Tsotsi

Athol Fugard

Contents (3)

Athol Fugard is one of the world's greatest living dramatists. His career spans over fifty years of playwriting, stage and film acting, and directing. He has worked in South Africa, on and off Broadway and in London. Tsotsi is his only novel.

The Canons edition published in Great Britain in 2019 by Canongate Books

First published in Great Britain in 2009 by Canongate Books Ltd, 14 High Street, Edinburgh EH1 1TE

This digital edition first published in Great Britain in 2009 by Canongate Books

First published in Great Britain in 1983 by Penguin Books Ltd

First published in the USA in 1980 by Random House, Inc.

First published in South Africa in 1980 by Ad. Donker (Pty) Ltd

canongate.co.uk

The right of Athol Fugard to be identified as the
author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance
with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available on request from the British Library

ISBN 978 1 78689 615 5

eISBN 978 1 84767 476 0

CONTENTS

Introduction, by Jonathan Kaplan

Tsotsi

The Birth of Tsotsi

About the Author

Introduction

JONATHAN KAPLAN

‘Tsotsi’ was a style. Young black men in Johannesburg’s townships, entranced by 1940s American gangster films, adopted their dress-sense along with their contempt for law and order. ‘Life was cheap; the gun and the knife ruled at night’, recalled Nelson Mandela in his autobiography Long Walk to Freedom. ‘Gangsters – known as tsotsis – carrying flick-knives or switchblades were plentiful and prominent; in those days they emulated American movie stars and wore fedoras and double- breasted suits and wide, colourful ties.’ The word tsotsi may have been derived from an Africanisation of ‘zootsuit’, or perhaps it came from the Sesotho term ho tsotsa, meaning ‘to make sharp’. Besides a look, it evolved its own argot, tsotsitaal, a fluid amalgam of phrases from the Babel of languages prevailing in South Africa, with regional variations; in one township Afrikaans-based, in another structured on Zulu.

It is this range of cultural influences that illuminates Athol Fugard’s plays, his dialogue a richly idiomatic mix of English, Afrikaans and African languages that expresses to the South African ear explicit gradations of social standing. Born in the eastern Cape in 1932, near the village of Middelburg in the arid Karoo, Harold Athol Lannigan Fugard was the child of a father of English descent and an Afrikaner mother. His childhood was spent in the company of the black workers in the tearoom run by his family in the town of Port Elizabeth. The racial discrimination that he observed while growing up would eventually set into the rigid ideology of apartheid, whose consequences have provided the baleful energy behind much of Fugard’s writing.