We are introduced to his murderous protagonist as he is about to nominate the night’s victim: ‘… the youngest of the four, the one who had said the least, the one they called Tsotsi, leaned forward and brought his slim, delicate hands together, the fingers interlocked in the manner of prayer. The others looked at him and waited.’ Tsotsi’s gang, his apostles, are a drunkard, a psychopath and a thug. Few that reside in this subterranean world have the hope of salvation, including the innocent: rural blacks who have come to the city for work. Their dreams are mocked and they are fed upon and die, or are consumed like raw materials by the white man’s industries.

Fugard only slowly allows us the measure of his monster. He places him in a void of impermanence, against the disappearing geography of Sophiatown. Tsotsi’s very work is transience, the casual termination of human life. He repeats to himself, ‘It is the same as always’, yet Tsotsi knows nothing of himself, not name, nor age, nor origins. Shorn of history, he has no identity, and when he thinks of himself he thinks of darkness. How does one reach an accommodation with such an entity? Initially Fugard implies that it cannot be done; his character appears to have no point of human access, like the malevolent system that has created him.

It is when Tsotsi rediscovers his memory that he realises he is alive, and as in Fugard’s plays, this revelation comes in a collision of shocking, primal images. Thereafter it is as though he cannot close his eyes to life’s intensity. The political background to his circumstances, previously unheeded, begins to intrude. During the period of political ferment that coincided with the rise of the tsotsis – demonstrations against the destruction of Sophiatown, boycotts of the state bus service, rallies against the Pass Laws – the ANC Youth League and the Pan-Africanist Congress had attempted to mobilise young urban blacks including, unsuccessfully, the township gangs. These generally shunned the mass action movements, and it was only with the Soweto student uprising in 1976 that tsotsis joined the common rage against the police and fought their incursions into the townships, some being hailed as revolutionaries. In one of the novel’s anticipatory ironies, Tsotsi, re-entering the community of mankind, is taken by some for a people’s leader.

* * *

After completing the book, Fugard appears to have put it aside and it was discovered twenty years later in a suitcase of his manuscripts stored at South Africa’s National English Documentation Centre. Published in 1980, Tsotsi’s resurrection came as the regime faced growing resistance from the urbanised black proletariat, whose strength the apartheid theorists had feared. Eventually the combination of social and economic pressures would bring about the end of white rule, with the holding of the country’s first democratic elections in 1994. The new South Africa is attempting to overcome persistent crime and unemployment and to offer all its citizens the hope of a better future. Earthbound, lost, blinded by the pain of his oppression but finally capable of transcendence, Tsotsi turns out to be a surprisingly prophetic model for his country’s redemption.