicate her own life to the struggle for justice and equality. She sees that it’s possible to appeal to people’s sense of morality and justice, like Mr. M wants to do, while standing outside and against the oppressive system, like Thami. Of course, Isabel’s decision is also evidence that persuasion works—even the perpetrators of injustice, like white people under apartheid, can change their minds and switch sides. In turn, this is also why Fugard wrote this play and staged it around the world in the final years of apartheid: he realized that, by morally objecting to oppressive institutions, dissent can help transform an oppressive society into a democracy based on equality and mutual respect.
Related Themes from Other Texts
Protest, Dissent, and Violence ThemeTracker
Protest, Dissent, and Violence Quotes in My Children! My Africa!
THAMI: His ideas about change are the old-fashioned ones. And what have they achieved? Nothing. We are worse off now than we ever were. The people don’t want to listen to his kind of talk anymore.
ISABEL: I’m still lost, Thami. What kind of talk is that?
THAMI: You’ve just heard it, Isabel. It calls our struggle vandalism and lawless behavior. It’s the sort of talk that expects us to do nothing and wait quietly for white South Africa to wake up. If we listen to it our grandchildren still won’t know what it means to be Free.
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.
I don’t think I want to be a doctor anymore. That praiseworthy ambition has unfortunately died in me. It still upsets me very much when I think about the pain and suffering of my people, but I realize now that what causes most of it is not an illness that can be cured by the pills and bottles of medicine they hand out at the clinic. I don’t need to go to university to learn what my people really need is a strong double-dose of that traditional old Xhosa remedy called “Inkululeko.” Freedom. So right now I’m not sure what I want to be anymore. It’s hard, you see, for us “bright young blacks” to dream about wonderful careers as doctors, or lawyers, when we keep waking up in a world which doesn’t allow the majority of our people any dreams at all.
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?
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.
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.”
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?
(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.
I sat here before going to the police station saying to myself that it was my duty, to my conscience, to you, to the whole community to do whatever I could to put an end to this madness of boycotts and arson, mob violence and lawlessness…and maybe that is true…but only maybe…because Thami, the truth is that I was so lonely! You had deserted me. I was so jealous of those who had taken you away. Now, I’ve really lost you, haven’t I? Yes. I can see it in your eyes. You’ll never forgive me for doing that, will you?
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.
I don’t call it murder, and I don’t call the people who did it a mad mob and yes, I do expect you to see it as an act of self-defense—listen to me!—blind and stupid but still self-defense.
[…]
Try to understand, Isabel. Try to imagine what it is like to be a black person, choking inside with rage and frustration, bitterness, and then to discover that one of your own kind is a traitor, has betrayed you to those responsible for the suffering and misery of your family, of your people. What would you do? Remember there is no magistrate or court you can drag him to and demand that he be tried for that crime. There is no justice for black people in this country other than what we make for ourselves. When you judge us for what happened in front of the school four days ago just remember that you carry a share of the responsibility for it. It is your laws that have made simple, decent black people so desperate that they turn into “mad mobs.”
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.
