Thread:LucidPigeons/@comment-27818776-20150514151901

OK, so my class and I just finished up on reading The Power of One, and the book version of Jaapie Botha is, while a monster, not a COMPLETE one. First, I'll tell you what the book is about. The book takes place in South Africa during the years of WWII, and the protagonist is a young English boy named Peekay who seeks to become the welterweight champion in the world. Anyway, he was sent to a boarding school by his mother (who was in the mental institution at the time, because she had a nervous breakdown for undisclosed reasons), and he comes face to face with Jaapie Botha, otherwise known as the Judge. The Judge was a large Afrikaner bully (an Afrikaner is pretty much a white South African of Dutch, French, or German descent). He takes an immediate dislikng of PK, because he hated Englishmen due to the Boer War (which i'm not going to explain in detail, mostly because I assume that you're already familiar with it). On PK's first night there, the Judge and his colleagues take PK into the showers, and they piss on him. From that point on, things get even worse for PK. He is tortured almost on a daily basis by Jaapie and his boys, he had a constant fear that Hitler was out to get him (you see the Judge idolized Hitler greatly, because he thought that Hitler would come to South Africa to rid it of the English. Eventually, Jaapie tries PK to a tree and tries to force him to eat human feces, and he savagely kills PK's pet chicken. He killed Chook not only because it defecated in his mouth, but because he wanted to invoke an emotional response from Pk, since PK claimed that he wouldn't cry (this reminds me a lot of Tomoo killing Lucy's puppy for some reason). Eventually, Jaapie leaves the boarding school and the novel for a little while, until it's revealed that he became a driller who worked at a copper mine that Peekay was working at. Botha tries to kill PK in a mixture of powder madness and drunkedness, and  Peekay beats the crap out of him at the end of the novel. We never find out if PK becomes a welterweight. PK was around 6 years old when Jaapie first started to abuse him, and Jaapie was implied to have been 12 at the time. I know it probably doesn't mean anything significantly, I just thought that would just kind of emphasize how screwed up in the head Jaapie was at a young age.

This novel had several unlikable characters in it, besides Botha. Now, that doesn't mean that they're all evil, just very hateable. The police are shown to be worse than Jaapie, because they are shown to savagely beat the kaffirs (or Black South Africans) savagely in prison. One poor kaffir was beaten due to him supposedly stealing biscuits, even though he actually didn't. Or in the other part of the book when the officers of the prison were going to arrest Doc because of him being an unregistered German immigrant, PK's lower jaw is broken in a blow that was meant for the Doc. One police officer also commits two murders in the prison, one that involved PK's boxing coach Geel Piet, a yellowlander and criminal, and one that takes place offscreen. There are a few decent wardens in the prison, though, i can't really say if the heinous standard is too high for anyone to count. There was also Jaapie's admiration of Adolf Hitler to take into account. You could argue that he had some respect for Hitler, though when I read it, it only really sounded like fanatical love or a shared hatred for a race than anything else. That, and he shows no love for anyone in particular, and despises PK for being a rooinek (Englishman) despite the fact that the Boer War was over for at least forty years.

Overall, Jaapie wasn't a CM in the book, but I am going to watch the film adaption of the book very soon, because from what I've heard, they somehow managed to make Jaapie even more worse than he was in the book. For one, he's a sergeant rather than a driller, so I guess he has more access to more resources. That, and the film is very different from the book. 