Power Of One Theme

Poison; a person, idea, action, or situation that is considered to have a destructive or corrupting effect or influence (dictionary). In life, there can be two types of poison, slow and immediate. Immediate is very self-explanatory as it is something that affects someone or something right away, however, slow poison is a much more complex idea or action that slowly leads to a disastrous effect. The captivating memoir, Power Of One, written by Bryce Courtenay in 1989, is a book starting in South Africa in 1939 and describes the life of a five-year-old, English speaking boy who goes by the name of Peekay. Peekay goes through a lot of hardships throughout his childhood while going to boarding school, dealing with an anxiety driven mother, making a new friend that introduces him to boxing

This is reflected when Peekay is at his first boarding school, when Peekay is with a man named Hoppie Groenewald, when Peekay is in a boxing match, and when Peekay’s boxing coach gets brutally murdered. During all of these events, there is an authoritative power that holds the utmost amount of arrogance and causes the development of a slow poison. First of all, school can already be a tough experience for anyone, with the older grades seeming big, scary, and threatening. When Peekay entered boarding school for the first time, the youngest kids there were two years his senior, making him the youngest by far, and allowing others to feel as though they had power over him. One kid, whom everyone called the “Judge,” was a 12-year-old boy who was considered a “senior” at their school and seemed to think he had the power over Peekay; that he was much better than him. One reason he and others felt this was was because Peekay was uncircumsized, something that was very uncommon for boys during that time because only the English, the enemies at the time, did