NEED RESPONSES FOR THE STUDENT’S POSTS

STUDENT’S POST #1

Christine,

After watching the movie and reading for M4, I was overwhelmed by the power of music in both materials. Even though under different circumstances, both experiences demonstrate the Africans unity under one identity to share their message of struggle out loud through music. In the Power of One, the request for Doc to perform a concert for the Prison staff before his departure gave the inmates the chance to gather together to show their commitment to work with one another and their strong unity to sing in harmony sending the message of the great cause that linked them all together.

Similarly, Mandela during his arrest in 1956, encountered the same music power in jail where the inmates all sang in Zulu reciting the praised legendary Zulu warrior and king empowering them as one as freedom fighters.

(Mandela, P.202) “Suddenly there were no Xhosas or Zulus, no Indians or Africans, we were all nationalists and patriots bound together by a love of our common history, our culture, our country, our people”.

The Power of One also shares a side of the racial struggle that we may have ignored or simply weren’t aware of that exist among whites. Since Apartheid is the widely known racial cruelty in South Africa, we may not have known about the relationship between the Afrikaans (Dutch ancestry) and the English-Speaking South Africans (British descent) portrayed by the bullying of PK. Racism goes way beyond simply color, it has a variety of pretexts connected to history, power, religion to name a few, and is the root of many wars and misfortune on this planet earth.

STUDENT’S POST #2

Ryan Finnegan,

Module 4’s theme can be characterized along side the old saying “tough times makes tough people”. In the text, Mandela rolls into a tough time when he is arrested at his home in front of his family, gets a divorce, withstands a two-year trial, and gets a divorce. At anytime during this period would have a been a perfect out for him to leave his political career and return to a “normal” family and professional life. By that I mean, working normal hours Monday-Friday in his growing law practice and spending each night at home with his family. However, Mandela was a different breed. He continued with his practice in between stents of his trial, and he remained active in the ANC, even if doing so in secret and moving from safe house to safe to evade police. Also, even after getting a divorce he was still able to find love and get remarried. For many people, all this stress hitting in a short period of time can overwhelm them into a paralysis of inaction; ultimately, it drove Mandela to work even harder.

On the other hand, PK started his tough times as a young boy being sent off to a private school after his mother died. Having a mother die at such a young age can be devastating, but then to not have time to go through the grieving process before being sent off to a school in which the students did not like him, so they bullied him is even worse. For PK to be able to withstand being urinated on, spit on, having his chicken killed and strung up and hit build a side of internal fortitude that I feel helped him later in life. Whether it was his boxing career, orchestrating the multi-tribe choir in the prison, or with all odds against him staring a literacy program, PK used the tough times to his advantage. When he was told no, he continued to work, think, and move. There were many times that PK could have given up in life. He was more than justified to quit going to the prison everyday to spend time with the Professor, stop smuggling in tobacco, give up boxing, stop seeing the girl he really liked, or stop his literacy program; yet he did not. In fact, it was quite the opposite. If PK showed us a life lesson it was that when people tell you no, you think of another way to make it happen.