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Chapter 2
Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Tsotsi, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Apartheid and Racism
Parents and Children
Identity and Memory
Hatred, Sympathy, and God
Habit vs. Choice
Summary
Analysis
Leaving Soekie’s, Tsotsi passes Rosie but ignores her. Boston’s words keep playing in his mind. Tsotsi watches a house party across the street and sees two girls run from the house chased by a drunk man. He almost manages to focus on the moment when the drunk man falls in a way that reminds him of Boston on the floor. Walking along, Tsotsi passes a church and begins to run “like a man possessed” out of the township toward the white suburb.
Tsotsi ignoring Rosie—when he knows Butcher and Die Aap have just raped her—emphasizes once again his lack of sympathy for his gang’s victims. Yet Boston’s argument for sympathy and his religious language have clearly affected Tsotsi: when he sees a church, he runs away “like a man possessed,” a figure of speech that refers to demonic possession and suggests that Tsotsi is in some sense opposed to or afraid of God.
Themes
Tsotsi runs until his mind goes blank and then stops under a lamppost. Seeing headlights, he realizes it may be police—they prowl the white suburb—so he slips into the darkness. Walking aimlessly, he sees a stand of bluegum trees and decides to rest there. As soon as he sits under a tree, he remembers Boston again. Just as he recruited Die Aap for his strength and Butcher for his violence, Tsotsi recruited Boston for his intelligence, which helps the gang elude capture. Tsotsi wonders why the arrangement stopped working. He concludes that it’s because Boston asked questions Tsotsi didn’t know the answers to.
By mentioning that police prowl the white suburb—presumably to keep out non-white people—the novel reminds the reader that in apartheid South Africa, the law served primarily not to uphold justice or protect all citizens, but to enforce segregation and oppress young Black men like Tsotsi. Tsotsi’s conclusion that the gang is failing because Boston asked too many questions about Tsotsi’s forgotten past, meanwhile, reveals how frightened Tsotsi is of his own true identity.
Themes
Tsotsi imagines his inner life as “darkness.” When he sleeps, he doesn’t dream, and both his outer and inner worlds are dark. To keep this from bothering him, he rigidly follows a few rules. First, every morning when he wakes up remembering nothing, he immediately checks his knife. He tests its sharpness and sharpens it if it’s dull. Otherwise, he plays with it. It makes him feel better: “The knife was not only his weapon, but also a fetish, a talisman that conjured away bad spirits and established him securely in his life.”
Tsotsi’s knife, a violent weapon, represents his stereotyped identity as a “gangster.” He uses his daily ritual surrounding the knife to reinforce his “gangster” identity and to distract himself from his own inner life. By comparing the knife to a “fetish”—a magical object associated by European colonizers with indigenous African religions—that protects Tsotsi from “bad spirits,” the novel seems to be associating indigenous African religious beliefs with violence, in contrast with Christianity, which it has so far associated with sympathy. Despite the novel’s critique of apartheid and white supremacy, then, it may be implicitly reinforcing racist assumptions about indigenous African religions here.
Themes
Second, Tsotsi refuses to think about himself or try to remember his own past. He finds this rule difficult to follow, because sometimes the external world elicits vague memories from him. For example, “the smell of wet newspaper” is suggestive to him. One time, he was playing dice on the street when a policeman walked by, and Tsotsi thought he recognized the beaten young man (later revealed to be Petah) in his custody. When the young man saw Tsotsi, he looked excited and smiled. When Tsotsi didn’t acknowledge him, the young man called Tsotsi “David,” identified himself as “Petah,” and asked for help. Tsotsi, ignoring him, continued to play dice.
In this passage, interestingly, Tsotsi’s refusal to remember his past and his true identity coincides with his refusal to sympathize: Tsotsi ignores Petah’s requests for help both because he doesn’t want to remember Petah and because he doesn’t sympathize with Petah’s distress. Thus, the passage suggests that memory is necessary to maintain a true, individual identity—and a true, individual identity is necessary to be able to sympathize with others.
Themes
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Third, Tsotsi won’t allow people to ask questions about him, because questions make him aware of “the vast depths of his darkness.” These empty depths threaten him with a “nothingness,” which he fears. Tsotsi believes that hiding beneath external reality, including “men’s prayers,” is nothingness. Violence allows Tsotsi to assert himself against this terrifying nothingness.
This passage includes the novel’s first account of Tsotsi’s religious beliefs. In contrast with Boston’s implied Christianity, Tsotsi believes in a “nothingness” that is more real than “men’s prayers”—in other words, Tsotsi does not seem to believe in God or in any ultimate meaning to life.
Themes
Tsotsi, tired of thinking, stands to leave when he hears footsteps. Hiding behind a bluegum tree, he sees a young Black woman carrying something and glancing behind her. As she approaches, Tsotsi sees she’s carrying a shoebox. Heartbeat quickening, Tsotsi moves through the trees to intercept her. As she enters the trees, he grabs her, puts a hand over her mouth to muffle her scream, and shoves her against a tree.
Just as Butcher and Die Aap raped Rosie seemingly as a matter of habit, without thinking much about their actions, so Tsotsi reacts in a stereotyped “gangster” fashion to the appearance of a woman alone—he moves to assault her.
Themes
Tsotsi puts his knee between her legs and, while she struggles and holds tighter to the shoebox, examines her. She pulls her mouth free and screams again. Something about the shoebox catches his attention, and he moves away. She looks at the shoebox “with a horror deeper than her fear of him.” She pushes the shoebox at him and, when he takes it, runs away. The shoebox lid falls off, and Tsotsi sees a baby inside. He recognizes that what made him move away from the woman was the sound of a baby crying.
That the woman looks at the shoebox containing her baby “with a horror deeper than her fear of” Tsotsi—and that she subsequently abandons her baby to Tsotsi, a strange man who seemed about to sexually assault her—suggests that something has gone terribly wrong in the relationship between mother and child here. This wrongness foreshadows the importance of failed and destroyed parent-child relationships in the rest of the novel.
Themes
