Essay

Question: Describe a key relationship between two or more characters or individuals in the text. Explain how this relationship helped you to understand at least one of these characters or individuals

In the novel, the Power of One by Bryce Courtney, the key relationship between Peekay and Doc helped me understand Peekay as a person because it helped me understand Peekay, with regards to belonging, oppression around him, and the  ‘Power of One’ – finding the courage inside himself to stand against the injustice around him.

Firstly, the relationship between Peekay and Doc was important to help me understand Peekay with regards to belonging because before Peekay met Doc he didn’t have a sense of belonging. Peekay didn’t have many friends and his family didn’t value him which made him feel very lonely and isolated, although after meeting Doc he realized what it was like to feel loved and wanted. Without Doc, Peekay wouldn’t have met Gel Piet and without Gel Piet he would not have been as successful with his boxing career. He also noticed how ‘Geel Pete, who had had no tribe, whose blood was the mixture of all the people of Southern Africa – the white tribe, the Bushman, the Hottentot, the Cape Malay and the black tribal blood of Africa itself – was celebrated in death by all the tribes. Gel piet did have a “tribe” but he had the prison. He was the new man of Southern Africa, the result of three hundred years of torture, treachery, racism, and slaughter in the name of one color or another’ but he had his sense of belonging in the prison he knew his people and the place where he belonged.  

Peekay at a young age noticed oppression around him not just the difference between black and white but the different nationalities. Peekays battled with this at his Afrikaans boarding school because he was the only English boy and the Afrikaans boys had grown up to hate English people. He also notices when he was visiting Doc in the Barberton prison he noticed how Giel Piet was mistreated just because of the colour of his skin ‘We saw the brutality around us not as a matter of taking an emotional side, of good versus evil, but as the nature of evil itself, where good and bad do not come into play’. But even though most people saw it no one stood up and said it wasn’t okay not even peekay at first.

Peekay found the ‘power of one’ –  courage inside yourself to stand against the injustices around you at a young age when we went to Sunday school where the pastor said that when they go to heaven they would all live in mansions and peekay wondered if God would love black people the same as white and would black and white mix in heaven. ‘he loves all of mankind but that He recognizes there are differences, like black and white. So he has a place for black angels and another place for white angels’. Peekay found his ‘why’ what he believed in after Gel Piet died he knew that black should have equal rights as whites and the colour of your skin didn’t dictate who you were what kind of person you wanted to be  ‘there is a special kind of silence to our own was joined the silence of the listeners beyond the hall. We had all been a part of the lament for Africa. Requiem for Geel Piet was a lament for all of us, the tears shed for South Africa itself’.

In conclusion, the key relationship between Peekay and Doc helped me understand the book because it showed me all elements of peekay and what he believed in. he be belved that all balck and white should have equal rights no matter what.