Thami Mbikwana Character Analysis

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.

ISABEL: This one was a riot!

THAMI (Finger to his lips): Be careful.

ISABEL: Of what?

THAMI: That word.

ISABEL: Which one?

THAMI: Riot! Don’t say it in a black township. Police start shooting as soon as they hear it.

ISABEL: Oh. I’m sorry.

THAMI (Having a good laugh): It’s a joke Isabel.

ISABEL: Oh … you caught me off guard. I didn’t think you would joke about those things.

THAMI: Riots and police? Oh yes, we joke about them. We joke about everything.

I’ve actually been into it quite a few times. With my mom to visit Auntie, our maid, when she was sick. And with my dad when he had to take emergency medicines to the clinic. I can remember one visit, just sitting in the car and staring out of the window trying to imagine what it would be like to live my whole life in one of those little pondoks. No electricity, no running water, no privacy! Auntie’s little house has only got two small rooms and nine of them sleep there. I ended up being damn glad I was born with a white skin.

I am not shy about making eye contact. Well, when I did it this time, when it was my turn to speak and I stood up and looked at those forty unsmiling faces, I suddenly realized that I hadn’t prepared myself for one simple but all-important fact: they had no intention of being grateful to me. They were sitting there waiting to judge me, what I said and how I said it, on the basis of total equality. Maybe it doesn’t sound like such a big thing to you, but you must understand I had never really confronted that before, and I don’t just mean in debates. I mean in my life!

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.

Knowledge has banished fear.

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.

You used the word friendship a few minutes ago. It’s a beautiful word and I’ll do anything to make it true for us. But don’t let’s cheat Thami. If we can’t be open and honest with each other and say what is in our hearts, we’ve got no right to use 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?

My head is rebellious. It refuses now to remember when the Dutch landed, and the Huguenots landed, and the British landed. It has already forgotten when the Old Union became the proud young Republic. But it does know what happened in Kliptown in 1955, in Sharpeville on twenty-first March 1960 and in Soweto on the sixteenth of June 1976. Do you? Better find out because those are dates your children will have to learn one day. We don’t need Zolile classrooms anymore. We know now what they really are—traps which have been carefully set to catch our minds, our souls. No, good people. We have woken up at last. We have found another school—the streets, the little rooms, the funeral parlors of the location—anywhere the people meet and whisper names we have been told to forget, the dates of events they try to tell us never happened, and the speeches they try to say were never made.

I’m sure it’s just my white selfishness and ignorance that is stopping me from understanding but it still doesn’t make sense. Why can’t we go on seeing each other and meeting as friends? Tell me what is wrong with our friendship?

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.

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?

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.

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.

ISABEL: This one was a riot!

THAMI (Finger to his lips): Be careful.

ISABEL: Of what?

THAMI: That word.

ISABEL: Which one?

THAMI: Riot! Don’t say it in a black township. Police start shooting as soon as they hear it.

ISABEL: Oh. I’m sorry.

THAMI (Having a good laugh): It’s a joke Isabel.

ISABEL: Oh … you caught me off guard. I didn’t think you would joke about those things.

THAMI: Riots and police? Oh yes, we joke about them. We joke about everything.

I’ve actually been into it quite a few times. With my mom to visit Auntie, our maid, when she was sick. And with my dad when he had to take emergency medicines to the clinic. I can remember one visit, just sitting in the car and staring out of the window trying to imagine what it would be like to live my whole life in one of those little pondoks. No electricity, no running water, no privacy! Auntie’s little house has only got two small rooms and nine of them sleep there. I ended up being damn glad I was born with a white skin.

I am not shy about making eye contact. Well, when I did it this time, when it was my turn to speak and I stood up and looked at those forty unsmiling faces, I suddenly realized that I hadn’t prepared myself for one simple but all-important fact: they had no intention of being grateful to me. They were sitting there waiting to judge me, what I said and how I said it, on the basis of total equality. Maybe it doesn’t sound like such a big thing to you, but you must understand I had never really confronted that before, and I don’t just mean in debates. I mean in my life!

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.

Knowledge has banished fear.

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.

You used the word friendship a few minutes ago. It’s a beautiful word and I’ll do anything to make it true for us. But don’t let’s cheat Thami. If we can’t be open and honest with each other and say what is in our hearts, we’ve got no right to use 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?

My head is rebellious. It refuses now to remember when the Dutch landed, and the Huguenots landed, and the British landed. It has already forgotten when the Old Union became the proud young Republic. But it does know what happened in Kliptown in 1955, in Sharpeville on twenty-first March 1960 and in Soweto on the sixteenth of June 1976. Do you? Better find out because those are dates your children will have to learn one day. We don’t need Zolile classrooms anymore. We know now what they really are—traps which have been carefully set to catch our minds, our souls. No, good people. We have woken up at last. We have found another school—the streets, the little rooms, the funeral parlors of the location—anywhere the people meet and whisper names we have been told to forget, the dates of events they try to tell us never happened, and the speeches they try to say were never made.

I’m sure it’s just my white selfishness and ignorance that is stopping me from understanding but it still doesn’t make sense. Why can’t we go on seeing each other and meeting as friends? Tell me what is wrong with our friendship?

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.

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?

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.