Ever since the 1913 Land Act, which appropriated 77 per cent of the country for white use, successive South African governments had refused to recognise blacks as having residence rights in the townships that sprang up as labour dormitories around the cities. With workers unable to have their families live with them, the resulting social pressures brought prostitution, illegal drinking dives – shebeens – and crime. The phenomenon of township gangsterdom surged in the 1940s, during the great shift to the cities that accompanied burgeoning industrialisation during the Second World War. The authorities made little attempt to understand its causes, preferring only to shut it away from the white cities. In the first post-war election, in 1948, white voters, fearful of an increasingly competitive black workforce, elected the Afrikaner Nationalist Party, which made a barricade of apartheid statutes: influx controls, the Pass Laws, the Group Areas Act.

Aimed at halting black urbanisation, these restricted freedom of movement by permitting blacks to be in the townships only as long as they ministered to white needs. A pass was required to get work. Those caught without one faced prison and deportation back to the jobless black rural ‘homelands’. Avenues of legitimate employment became scarce for township youth. Forced into an underground existence, criminality offered a chance for survival; only the most ruthless might thrive. By the late 1950s, when Fugard wrote this book, tsotsis had become the scourge of people’s already straitened lives in the townships. They preyed on their fellow Africans, robbing, murdering and raping with impunity, for the authorities did little to keep order in the townships apart from the constant ratissage of the Pass raids.

As a child in South Africa I heard about tsotsis and grew up with an impression of their menace, a force of unbridled violence as pitiless and unthinking as the sharks that lay in wait outside the nets off Durban beach. Beyond the perimeter of our ‘civilised’ white euphoria – guarded, we were told, by the thin blue line of the South African Police – lay the township world, shadowy and unfathomable. Tsotsis were its predators, killers with a superlative attention to mortal detail. In my years as a medical student I saw their victims delivered to us with the neatest of wounds. We learned to inspect the collapsed patient for the almost invisible puncture in the armpit from a sharpened bicycle spoke, slipped between the ribs into the heart to cause a tamponade: a squirt of blood into the pericardial sac that as it filled, pressed on the heart, strangling it in its own labour.

Our professors credited these assassins with almost mystical powers of evil, a hermeneutic knowledge of anatomy and physiology that allowed them to calibrate precisely the dimensions of the suffering they wrought. Sometimes, instead of murder, a lancet blade or knife- edged spoke would be stuck into the spine at the exact level to achieve a specific outcome – paraplegia, quadriplegia, with or without the ability to achieve an erection. In these cases the blade was sterilised before use so that vengeance would not be thwarted by an early death from infection.