Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Tsotsi, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Apartheid and Racism
Parents and Children
Identity and Memory
Hatred, Sympathy, and God
Habit vs. Choice
Summary
Analysis
Cassim is trying to sell a woman fabric in his shop when a young man (Tsotsi) walks in. Cassim checks who else is in the shop, counts eight people, and judges it “enough.” He looks at Tsotsi and sees a bad “type.” He sells fabric to the woman, looks again, and sees Tsotsi is gone. When he asks his wife whether she saw him, his wife replies, “God forgive us.” Tsotsi comes back half an hour later. Cassim, scared, gives an older male customer extra tobacco and tells the customer frenetically about his mother back in India and about Indian history. Again, Tsotsi leaves. Cassim wonders aloud to his wife what Tsotsi wanted.
As soon as Tsotsi walks into Cassim’s shop, Cassim is looking around to make sure there are “enough” people to protect him from Tsotsi. Cassim and his wife look at Tsotsi and see a “type,” not an individual. This detail suggests that while Tsotsi has chosen to embrace his stereotyped “gangster” identity, other people also impose that stereotype on him. It also suggests that apartheid’s white supremacist ideology affects not only how white people see non-white people, but also how non-white people see each other. Although Cassim is Indian, another legally oppressed racial class under South African apartheid, he seems to have absorbed racist stereotypes about young Black men.
Themes
Tsotsi comes back when there are no other customers. Cassim’s wife and children hide in a back room. Tsotsi demands milk, but Cassim thinks he must have misheard. Tsotsi again demands milk. Cassim, so afraid he cannot see Tsotsi’s face, asks what kind. Tsotsi says, “Baby milk.” Cassim runs to the door behind which his family is hiding and says, “Baby milk!” His family starts crying because they think Tsotsi has stabbed Cassim. Their tears remind Cassim of something. He runs to Tsotsi, tells him he wants condensed milk, and grabs a tin. Tsotsi examines the tin. Cassim, realizing Tsotsi can’t read the label, tells Tsotsi it’s excellent baby milk. Tsotsi pays Cassim and leaves.
Cassim simply cannot believe that Tsotsi is trying to find milk for a baby. His disbelief reveals that due to his stereotypes about poor young Black men like Tsotsi, he cannot imagine Tsotsi in the role of parent or caretaker. By revealing that Tsotsi cannot read, meanwhile, the novel hints at the poverty and lack of education from which Tsotsi has suffered in his mysterious past.
Themes
Tsotsi, leaving Cassim’s store, makes himself stop while holding the tin to show himself he doesn’t care whether anyone is watching him, even though it doesn’t seem “right” to him to buy baby milk.
Tsotsi, like Cassim, has embraced negative stereotypes about himself and does not feel “right” taking on the positive role of parent or caretaker—yet, curiously, he takes on the role anyway.
Themes
It’s Saturday. On Saturdays, people are happy because the work week is over, they’ve been paid, and the next day is Sunday, also not a workday. Tsotsi ignores this Saturday behavior because he recognizes it. He rushes home, reinforces the door with a chair, blocks a hole in the wall with some wood, and removes the shoebox from under his bed. Although the baby smells, Tsotsi is too shocked by its being to notice: “This was man. This small, almost ancient, very useless and abandoned thing was the beginning of a man.”
By describing what people habitually do on Saturdays, the novel reminds us that most people, not just Tsotsi, follow habits or patterns of behavior. Tsotsi’s secretiveness when he gets back to his room reminds the reader that he, by contrast, is doing something unusual and strange for him: assuming a caretaking, parental role. Tsotsi’s association of the baby with “man”—that is, with all mankind—suggests that in addition to having stereotyped identities and real, individual identities, people can also have true group identities like “human.” By attributing the group identity of “man” to the baby—an identity that Tsotsi, of course, also shares—Tsotsi may be starting to identify with and thus sympathize with the baby.
Themes
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Tsotsi, becoming aware of the smell, lays a coat on his table, removes the baby from the box, and puts it on the coat. He feels “proud” for using the coat but then “frown[s] at himself.” Deducing the bad smell is coming from the baby, not the box, Tsotsi tries to figure out what to do. He decides to take off the baby’s “rags” and replace them with his own clothes.
This passage reveals Tsotsi’s ambivalent feelings about taking on a parental or caretaking role. On the one hand, he is “proud” of caring for the baby, but on the other hand, he “frown[s]” at his own pride—which implies that he thinks pride in caretaking is incompatible with the stereotyped “gangster” identity he has cultivated.
Themes
Tsotsi fetches a shirt from the cardboard box he uses as a dresser. Unwrapping the baby, he notices its rags used to be “a torn petticoat and an old pair of blue bloomers.” The baby cries, which disconcerts Tsotsi. When he has unwrapped the baby, he realizes with surprise that the baby is male. Lifting him out of the rags, Tsotsi sees that the baby has been lying in feces. He cleans the baby with some of the rags, rewraps him in his shirt, and returns him to the shoebox.
That the baby has been wrapped in “a torn petticoat and an old pair of blue bloomers”—that is, women’s underclothes—hints that his mother did want to care for him (she took the trouble to wrap him) but lacked the necessary resources (she couldn’t afford baby clothes). Given the poverty in which apartheid keeps the novel’s Black characters, this detail may be implying that a lack of economic opportunity in a white supremacist society prevented the woman from being able to provide for her child and thus made her desperate enough to abandon him.
Themes
Tsotsi looks at the tin, whose label he recognizes but can’t read. He remembers trying to feed the baby bread and water that morning. He knows condensed milk and baby’s milk aren’t the same, but Cassim told him the tin’s label said baby’s milk. The baby keeps crying. Tsotsi wishes Boston was here, but he cuts off that thought because it’s “too late.” He tells the baby that it’ll drink the condensed milk the same way he does.
Tsotsi wishes for his one educated acquaintance, Boston, to help him with the baby, despite having violently attacked Boston the last time they talked—which suggests both how seriously Tsotsi takes caring for the baby and how out of his depth he feels in assuming a parental role.
Themes
Tsotsi pokes holes in the tin with his knife, tries the milk, and pours some onto a spoon. He gives some to the baby, who stops crying. After feeding the baby 10 spoonsful, Tsotsi stops and looks out the window. He worries that Butcher and Die Aap may visit soon and discover him taking care of the baby. Tsotsi decides he needs to take the baby elsewhere. He considers taking him to Soekie but imagines her asking where and why he obtained a baby. Then, he asks himself why he took the baby but quickly dismisses that question in favor of the more practical question: where.
Previously, Tsotsi’s knife reinforced his stereotyped “gangster” identity. Now, he is using it, rather awkwardly and inappropriately, to open a milk tin for a baby—a use that represents Tsotsi’s shift away from his “gangster” identity and toward a parental role. Yet Tsotsi still identifies somewhat with the mindless gangster stereotype: he doesn’t want the other gang members to know about the baby, and he refuses to explore his own inner world by thinking about his motives for accepting the baby.
Themes
Out the window, Tsotsi sees “one of the demolition squads,” men whose job it is to destroy the township piece by piece. He decides to stash the baby in one of the deserted, demolished areas, near the white suburb. Tsotsi packs up the milk and spoon, puts the lid over the baby in the shoebox, and leaves his room.
Under apartheid law, people had to live in racially segregated neighborhoods. To enforce segregation, the government would order demolished any non-white neighborhoods they thought were too close to white neighborhoods and force the non-white residents to move elsewhere. The “demolition squads” that Tsotsi sees have the job of destroying the non-white neighborhoods near the white suburb.
Themes
Walking through the ruins, Tsotsi does not think about why the demolitions occurred. The ruins are deserted. The only people who used to visit them were children who “scavenge[d]” or played there, but even the children have now deserted this place. Tsotsi decides to put the baby in the ruin that used to be a woman named MaRhabatse’s house. The men demolishing the house had to remove the door to her room because she was so large she couldn’t get through. Her exit foreshadowed the destruction of the whole township. Tsotsi decides on her house’s ruin because part of its roof is still in place, and he wants the baby to have shade.
The anecdote about MaRhabatse illustrates how apartheid’s destruction of non-white neighborhoods to enforce segregation cruelly uprooted non-white individuals who had been living in the same community for a long time. That Tsotsi doesn’t think about the reasons for the demolitions implies that he ignores not only his individual past and identity but his group identity as a member of a historically oppressed class, Black South Africans.
Themes
Tsotsi opens the shoebox to check on the baby, puts it in the shadowed corner, and thinks. He has realized that taking and caring for the baby doesn’t “fit into the pattern of his life.” Tsotsi asks himself why he’s cared for the baby, when usually he kills. He wonders whether he plans to kill the baby in some special way. Although Tsotsi wishes that were the case, he realizes that he is “chancing his hand at a game he [has] never dared play and the baby [is] the dice.”
Before encountering the baby, Tsotsi clung tightly to his stereotyped “gangster” activity and violent habits. When he compares taking care of the baby to playing dice, he is acknowledging that in taking on a parental role, he is gambling with—and may lose—his whole previous identity and “the pattern of his life.”
Themes
Tsotsi recalls the details of the night before: the baby’s cry, the woman giving him the shoebox, the lid coming off and revealing the baby. All of a sudden, Tsotsi had a memory of a “yellow bitch”—that is, a yellow dog, which is female—“crawling” at him and “whimper[ing].” Tsotsi came back from the memory kneeling and saw the baby on the ground. The baby had summoned a memory of Tsotsi’s, which made him curious—and terrified him, because he’d never wanted to know about his past before. He now realizes that he kept the baby because the baby inspired a memory, and he wanted it to happen again. Tsotsi leaves the baby in the demolished ruins but resolves to come back to feed him the following day.
Tsotsi experiences his flashback to the yellow dog immediately after the desperate woman abandons her baby with him—thus, the novel clearly connects the yellow dog to the idea of failed or destroyed families. Yet the dog remains mysterious. For example, the reader does not know why it was “crawling” or “whimper[ing]” or in what context Tsotsi saw it. This mystery hints at revelations yet to come. Meanwhile, Tsotsi’s realization that he wants to remember his past is a major turning point for the character: he is moving further from his stereotyped “gangster” identity and beginning to seek his true, individual identity.
Themes
