‘Tsotsi’—A Thug by any Other Name

By Esther Iverem
SeeingBlack.com Editor and Film Critic

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In the hands of director and writer Gavin Hood, Athol Fugard’s novel Tsotsi comes alive as a visually poetic pastiche of wealth, poverty and violence in post-Apartheid South Africa. As we follow Tsotsi, leader of a Soweto gang, in his various criminal exploits, there is the odd juxtaposition of the modern, gleaming Johannesburg—with its subways, neon, concrete and glass—and the dusty and bleak township of Soweto, where a million of the country’s Black residents, including Tsotsi, live.

We are introduced to a very hardened and merciless side of Tsotsi, (which is the word for “thug” in the local vernacular. The “T” is silent.). Actor Patrick Chweneyagae commands the role with both a convincing menace and checked vulnerability. Hood keeps the tension taut, intimate and visceral, from the opening scenes of a murder, through the pivotal moments that change Tsotsi’s life forever.

Those pivotal moments begin when Tsotsi decides to carjack a well-heeled woman, shoots her, and then, minutes later, realizes that the woman’s infant son is riding in the back seat. At this moment, and in the coming days, Tsotsi must make decisions that allow him to reexamine his actions and his heart.

Fugard is a master at taking the pulse of South Africa and interpreting that pulse on the stage and, in this case, in fiction. While in lesser hands, an action-packed story about a hardened criminal might suffice, Fugard’s story adds issues of class, social mobility, South Africa’s AIDS epidemic and human decency to the mix. One of Tsotsi’s gang members, Boston, challenges Tsotsi to think about human caring and the line he won’t cross to get what he wants.

These issues of heart and community loom larger in this story than do issues of race and South Africa’s old order of Apartheid, except in a residual manner. All of the criminals and victims are Black. And in this “new” order in the country, where Blacks now hold government power but not economic power, what are legions of poor, uneducated Black people to do? Add other breakdowns in the social and family fabric, and it is clear, Hood seems to say, that there are ghettos all over the world, from Soweto, to Singapore, to San Francisco, with legions of young men who are known to the outside world simply as thugs.

In a pivotal scene in Soweto, Tsotsi asks a young widow, “How do you get money?” It seems a wonder to him that a woman can work in her home, sewing and mending clothes for a living. With the question, “How do you get money?” Fugard asks the larger question about how the modern world easily creates hardened thugs who answer that question with, “By any means necessary.” They look at their own lives and scoff at any notion that there is such a thing as decency in the world.

Esther Iverem’s review of ‘Tsotsi’ also appeared on www.BET.com. Her new book of poems, “Living in Babylon,” is available at Amazon.com

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