Tsotsi

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

Introduction copyright © Jonathan Kaplan, 2006

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.

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.

It was while studying medicine that I first saw Fugard perform. In 1972 he’d been involved in the establishment of a theatre called The Space/Die Ruimte/Indawo in a converted warehouse below Cape Town’s old Malay Quarter, where I watched him play opposite his regular collaborator, Yvonne Bryceland, in the theatre’s opening production. Statements after an Arrest under the Immorality Act explored the deformity of human love wrought by authoritarian power – in this case the notorious piece of apartheid legislation officially termed the Prohibition of Mixed Marriages Act – which banned sexual contact, indeed all forms of intimacy, between people of different racial groups.

Fugard himself had had personal experience of the machinery of repression when his passport was revoked by the South African government in 1967 ‘for reasons of state safety and security’, following the production of an earlier work, The Blood Knot, on British television. The first of his plays to be publicly performed – in Johannesburg, in 1961 – The Blood Knot introduced a central theme of Fugard’s work; the struggle of people trapped in bonds of family, love or dependency, oppressed by systems to which they lack the keys of analysis or insight. He had written it over the previous two years, at the same time that he was setting down his only novel, Tsotsi.

Tsotsi had its genesis in Fugard’s rare insight (for a white South African) into the brutality of the apartheid system. Arriving in Johannesburg in 1958 from Port Elizabeth, he had taken the first job available: as a clerk in a Native Commissioner’s Court that dealt with violations of the Pass Laws. ‘Seeing the machinery in action,’ he said, ‘taught me how it works and in fact what it does to people.’ Further understanding came with his introduction to Sophiatown, Johannesburg’s violent, colourful ghetto: ‘… tremendous poverty, a capacity for humour that was almost proverbial, bitterness and hope’.

Sophiatown was a ‘freehold’ township where blacks had historically been allowed to own title to their properties. Its lively jazz and shebeen subculture, where black and white could drink and dance together, formed the febrile centre of an urban African renaissance of music and theatre. The government now set about suppressing this creative independence. Pass raids were stepped up to catch those blacks in the township who were ‘surplus to labour requirements’. Black writers and musicians found themselves banned or forced into exile. Under the Group Areas Act, Sophiatown was ‘re-zoned’ as a white suburb – to be called Triomf (Triumph) – and its demolition began, the area’s long-established neighbourhoods relocated block by block to the grim wasteland of the new South Western Townships, Soweto.

The pressures of survival under extreme conditions had been the motif of Fugard’s first ‘Township’ plays, No-Good Friday (1958) and Nongogo (1959). These were ‘workshop’ productions with amateur actors that used the lives of Sophiatown characters – a jazz musician, a gangster, an aspiring student, a shebeen queen – to reflect apartheid’s damage. The effect of its unsparing regime of humiliation, he suggested, was to abort hope and drive the persecuted to turn on those lower down the survival chain. The character of Fugard’s Tsotsi is a product of this implacable process.

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.

Jonathan Kaplan, November 2005

1

There had been a silence, as always happened at about the same time, a long silence when none of them moved except maybe to lift up a glass and hold it high over their heads for the dregs to drip into their open mouths, or to yawn and stretch and then slump back into their chairs, when one of them might scratch himself, another consider the voice of the woman in the backyard, the old woman who was scolding, rattling her words like stones in a tin, and all of them in their own time looking at the street outside, and the shadows, wondering if they were not yet long enough. It was not a deliberate silence; there was no reason for it, being at first just the pause between something said and the next remark, but growing from that because they were suddenly all without any more words. It ended, as always happened at about the same time, when the young one, the youngest of the four, the one who had said the least, who had sat there and listened to the other three, the one they called Tsotsi, leant forward and brought his slim, delicate hands together, the fingers interlocking in the manner of prayer. The other three looked up at him and waited.

Before that the one called Boston had been telling his story. Boston always had a story. He started early in the afternoon when they came together in Tsotsi’s room and settled down with the first bottle of beer, telling it from then for a long time, almost to the hour when the shadows were long enough and Tsotsi told them what they would be doing that night. He told it slowly, taking his time, the words coming in an easy rhythm between the swallows of beer, the belches, the bother of opening another bottle and the other interruptions like leaving the room for the backyard where you rested against the hot corrugated iron fence with an outstretched arm and pissed into the sand, and watched it soak up and dry away before you had left the spot. When he got back he would ask, where was I, and sometimes someone remembered and most times no one cared because it wasn’t important. All that mattered was that his voice filled that last reluctant hour of an afternoon that was heavy with the weight of idle hands. They toyed with their glasses, they drew out the wet rings left by the beer bottles into strange patterns on the tabletop, while Boston with a gesture that was becoming habitual rubbed his eyes with the thumb and forefinger of his right hand. It was a strain to be without glasses.

The other two were mostly listeners. Die Aap, so called because of his long arms—his knuckles seemed to drag in the dust—listened attentively to every word. Sometimes he had something to say, or asked a question, and he laboured a lot in finding words and putting them together. The last of the four, the one called Butcher, built like Tsotsi with lithe supple bones, but different in his small, dangerous eyes and his pendulous lower lip, Butcher also listened, but with impatience. Why all the words? His stories were told in ten words or less. But there was nothing else to do except listen.