Pangaea is the continental setting against which the novel links the history of Cross dominance to the continuing subordination of noughts. It is more than a name on a map: the account of Crosses moving across the continent gives political power a history, while school exclusion, official indifference, and the spectacle of execution show that this hierarchy remains active in the present.

Geography and Historical Account

In Callum’s history lesson, Mr Jason presents Crosses as the race that became dominant across the world. He traces their ancestors’ movement from southern Pangaea across its northern and eastern regions, describing how they acquired the knowledge of gunpowder, writing, weapon-making, and the arts. In his telling, Cross explorers advanced civilizations he characterized as backward.

Callum resists the moral conclusion Mr Jason draws from that account. He accepts that Crosses acquired weapons and power, but rejects the idea that this history makes their domination right. He recalls that noughts were enslaved for centuries and that slavery had been formally abolished only a little over half a century earlier. The past, in his view, remains legible in the present: noughts are only beginning to enter Cross schools, and he argues that their representation in positions of national authority can be counted on the fingers of one hand, without using the thumb.

A Contested Present

The school scenes show how the old hierarchy is reproduced through both public hostility and institutional responses. Outside Heathcroft, a crowd chants against admitting nought students, while police try to separate the crowd and make their way through it toward the school entrance. The conflict over access to education therefore unfolds not as an abstract policy dispute but as a confrontation around the school gates.

The news report makes the struggle over Pangaea’s public account equally visible. It describes the nought students’ reception at Heathcroft as involving “some hostility,” while Callum’s account includes police allowing members of the crowd to reach and assault the students. He also describes the back of his jacket as covered in Cross spit. The contrast between what he experiences and what the broadcast omits shows how the public narrative can soften or erase the violence that accompanies nominal inclusion.

Inside the school, the unequal order appears in a different register. When Callum challenges Mr Jason’s account of history, the teacher sends him from class to stand outside the headmaster’s room until he is ready to accept the lesson. Callum leaves furious, insisting to himself that the history he has voiced is not nonsense: formal emancipation and a limited opening of school doors have not made noughts equal. His punishment turns the classroom into another site where authority determines which account of the past may be spoken.

Institutions and Unequal Power

The pattern extends beyond education. At the hospital, a nurse tells Callum’s mother that the family’s identity cards must be checked and registered before medical care can be administered, citing a new government ruling. The exchange places the family’s access to care behind an administrative checkpoint and broadens the novel’s picture of how official systems reach into ordinary life.

Public language also helps preserve social boundaries. After Callum’s connection to Sephy brings her family into the orbit of his case, Sephy’s mother warns her that the family’s names will be dragged through court, newspapers, and public scrutiny. She frames Sephy’s association with Callum and his family as the cause of that exposure. Her response presents the boundary between the families not simply as private prejudice, but as a social rule enforced through reputation and anticipated scandal.

Justice and the Meaning of the Setting

At Hewmett Prison, Pangaea’s racial order is rendered as a stark public scene. Noughts arrive dressed in black and stand before the scaffold, while Crosses occupy the seats. Sephy sees Callum among the witnesses and learns that the prisoner to be hanged is Ryan Callum McGregor, Callum’s father, convicted of seven counts of murder and political terrorism after his appeal is denied. The event places the machinery of criminal justice before a divided crowd, and makes the consequences of the novel’s political conflict immediate and personal.

Across these settings, Pangaea gathers the novel’s competing versions of history and belonging. Mr Jason’s celebratory account of Cross expansion sits beside Callum’s insistence on conquest, slavery, and continued exclusion; official rules and public reports then show how hierarchy persists beyond the history lesson. The continent’s significance lies in that connection between a remembered past and the institutions that keep its inequalities present.