THE family has abandoned its socialising role in their quest for money.
This family represents the urban community which has taken values of the white world.
“They say he will get horribly filthy from the street dust, and make the carpet in the lounge dirty.” …. “No his mother doesn’t let him mix with common street urchins. She’s worried they will teach him nothing but obscenities….” (pg. 170).
Franklin is a victim of this urban environment yet even as a young child he demands his freedom.
On pg 174, he says “I don’t care anymore for those balls.
“We can make our own, my friends and me!”
By this statement he rejects the artificial for the natural.
At the end, Franklin meets his death in pursuit of this quest.
His attempted escape is frustrated by his death.
The dislocation of childhood is reflected in the absence of play.
By the way Tsitsi is paid to ‘imprison’ the boy, and as if the imprisonment is not enough, his father also flogs him for trying to jump the fence, thereby creating a rebellious and fragile instinct in the young boy.
The story focuses on the predicament of the young children at the hands of parents who have abandoned parental care and guidance for the sake of money.
It is also an indictment of the abuse of adult authority and the way the adult world imposes everything on the children.
This reflects people’s insensitivity to children’s well-being.
This is a violation of children’s rights to basic needs such as love and care.
Locked up inside the fence, Franklin’s youthful spirit becomes restive and yearns to go out and enjoy itself away from the disapproving adult supervision.
The ‘bath-sums-television-supper-bed’ routine, which is imposed on a child tends to dehumanise him.
In No More Plastic Balls, it chokes Franklin’s soul:
“Tsitsi complained to Frankie’s father that the boy’s fence-climbing was now just unbearable, and the man beat him. The boy spent the next day gloomily leaning over the locked gate but never dared climb up. The maid had to drag him from there for the routine bath, sums and spellings before T.V. cartoons, supper and bed.” (pg 171).
Tragically, the narrow-minded adults persist in their ignorance and lead the little boy to sacrifice himself.
Franklin would rather die than go back inside the fence.
It is little wonder that he does so because, not many people, especially the innocent ones, can bear the repeated experience of imprisonment.
In many ways the adults are guilty of causing Franklin’s death.
While that death could almost pass as willful suicide, it is tragic because the victim did not deserve his fate, and could have lived happily, had he an option.
But as things stand, the little boy has been crowded out by insensitive adults who consciously connived to petrify his childhood.
The parents failed to grasp a few realities, which, if they had done, would have probably saved their son’s life.
Buying their son toys is not a bad thing, but it is not enough.
Franklin wanted to play, and he wanted companions and friends.
It was improper to protect him from other children.
A puppy, television (cartoons), and a maid may help occupy a growing boy’s day, but never all of it.
The boy needs to run around and splash and fight and get dirty with those of his own age.
The fence and the padlock are the aggregate of all the adults’ efforts to condition Frankie into a clone of a child.
Frankie is a sensitive child, and he feels and absorbs all that happens around him.
His family, in its insulated, capitalist snobbery, devotes more time to its materialist fancies, and less to him.
What the story shows is therefore a dangerous, infanticidal way to bring up a child.
Frankie, like most children, indeed like most people, needs to discover the world for himself.
This is why he rejects the plastic balls.
He screams at the narrator:
“I don’t care anymore for those balls. We can make our own, my friends and me!
“He might as well have openly shouted, “Traitor” in my face. His confidence was so astonishing that I failed to tell him that I hadn’t meant what I said; that it was all for Tsitsi’s sake – after all I was just a harmless well-meaning neighbour, who liked him. It was too late. Frankie had tasted the forbidden fruit, street-fun, and no-one was going to take it from him. He had learnt the tactics so amazingly fast that Tsitsi realised threats alone were not going to force the boy back into the yard. She chased after him. He fled down the street.” (pg74).
This is an affirmation that one has come of age, that he deserves the freedom to see and discover things and also that his feelings must be taken seriously.
The story of Franklin shows that it is not enough to provide materials to the child; it is more important to provide spiritual nourishing in order to prevent psychological dislocation.
The beautiful house for the Franks and all its material abandon cannot provide Franklin with a sense of home nor belonging.
Franklin’s parents are an alienated pair, two snobs whose souls have been stolen by an overstressed capitalistic individualism.
They are blind, however, to the full implications of their preferred isolation.
The isolation brings unhappiness and sterility into their home, and, eventually, grief.
One may conclude that Chirere’s stories about children portray how children are deprived of their childhood by society resulting in dislocated and fragmented personalities.
The decay of moral values has made it impossible for society to rehabilitate the marginalised children.
The society itself has been dismembered and disfigured by a deluge of slavery, colonialism, colonial capitalism and neo-colonial forces of killer machines.
Children are now growing in the midst of violence and this is affecting their adult personalities.
This is putting their future in jeopardy.
The discord in the modern Zimbabwean society has brought many problems for the children.
Society has failed the innocent souls who have now become monsters and victims of each other.
They can never be riper for Africa to start its own healing.