Blog Entry 4

Blog 4

Racism. I have spent quite a while this year looking at racism from different texts and now again through this book, The Power of One. This theme comes through fairly strong and Bryce Courtenay portrays some of it very graphically and somewhat extraordinarily. There are all types of racism in this book, including apartheid, which I will focus on most, the anti-Semitism showed by the Nazis and the hate shown towards the English South Africans or Rooineks by the Afrikaners. In the 1930’s and 1950’s there was a lot of racism still from the Boer Wars. First of all there was the tension between the Boers and the British. This, as already stated, originated from the Boer war. Things were still uneasy between the Rooineks and the Afrikaners. The sons, especially the Afrikaner veterans of the Boer War, were taught to make the Rooineks to pay at every single chance possible. This party was mainly represented by Judge and the Jury in the book. Peekay copped a lot of shit, literally, and was even pissed on at one stage by the Afrikaner boys in his school. There was also the racism between the whites and the blacks, or the ‘kaffirs’ as they were referred to. The word kaffir in literal English means heathen, and was a very derogatory term back then, as it still is now. People get killed for calling black people kaffirs. The black were treated like dirt by all of the white people, Rooinek and Afrikaner alike. The hatred went both ways because the whites had taken everything away from the natives. This was shown in the book The Power of One especially with Geel Piet. Geel Piet is a coloured man who works in the Barberton prison where Peekay starts to actually learn how to box. Geel Piet is Peekay’s personal boxing trainer and develops a close relationship with both Peekay and Doc, who is also an occupant of the prison, and Peekay’s piano teacher. Geel Piet is brutally treated by the warder at the prison, Borman, and eventually is heartlessly murdered by him. He is also forced to say that he and his kind eat their own excrement. This may have actually been true, because in the concentration camps they were starving. The hurt could have only been on the outside if this was not true, but if it was true that they resorted to eating faecal matter in the concentration camps, this insult would bring back horrible memories and cut deep into their consciences.