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Scene 5
Themes and Colors
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in No-Good Friday, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Injustice and Forgetting
In No-Good Friday, forgetting about injustice helps oppressed people get on with their lives—but the play also shows how such complacency also allows injustice to continue. The play’s main characters, young Black South African people living under apartheid (a legally enforced system of racial segregation that lasted from the 1940s to the early 1990s) on the outskirts of Johannesburg in the mid-20th century, suffer racial injustice in various forms: White employers who discriminate against…
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Individual Conscience vs. Relationships
No-Good Friday illustrates how following one’s individual conscience can damage or destroy one’s relationships with others, thereby suggesting that conscience has a tragic dimension: to do the good thing, a person may have to give up on relationships that are also genuinely good. The doomed relationship between Willie and Rebecca, two young Black South Africans living under apartheid in a town near Johannesburg in the mid-20th century, shows how individual conscience can have a…
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Employment and Racism
In No-Good Friday, employment—both seeking jobs and retaining jobs—is a major source of racist oppression in the lives of Black South Africans living under apartheid. Under apartheid, money and power are concentrated among the White South African minority, meaning the country’s Black majority mostly seeks jobs from White employers. This situation creates a power dynamic in which White South Africans decide what opportunities Black people get. In the play, for example, a talented…
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Justice
No-Good Friday represents the shortcomings of the justice system in South Africa under apartheid, where the racial bias inherent in the laws of the land makes it impossible for Black people to see real justice. In various ways, apartheid laws criminalize normal Black existence, while White police officers under apartheid fail to protect Black South Africans from actual violent crime. The bias inherent in South Africa’s racist legal system under apartheid becomes clear when…
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Education
No-Good Friday suggests that, for an oppressed person, education can become a source of anguish if it fails to give the oppressed person tools to combat injustice. The play’s main character, Willie, is a Black man living under apartheid in South Africa in the mid-20th century. When the play begins, Willie is pursuing a correspondence BA, which the people around him approvingly note will allow him to obtain better, higher-paying jobs. Yet Willie, observing…
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