Word: thami
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Isabel Dyson is a young white girl who once felt "very virtuous about our pioneering mission." Thami Mbikwana is a 17-Year-old Black man who tells her in exasperation, "going to school doesn't mean the same to us as it does to you." Anela Myalatya is a Black teacher in a ghetto school who has "seen too much of it, wasted chances, wasted people." My Children My Africa! is about a country that could ours, about a country inhabited by lunacy but home to people who unrelentingly search for "opportunity to fight the lunacy...
Athol Fugard has set My Children! My Africa! in Camdeboo, South Africa in the autumn of 1985, and the different ways his three characters choose to fight the lunacy are freighted with historical poignancy. "Mr. M" (Allen Oliver) wants sustained change through education and discipline, but his protege Thami (Donald Swaby) wants direct action, revolutionary action. Isabel (Eliza Gagnon) is afraid that, in the upheaval she knows is necessary for change, Thami will dismiss their friendship as "an old-fashioned idea...
...adjudication of right and wrong: urgency to stop thinking and act in the face of impending danger is so palpable. Oliver is certainly the most masterful of the three, his sophistication as an actor well-demonstrated by the transformation of ideology and emotion that "Mr. M" undergoes, Swaby's Thami is magnetic in his development from polite and amiable debate to clenched-fisted crescendoes, as he turns on "Mr. M": "Yours were the lessons in whispering, there are men who are teaching us to shout." Gagnon is perhaps a little old for the role of Isabel Dyson, but her believability...
...Rankuwa Township, 8 a.m. Thami Mcerwa, 27, president of the Azanian Youth Organization (AZAYO) -- Azania is what his movement would rename South Africa -- is preparing for another day's work in "the struggle." He spent the night as he usually does: in a four-room matchbox house in Soweto that he shares with his mother, brother and two sisters. Then he made the 50-mile journey north in his battered green Toyota to this black ghetto outside Pretoria...
...another organizational meeting. At a small dwelling that doubles as a comrade's home and an AZAYO branch office, he runs into Khosto Seathlolo, a leader of the 1970s' student protests who was sidelined by a long prison sentence. "He is one of our famous activists," Mcerwa explains. "No, Thami," Seathlolo replies. "You young guys are going to be the heroes...