As the play’s title suggests, the three protagonists of My Children! My Africa!—Thami, Isabel, and Mr. M—are driven by a profound love for Africa and its people. In one way or another, all three dedicate their lives to building a better future for both their home country of South Africa and the continent as a whole. This dedication largely stems from their knowledge of how colonialism has devastated and impoverished the continent. In South Africa, colonial rule and apartheid have wasted Black people’s potential by forcing them to live miserable lives as manual laborers in impoverished reservations and townships. Therefore, as they look forward to the end of apartheid, Thami, Isabel, and most of all Mr. M feel a strong sense of social and political responsibility to rebuild their nation and redeem their continent. With this, My Children! My Africa! suggests that Africa’s future depends on its youth’s capacity to learn about their past, remain hopeful for the future, and dedicate their lives to building an inclusive and equitable world.
All three protagonists are motivated by a sense that history has been unkind to Africa: European colonialism, in particular, has plundered the continent and impoverished its people. As a teacher, Mr. M’s sense of responsibility for South Africa’s youth comes from his awareness of this historical devastation. In his first monologue, he admits that he is distraught to see extreme poverty and constant violence around him. And in his final monologue, he describes a news report he saw that showed a starving Ethiopian man carrying his dead child to a mass grave. Mr. M views the starving man and child as a metaphor for the current state of Africa, which has been beaten down by European imperialism, colonialism, and resource extraction. He sees these events as tragic because they have wasted young people’s potential by forcing them into poverty, and he thinks contemporary and future Africans have a responsibility to act to change these conditions. Thami feels the same way, which is what leads him to abandon his childhood dreams of becoming a doctor and instead dedicate himself to the anti-apartheid struggle. As he explains in a monologue, South Africa’s political system “doesn’t allow the majority of our people any dreams at all.” He sees his best and brightest peers get stuck in low-wage jobs serving white people, and he realizes that his country systematically wastes its young Black people’s potential. If he keeps trying to help people through medicine, he realizes, the same thing might happen to him: the country will not let him achieve his own potential unless he insists on changing it. But by helping build a free and equitable society for Black South Africans, he can make it possible for future generations of young African people to achieve their potential. Finally, Isabel learns about apartheid’s effects over the course of the play, particularly through befriending Thami and visiting his township of Brakwater. She soon realizes that apartheid—a system that white South Africans like her have created—is directly responsible for Black South Africans’ poverty and suffering.
Nevertheless, all three protagonists also have profound hope for Africa’s future and view themselves as partially responsible for shaping it. Mr. M yearns to build a better future for the next generation of Black South African youth, and he views teaching as a way to inspire his students (whom he calls his “children”). Mr. M treats Thami as an embodiment of young Africans’ great potential—this is why he enters Thami in a literature competition in the hopes of winning him a scholarship to college. Similarly, just before Mr. M is killed, he grabs Thami and says, “My beautiful and proud young Africa!” Tragically, as he watches his students suffer brutal violence from the apartheid regime, Mr. M feels that he has failed in his mission to save them. Still, his idealistic hope also compelled him to play a part in shaping this future. Moreover, the play’s conclusion shows that Mr. M actually did inspire and leave a lasting impact on South Africa’s youth. Thami admits that he did deeply love and appreciate Mr. M, who strongly contributed to his feeling that he had a political duty to fight for justice. Ironically, this sense of duty led Thami to participate in the revolt of which Mr. M strongly disapproved. At the end of the book, Thami leaves South Africa to “join the [international anti-apartheid] movement.” His decision shows that Mr. M did manage to pass down his sense of hope and his dedication to creating a better future. And in the play’s final scene, Isabel shows that Mr. M inspired her, too. Standing atop Wapadsberg Pass, where Mr. M first decided to become a teacher, Isabel promises that she will live a useful life. This likely means dedicating her life to ending apartheid and, more broadly, serving the people of Africa. Her final line in the play, “the future is still ours,” shows that she carries on Mr. M’s sense of hope for the youth and future of Africa.
In writing My Children! My Africa!, playwright Athol Fugard understood that he had a powerful platform in a pivotal historical moment. As they look ahead to democracy, the South Africans in Fugard’s play recognize that they will finally have the chance—and the responsibility—to take an active role in building their nation’s future. But they also realize that to fully appreciate this responsibility and make the best of their opportunity, they also need to understand the past. Therefore, they are profoundly hopeful because they understand that their generation, unlike many in the past, has a true opportunity to shape the future.
Related Themes from Other Texts
The Future of Africa ThemeTracker
The Future of Africa Quotes in My Children! My Africa!
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.
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.
(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 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?
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.
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.
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.
(Pause) Not knowing their names doesn’t matter anymore. They are more than just themselves. The tribesmen and dead child do duty for all of us Thami. Every African soul is either carrying that bundle or in it.
What is wrong with this world that it wants to waste you all like that…my children…my Africa!
(Holding out a hand as if he wanted to touch Thami’s face) My beautiful and proud young Africa!
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.”
THAMI: Sala Kakuhle Isabel. That’s the Xhosa good-bye.
ISABEL: I know it. U’sispumla taught me how to say it. Hamba Kakuhle Thami.
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.
