Tsotsi

by

Athol Fugard

Themes and Colors
Apartheid and Racism Theme Icon
Parents and Children Theme Icon
Identity and Memory Theme Icon
Hatred, Sympathy, and God Theme Icon
Habit vs. Choice Theme Icon
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Tsotsi, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Identity and Memory Theme Icon

In Tsotsi, characters have three kinds of identity, one false and two true: the false identity of stereotype, and the true identities of individual history and of universal human belonging. Memory is necessary to reject a false, stereotyped identity in favor of true individual and group identities. In the novel, these different identities, false and true, play out in the protagonist’s, Tsotsi’s, life. Tsotsi’s real name is David, but after a traumatic experience in his childhood, in which policemen abducted his mother and he ended up homeless, he lost most of his memories and rejected his true identity. When he joined a group of homeless children who scavenged and stole their food, a shopkeeper called him a tsotsi—a word meaning “gangster” or “thug”—and he took this stereotyped identity as his name. When he is Tsotsi, a stereotype without a memory or history, people do not recognize him as a human individual. As a gang leader, his potential victims—for example, the shopkeeper Cassim and the beggar Morris Tshabalala—find him so frightening that they literally cannot see or remember his face. Their inability to see Tsotsi’s face represents how his stereotyped identity strips him of his true identity.

Once Tsotsi begins to remember his past and sympathize with other people, however, he gradually recognizes himself as a member of humanity: he sees himself dimly reflected in a shop window and realizes his reflection could represent not only himself but his fellow gang members Boston and Butcher, or even his potential victim Morris Tshabalala. By connecting his own image with those of other human beings, Tsotsi is coming to realize one of his true identities—as a human being like other human beings. Finally, when Tsotsi fully regains his memories and decides, counter to the tsotsi stereotype, to become an adoptive father to a baby, he reclaims his full name and individual identity: David Madondo. Thus, Tsotsi suggests that to reject the false identities that stereotypes impose on us, we need to remember our individual histories and embrace our group identity as human beings.

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Identity and Memory ThemeTracker

The ThemeTracker below shows where, and to what degree, the theme of Identity and Memory appears in each chapter of Tsotsi. Click or tap on any chapter to read its Summary & Analysis.
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Identity and Memory Quotes in Tsotsi

Below you will find the important quotes in Tsotsi related to the theme of Identity and Memory.
Chapter 1 Quotes

[Tsotsi’s] knowledge was without any edge of enjoyment. It was simply the way it should be, feeling in this the way other men feel when they see the sun in the morning. The big men, the brave ones, stood down because of him, the fear was of him, the hate was for him. It was all there because of him. He knew he was. He knew he was there, at that moment, leading the others to take one on the trains.

Related Characters: Tsotsi (David), Boston, Die Aap, Butcher
Page Number: 7
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 2 Quotes

[Tsotsi’s] own eyes in front of a mirror had not been able to put together the eyes, and the nose, and the mouth and the chin, and make a man with meaning. His own features in his own eyes had been as meaningless as a handful of stones picked up at random in the street outside his room. He allowed himself no thought of himself, he remembered no yesterdays, and tomorrow existed only when it was the present, living moment. He was as old as that moment, and his name was the name, in a way, of all men.

Related Characters: Tsotsi (David), Boston, Die Aap, Butcher, Gumboot Dhlamini, Soekie
Page Number: 20-21
Explanation and Analysis:

They stayed that way until the street cried, then laughter, and Soekie started her song again at the beginning, staying like that, Boston still, Tsotsi seemingly the same as always, the one in disbelief, the other at the explosive moment of action, and this moment precipitated when Boston whispered: ‘You must have a soul Tsotsi. Everybody’s got a soul. Every living human being has got a soul!’

Related Characters: Boston (speaker), Tsotsi (David), Die Aap, Butcher, Soekie
Page Number: 26
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 3 Quotes

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.

Related Characters: Tsotsi (David), Boston
Related Symbols: Tsotsi’s Knife
Page Number: 36
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 4 Quotes

He didn’t see the man, he saw the type.

Related Characters: Tsotsi (David), The Baby, Cassim
Page Number: 43
Explanation and Analysis:

This was man. This small, almost ancient, very useless and abandoned thing was the beginning of a man.

Related Characters: Tsotsi (David), The Baby, Boston, Cassim
Page Number: 49
Explanation and Analysis:

Tsotsi knew one thing very definitely now. Starting last night, and maybe even before that, because sitting there with a quiet mind to the events of the past hours it seemed almost as if there might have been a beginning before the bluegum trees, but regardless of where or when, he had started doing things that did not fit into the pattern of his life. There was no doubt about this. The pattern was too simple, too clear, woven as it had been by his own hands, using his knife like a shuttle to carry the red thread of death and interlace it with others stained in equally sombre hues. The baby did not belong and certainly none of the actions that had been forced on him as a result of its presence, like buying baby milk, or feeding it or cleaning it or hiding it with more cunning and secrecy than other people hid what they had from him.

Related Characters: Tsotsi (David), The Baby, Die Aap, Butcher
Related Symbols: Tsotsi’s Knife
Page Number: 55-56
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 5 Quotes

Gumboot had been allocated a plot near the centre. He was buried by the Reverend Henry Ransome of the Church of Christ the Redeemer in the township. The minister went through the ritual with uncertainty. He was disturbed, and he knew it and that made it worse. If only he had known the name of the man he was burying. This man, O Lord! What man? This one, fashioned in your likeness.

Related Characters: Boston, Gumboot Dhlamini, Rev. Henry Ransome
Page Number: 60-61
Explanation and Analysis:

It was the awareness of alternatives that disturbed Tsotsi and seemed to paralyse his will. Up to that moment he had lived his life as the victim of dark impulses. They had been ready, rising to his moments of need all through his life. Where they came from he never knew, and their reasons for coming he had never questioned. What he realized now was that something had tampered with the mechanism that had governed his life, inhibiting its function.

Related Characters: Tsotsi (David), Die Aap, Butcher
Page Number: 70
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 6 Quotes

Are his hands soft? he would ask himself, and then shake his head in anger and desperation at the futility of the question. But no sooner did he stop asking it than another would occur. Has he got a mother? This question was persistent. Hasn’t he got a mother? Didn’t she love him? Didn’t she sing him songs? He was really asking how do men come to be what they become. For all he knew others might have asked the same question about himself. There were times when he didn’t feel human. He knew he didn’t look it.

Related Characters: Tsotsi (David), Morris Tshabalala , David’s Mother (Tondi)
Page Number: 88
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 7 Quotes

What is sympathy? If you had asked Tsotsi this, telling him that it was his new experience, he would have answered: like light, meaning that it revealed. Pressed further, he might have thought of darkness and lighting a candle, and holding it up to find Morris Tshabalala within the halo of its radiance. He was seeing him for the first time, in a way that he hadn’t seen him before, or with a second sort of sight, or maybe just more clearly. […]

But that wasn’t all. The same light fell on the baby, and somehow on Boston too, and wasn’t that the last face of Gumboot Dhlamini there, almost where the light ended and things weren’t so clear anymore. And beyond that still, what? A sense of space, of an infinity stretching away so vast that the whole world, the crooked trees, the township streets, the crowded, wheezing rooms, might have been waiting there for a brighter, intense revelation.

Related Characters: Tsotsi (David), The Baby, Boston, Morris Tshabalala , Gumboot Dhlamini
Page Number: 106-107
Explanation and Analysis:

I must give him something, he thought. I must give this strange and terrible night something back for all it has given me. With the instinct of his kind, he turned to beauty and gave back the most beautiful thing he knew.

‘Mothers love their children. I know. I remember. They sing us songs when we are small. I’m telling you, tsotsi. Mothers love their children.’

After this there was silence for the words to register and make their meaning, for Tsotsi to stand up and say in reply: ‘They don’t. I’m telling you, I know they don’t,’ and then he walked away.

Related Characters: Tsotsi (David), Morris Tshabalala , David’s Mother (Tondi)
Page Number: 115
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 9 Quotes

Petah turned to David. ‘Willie no good. You not Willie. What is your name? Talk! Trust me, man. I help you.’

David’s eyes grew round and vacant, stared at the darkness. A tiny sound, a thin squeaking voice, struggled out: ‘David…’ it said, ‘David! But no more! He dead! He dead too, like Willie, like Joji.’

Related Characters: Tsotsi (David) (speaker), Petah (speaker), David’s Mother (Tondi)
Page Number: 166-167
Explanation and Analysis:

So he went out with them the next day and scavenged. The same day an Indian chased him away from his shop door, shouting and calling him a tsotsi. When they went back to the river that night, they started again, trying names on him: Sam, Willie, and now Simon, until he stopped them.

‘My name,’ he said, ‘is Tsotsi.’

Related Characters: Tsotsi (David) (speaker), Boston
Page Number: 168
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 10 Quotes

The baby and David, himself that is, at first confused, had now merged into one and the same person. The police raid, the river, and Petah, the spider spinning his web, the grey day and the smell of damp newspapers were a future awaiting the baby. It was outside itself. He could sympathize with it in its defencelessness against the terrible events awaiting it.

Related Characters: Tsotsi (David), The Baby, David’s Mother (Tondi)
Page Number: 175
Explanation and Analysis:

‘What are you going to do with him?’

‘Keep him.’

‘Why?’

He threw back his head, and she saw the shine of desperation on his forehead as he struggled with that mighty word. Why, why was he? No more revenge. No more hate. The riddle of the yellow bitch was solved—all of this in a few days and in as short a time the hold on his life by the blind, black, minute hands had grown tighter. Why?

‘Because I must find out,’ he said.

Related Characters: Tsotsi (David) (speaker), Miriam Ngidi (speaker), The Baby, Boston, David’s Mother (Tondi)
Related Symbols: Yellow Dog
Page Number: 182
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 11 Quotes

‘Why Boston? What did do it?’

A sudden elation lit up Boston’s face; he tried to smile, but his lips wouldn’t move, and his nose started throbbing, but despite the pain he whispered back at Tsotsi: ‘You are asking me about God.’

‘God.’

‘You are asking me about God, Tsotsi. About God, about God.’

Related Characters: Tsotsi (David) (speaker), Boston (speaker), The Baby, Miriam Ngidi, Morris Tshabalala , Rev. Henry Ransome
Page Number: 205
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 12 Quotes

‘Come man and join in the singing.’

‘Me!’

‘I’m telling you anybody can come. It’s the House of God. I ring His bell. Will you come?’

‘Yes.’

‘Listen tonight, you hear. Listen for me. I will call you to believe in God.’

Related Characters: Tsotsi (David) (speaker), Isaiah (speaker), The Baby, Boston, Morris Tshabalala
Page Number: 219
Explanation and Analysis:

It was a new day and what he had thought out last night was still there, inside him. Only one thing was important to him now. ‘Come back,’ the woman had said. ‘Come back, Tsotsi.’

I must correct her, he thought. ‘My name is David Madondo.’

He said it aloud in the almost empty street, and laughed. The man delivering milk heard him, and looking up said, ‘Peace my brother.’

‘Peace be with you’, David Madondo replied and carried on his way.

Related Characters: Tsotsi (David) (speaker), The Baby, Miriam Ngidi
Page Number: 224-225
Explanation and Analysis:

The slum clearance had entered a second and decisive stage. The white township had grown impatient. The ruins, they said, were being built up again and as many were still coming in as they carried off in lorries to the new locations or in vans to the jails. So they had sent in the bulldozers to raze the buildings completely to the ground.

Related Characters: Tsotsi (David), The Baby, Miriam Ngidi, David’s Mother (Tondi)
Page Number: 225
Explanation and Analysis:

They unearthed him minutes later. All agreed that his smile was beautiful, and strange for a tsotsi, and that when he lay there on his back in the sun, before someone had fetched a blanket, they agreed that it was hard to believe what the back of his head looked like when you saw the smile.

Related Characters: Tsotsi (David), The Baby
Page Number: 226
Explanation and Analysis: