A small-town shopkeeper in the Orange Free State points a revolver at the South African Prime Minister. He is detained and questioned, but his eccentric explanations fail to provide the police with the neat motive they are searching for and he is judged insane. Yet Ebon Prinsloo's gesture of violence is for him a kind of awakening - an awakening from the fantasies with which he has protected himself from a parochial community, a constricting marriage, indeed from the limitations of life itself. The inarticulate dissatisfactions he feels inside his ' cage of freedom' are typical of his society, and so too is the violence with which he tries to extricate himself.