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Act 1, Scene 5
Themes
Key
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.
Protest, Dissent, and Violence
Apartheid, Race, and Human Connection
Education
The Future of Africa
Summary
Analysis
In a monologue, Thami sings a song in Xhosa, his native language, about going to school and hearing the bell ring. When he was seven, he used to sing this song on his way to school in the morning. He loved school so much that he would show up early. When he was 10, he wrote his life story for an assignment, and the teacher was so impressed that she asked him to read it for the entire school. In his composition, he promised to work hard in school, become a doctor, and treat Black people for free.
In his earliest memories, Thami felt a strong sense of belonging and responsibility to his community—including both his ethnic group and the broader racial community of Black South Africans. Like Mr. M, Thami used to see education as the key to advancing in life, fulfilling his potential, and uplifting his people. He defined success as academic and professional accomplishment within South Africa’s existing institutions, but he also thought that this individual success was the best way to help his community.
Themes
In the eight years since, Thami admits, he gave up on becoming a doctor because he realized that Black people need freedom, not medicine. He thinks it’s unfair for Black people to want to succeed in a society that “doesn’t allow the majority of our people any dreams at all.” He no longer trusts the educators who promise that he’ll succeed by doing well in school.
Thami’s mindset shifted when he decided that changing South African society was more important than succeeding within it. First, he decided that Black people needed to act collectively rather than individually. And second, he realized that, if he did succeed, this would still be at the expense of other Black people who never got the same opportunities as him. He now sees the school system as part of the broader oppressive structure that maintains apartheid and prevents Black people from pursuing their dreams.
Themes
Every year, the regional Bantu Schools inspector Oom Dawie visits Zolile High School to give a speech. This year, he promised the students that they were going to join the elite, and all of South Africa’s people were going to “share” in the country’s “future.” But Thami wonders what future he’s talking about; the best students he knows who have graduated and are working humiliating jobs for white people in order to survive. Everybody can see the stark inequality between white and Black South Africans, so Oom Dawie is talking as though Black people are either blind or stupid.
Oom Dawie’s rhetoric about the future is similar to the dangerous sense of hope that Mr. M talked about in his monologue. However, Thami points out that both men seem unrealistic and out of touch with Black people’s reality. In fact, Thami sees Oom Dawie’s promise as a manipulative lie, designed to convince Black people to buy into a system that oppresses them. Mr. M’s decision to become a public school teacher is an example of this mistake.
Themes
Thami no longer cares to learn what they want to teach him in school. While schools teach him the history of colonization in South Africa, Thami thinks that the truly important events in South Africa’s history are the Congress of the People in Kliptown in 1955, the Sharpeville massacre in 1960, and the Soweto uprising in 1976. But South Africans won’t learn this history in classrooms—to learn their own history, they have to teach each other in their homes, neighborhoods, and workplaces. Thami cries out, “AMANDLA!” (“power!”).
Where Oom Dawie and Mr. M’s sense of hope is too blind and idealistic, Thami offers a more realistic alternative. While Mr. M believes in knowledge, Thami believes in power. Thami’s sense of hope is based on his faith in the anti-apartheid movement’s commitment to changing society and his knowledge of history. But he has learned this history from his community, not from the school system, which has failed him by teaching him about his country from someone else’s perspective. This shows that education can transform students only when it centers their own perspectives.
Themes
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