The Birth of Tsotsi

Athol Fugard began these indelible notes about Tsotsi in December 1960, as he and his wife Sheila embarked at Southampton for the Cape after a year in England and Europe. He records the sweet sorrow of their departure, his yearning for his homeland and the writing life waiting for him there. With this presentiment of great things to come he sketched, over the next few weeks, the entire plan of the novel.

Fugard made notes on his major characters and his setting of Sophiatown, the black township which the authorities had destroyed in the late fifties to make way for homes for whites. One of the scenes he alludes to, the ‘confrontation with the priest in the church’, was later edited out of the published novel.

Fugard continued writing notes after he disembarked in Cape Town, and then in Port Elizabeth, where he was staying with his parents and his sister Glenda. His impres sions of the country he hadn’t seen for a year became inseparable from the book he was writing. The man with shrivelled legs, wearing an umbrella on his head, whom he saw in his mother’s café, was transformed for instance into Morris Tshabalala, whose life Tsotsi spares in the novel. His last note about Tsotsi dates from January 1961.

December 1960

Departure from Southampton to the Cape.

The ship’s brass-band playing patriotic British music. Nostalgia and a flood of sentiment. Sheila in tears—myself too, but suppressed. Indulged this mood, savoured the bittersweet of our leaving. The last tug that had followed us to the harbour was turning away, our ship was slipping, alone, into the ocean. Gulls, black and sinister, hung overhead, like spiders waiting in the web of spars and cables. The lights, remote now. The sea, cold and quick. A strong wind tearing down one side of the ship. A pale full moon, sailing abreast of us through storm clouds.

The moment was charged with an ominous presentiment of a dark future—and we were sailing to the Cape and sunshine!

The evening on deck. Biting cold. Wind and spray. I let the wind into my hair and through my nostrils and mouth into the furthermost crannies of my skull. Gone were the cobwebs of Europe and the past twelve months. I felt awakened—renewed—in life I again see the dimension, the big dimension. The ‘big conception’ of my youth. The spars were singing. God! How could I forget so much. Life is big, its possibilities infinite.

Joburg to Orlando train. Tsotsis. Bicycle spoke—death.

The idea for a story—criminal: completely shrouded in darkness. At a moment—a stab of light and pain. This followed, developed, in the span of a short time leads to the full Christian experience after a meeting with a priest in an empty church.

The end—a life saved. (A useless life saved? Old man?) Held and refusing to let go. Carried, cherished—dying with it? Love.

His dark shroud expressed in nihilism, anarchy. Hate.

‘Nothing is precious. Nothing is worth keeping. Destruction.’ And then to find something precious. Shoebox baby.