Film Essay Power of One

The novel traces the adventures of Peekay, an English-speaking South African boy, from age five to age seventeen, from the year 1939 to 1951. After his mother suffers from a nervous breakdown, the five-year-old Peekay is brought up by his Zulu nanny Mary Mandoma and his Granpa on a farm in the province of Natal. Soon after, he is sent to an Afrikaans boarding school, where--as the youngest of all the students, and the only English-speaker--he is brutally tortured by the other boys. The Judge, a senior boy called Jaapie Botha, and his so-called "stormtroopers" punish Peekay for his bedwetting habit and his circumcised penis by means of constant verbal and physical abuse. They call him derogatory names in Afrikaans such as "pisskop" (piss head) and "rooinek" (redneck), a term used for Englishmen during the Boer War (fought between the British and the Boers, or Afrikaners). The Judge, who wears a swastika tattoo on his arm, convinces the innocent Peekay that Hitler is on a mission to march all Englishmen into the sea and to restore glory to the Afrikaners. Mevrou, the Afrikaans woman who runs the boarding house, walks around brandishing her deadly "sjambok" (cane stick), instead of offering solace.

Peekay returns home after his first year of school, and his nanny commissions the famous black chief Inkosi-Inkosikazi to solve Peekay's bedwetting dilemma. Not only does Inkosi-Inkosikazi manage this, but he also opens Peekay's mind to a special place of "dreaming"-a place of three waterfalls and ten stones-where Peekay may always find him. Peekay returns to school the following year with his problem solved, with Granpa Chook one of Inkosi-Inkosikazi's magic chicken, and with the independent spirit he refers to as the "power of one." Granpa Chook becomes Peekay's only friend at school, and Mevrou allows him to live in the kitchen where he keeps the cockroaches at bay. Peekay excels at school, yet he has learnt that surviving the system means one has to adopt a