The Power of One: Chapter 3 Summary & Analysis

With Britain having declared war on Germany, the Judge declares the narrator a prisoner of war. No matter how good his camouflage is, the Judge remembers his circumcised penis. This betrays his British heritage. As soon as the stitches come out of the narrator’s ear, the Judge declares he must spend his afternoons marching 5,000 steps around the playground. The narrator’s mind often wanders while he’s marching, and one day, he hatches a brilliant plan.

The narrator knows that the Judge is an indifferent student and that he’s in danger of failing his math class. He’s terrified that the Judge will fail and have to repeat a grade, thus giving him another year to torment the narrator. So, he offers to do the Judge’s homework for him. The Judge not only accepts the offer, but he also agrees to let the narrator stop marching and not to turn him over to Hitler until at least the end of the term.

But the Judge isn’t done tormenting the narrator, whom he subjects to nightly interrogation-and-torture rituals that require the narrator to admit that he’s British “dog shit” and that his mother is a “whore” who sleeps “dirty, stinking kaffirs.” He takes pride in the fact that he never cries, though the Judge takes this as an act of defiance and hates him more for it. The narrator endures these sessions by retreating, in his mind, to Inkosi-Inkosikazi’s place with the waterfalls.

On the second-to-last afternoon of the school year, the Judge orders his minions to tie the narrator to a tree and forces him to eat human feces. Next, he tries to shake Granpa Chook from the tree where he’s sitting. Just as the Judge screams, “Heil Hitler!” Granpa Chook defecates into his mouth. A crazed Judge seizes the bird, and the boys tie him up by his legs. No one disrespects him, Jaapie Botha, like that, the Judge says. The narrator threatens to tell the teachers how he cheated for the Judge. The Judge shoots the narrator in the ribs with a stone from his slingshot. Then he opens fire on and kills Granpa Chook. After the bullies leave, the narrator buries Granpa Chook in the orchard under a full moon that hangs faintly in the midafternoon sky.