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.
Parents and Children Theme Icon

Tsotsi suggests that the inhumanity of South African apartheid (a period of enforced racial segregation) is clearest in how it separates parents from children. The novel represents family as fundamental to human fellow feeling and moral development. At the novel’s beginning, the gang-leader protagonist, Tsotsi, cannot remember his childhood or anything about his family. He begins to remember his past and thus his own humanity when he starts taking care of—acting as a father toward—an abandoned baby. As Tsotsi remembers more of his childhood, especially his mother, he develops newfound sympathy toward other people, realizing, “Every single person in the world had a mother.” Thus, throughout the story, the novel portrays an awareness of family ties—biological or adopted—as essential to fellow feeling.

Throughout the story, South African apartheid destroys Black families. As a child, Tsotsi loses his mother to a police raid whose purpose is to prevent Black people without special passes from living or working in white areas. Miriam Ngidi loses her husband, and her young baby loses his father, when her husband disappears while participating in a bus boycott—and bus boycotts in apartheid South Africa were usually protests by Black workers against apartheid and its economic exploitation of Black people, which exposed the protesting workers to violence by the white supremacist state. Finally, the demolition of Black homes at the urging of the white township leads to Tsotsi’s death and—it is implied—the death of his adopted baby, as Tsotsi has hidden the baby in an abandoned home and, when the bulldozers come, he is killed trying to save the baby. This pattern throughout the story—in which family is fundamental to humanity, and apartheid destroys families—implies that one of the greatest evils of apartheid lies in its depriving Black children of their parents.

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Parents and Children ThemeTracker

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

Below you will find the important quotes in Tsotsi related to the theme of Parents and Children.
Chapter 4 Quotes

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

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

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 8 Quotes

So she carried on, outwardly adjusting the pattern of her life as best she could, like taking in washing, doing odd cleaning jobs in the nearby white suburb. Inwardly she had fallen into something like a possessive sleep where the same dream is dreamt over and over again. She seldom smiled now, kept to herself and her baby, asked no favours and gave none, hoarding as it were the moments and things in her life.

Related Characters: Tsotsi (David), The Baby, Miriam Ngidi, David’s Mother (Tondi)
Page Number: 135
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 9 Quotes

On she came, until a foot or so away the chain stopped her, and although she pulled at this with her teeth until her breathing was tense and rattled she could go no further, so she lay down there, twisting her body so that the hindquarters fell apart and, like that, fighting all the time, her ribs heaving, she gave birth to the stillborn litter, and then died beside them.

Related Characters: Tsotsi (David), The Baby, David’s Mother (Tondi)
Related Symbols: Yellow Dog
Page Number: 161
Explanation and Analysis:

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:

‘Last night I was sad and I bent on my knees and did pray for something and a voice said, “Why should I give you what you ask me for, when you got no milk for babies.” Please give him to me.’

Related Characters: Miriam Ngidi (speaker), Tsotsi (David), The Baby, David’s Mother (Tondi)
Page Number: 181
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 12 Quotes

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: