Summary
Act II, Scene 3
Mr. M is alone in his classroom ringing the school bell and calling for students to come to school "before they kill you all" (p.67). He goes to his desk, picks up the class register, and starts to call roll. For each student he asks "living or dead?" (p.68). He talks as if talking to the class, saying his lessons were meant to help them in life, and will be useless if they are dead. Someone throws a stone and it breaks the window. Mr. M starts to ring the school bell loudly again.
Thami appears and tells Mr. M to stop ringing the bell, saying he is "provoking the Comrades" (p.68) by openly defying the boycott. Mr. M says he is ringing the bell because he rings it at the end of every lesson, and he asks if Thami has come back only to tell him to stop ringing the bell or if he has come for a lesson. When Thami says that he didn't come for a lesson, Mr. M agrees that you don't need to know grammar to write slogans or throw rocks. He picks up his dictionary in one hand and the stone that came throw the window in the other; he ruminates on how the stone is only one word while the dictionary holds the whole English language. Suddenly, he offers the book to Thami; Thami ignores this gesture.
Thami says that he's come to warn Mr. M, not just to stop ringing the bell, but that at a meeting the night before he was named as an informer for giving the names of absent students to the police. He says that there is a plan to march to the school, burn the building down, and kill Mr. M. Mr. M writes this on the board while reminding Thami to always put a problem into words to try to solve it. Thami suggests that he can report back to the Comrades that Mr. M has realized he was wrong and Mr. M can join the boycott. Mr. M asks why he's doing this but Thami says that he's doing it for "the Struggle" (p.71), since the "Cause"(p.71) will be hurt if innocent people are accused and killed. Mr. M snidely apologizes for thinking Thami would have come because he cares about him.
He tells Thami to let them come since he isn't innocent. He confesses that he did go to the police and report on "the presence in our community of strangers from the north" (p.72) who he believed were creating unrest. He gave the police names and addresses, and he refused money for the information. He says that he did it to stop the madness and because he was lonely and jealous with Thami gone. He laments the children gone from his classroom, his only calling in life since he was a child. He tells the story of when he was ten years old, how while peeing on a mountain after a rugby match, a teacher told him about how books have the power to help you see all of Africa. He tells Thami about how his "visions of splendor" (p.74) for Africa was ruined when he saw a little child dead from famine on television; a tribesman dropped the little bundle with the child into a mass grave without delicacy and the program never told the viewers the names of the child or the man.
Mr. M's long speech is interrupted by the sounds of breaking glass and a crowd outside the school. Thami warns Mr. M not to go outside, saying he will lie to them about Mr. M being innocent. Mr. M presses Thami again on why he is doing this, but Thami repeats that it is for the Cause. Mr. M asks Thami if he thinks he is scared of dying. He goes outside ringing his bell, and he is killed by the mob.
Act II, Scene 4
Thami waits onstage. Isabel arrives. Isabel is tense, distracted. Thami thanks her for coming and she tells him that there is nothing she wants to see less than "anything or anybody from the location" (p.76). Thami says that he wants to say goodbye, though Isabel challenges that he already said goodbye three weeks ago, which was the last time she, he, and Mr. M were together. Thami says that he is leaving town for good. Isabel says that she thought he was asking to see her to talk about recent events, and reads to him from the newspaper: "...unrest-related incident in which according to a witness the defenseless teacher was attacked by a group of blacks who struck him over the head with an iron rod before setting him on fire" (p.77). She tells him that she's been crying, praying, and even going to the location, but she still can't come to terms with why he was killed.
Thami tells her that Mr. M was an informer, not just of students in the boycott, but the names and addresses of the political action committee, leading to many arrests. Isabel can't believe it, calling him a "police spy" (p.78), but Thami clarifies that it wasn't like that. Thami is understanding, saying that the teacher was confused and felt it was his duty. Isabel says that his actions didn't make him an informer in the way the word suggests, making his murder unjustified. Thami cautions her against using the word "murder" (p.79) saying that he was killed in self-defense because he betrayed his people and put everyone in more danger. He says that black people arrested, tried, and hanged by a white government are what his group would call murder.
Isabel starts to say something, then stops. Thami tells her to say whatever she was going to. She asks where he was when Mr. M was murdered and whether he tried to stop them. Thami says that he knows she has a third question: whether he was in the mob that killed him. She asks for his forgiveness, but says she does wonder that. She says that she loved Mr. M. Thami says he was there and did try to stop it by going to him beforehand, but that Mr. M seemed to want to be killed. Isabel continues to wonder aloud why he had to die, and Thami says that he loved him too and should have tried harder to explain what he was doing and why.
Isabel asks if the police are really looking for Thami and where he's going. He tells her that he's going north, leaving the country, and "joining the movement" (p.82). Isabel tells him that she's frightened that she's forgetting Mr. M already and that she found out he wasn't even buried, so she doesn't know where to go to visit him. Thami advises her to go to the mountain Mr. M told him about in the story from his childhood. They say goodbye to one another in Xhosa.
Act II, Scene 5
Isabel is alone onstage. It becomes clear that she is on the mountain where Mr. M's teacher talked to him about books as a child. Isabel says she's there to pay her respects to Mr. M, not with flowers, but with a promise to try as hard as she can to not waste her life. She calls herself one of his children and says that the future is still theirs. She walks off the stage, and the play ends.
Analysis
The school bell is a symbol that appears throughout the play, but is of special importance in Act II, Scene 3. The bell is a representation of the traditional education system, so Mr. M ringing it after the boycott has begun angers the Comrades. However, the audience also knows that the bell is of special significance to Thami, who so used to love hearing its sound when he was enamored with the education system; Thami now feels constricted and angered by the education system, so the bell, especially as rung by Mr. M, is a reminder of everything Thami is trying to put behind him.
One of the major questions of the play is whether Mr. M's goal is truly fulfilled. He tells Isabel early in the play that his goal is to have one special student who he mentors to success as an adult. However, Mr. M clearly means for this to be Thami, and since Thami leaves the country to join the movement rather than continue his education, it seems Mr. M's goal for him will not be fulfilled. Isabel promises to fulfill Mr. M's goal, but because she is white and not Mr. M's favorite student, this is not really an equal substitution. Isabel always had hope for her future, since she is white, but the play ends with the black characters not achieving what they want.
Mr. M's innocence or guilt is another question to be contemplated by readers and the audience. On one hand, as Isabel argues, Mr. M was simply following his conscience, as evidenced by him not having a history of informing the police or even accepting money for the information he gave. In any case, it is difficult to see the violent punishment doled out by the mob of Comrades as self-defense. On the other hand, Thami argues convincingly that Mr. M posed a very real threat to the movement, and that the white courts run by the government could not be expected to produce justice in this kind of situation.
Isabel and Thami's final words to one another, which are the words for goodbye in Xhosa, set the tone of the end of the play. Fugard has tried to make a case for the personhood of black, native South Africans, and he shows Isabel's perspective through her understanding of what Thami says and her saying the correct words back to him. Though their relationship seems like it is ending forever, one can imagine that Thami will feel a certain gratification that Isabel pays him and his people this final respect.
Fugard ends the play with a strong, interesting choice in the stage directions. Isabel delivers her final line, "The future is still ours, Mr. M" (p.84) and then Fugard writes, "(The ACTRESS leaves the stage.)" (p.84). "ACTRESS" (p.84) is written in all capitals, as the name of a character would be, but this character is not listed on the list of characters at the beginning of the play and clearly refers to not an additional character but the actress playing Isabel in a given production. This signals that the character of Isabel is left in the final scene, perhaps to give a sense of the story continuing. It is up to a director and actor to decide how this stage direction should be dealt with in practice.
