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
On Sunday, the Church of Christ the Redeemer rings its bell. People throughout the township hear it—including Boston, lying somewhere unknown staring at his own arm without recognizing it. Meanwhile, the Reverend Ransome glances out his window at congregants filing into the church. He becomes suddenly, helplessly enraged, thinking, “Go home. It’s no good. I didn’t know his name.” Yet he hurriedly leaves for church and prays to God for aid.
In this passage, religion brings people together, in that everyone in the township hears the church bells at the same time. Yet the white Reverend—whom the reader would expect to feel positively about religion—casts doubt on the ability of religion to unite people across racial groups when he remembers that he even didn’t know the poor Black worker Gumboot Dhlamini’s name, despite presiding over his funeral. Thus, the passage implies both that religion can unify people and that it still isn’t powerful enough to overcome South African segregation and racism.
Themes
Tsotsi walks into the ruins and sees an “uncertain line” on the wall, the shoebox, and the corner. It reminds him of a day when he was playing with Boston’s pencil in his room, drawing on the table, until he glanced at Boston, got angry at his expression, and broke the pencil. He says aloud, “Jesus. Ants”—the condensed milk has attracted ants to the room. When Tsotsi opens the shoebox, he finds ants around the baby’s mouth. Though his first impulse is to get rid of the baby, Tsotsi cleans the baby’s face and puts the shoebox in a shaded corner without ants. He kills the ants on the wall and in the corner.
Tsotsi doesn’t really know how to care for a baby, despite his decision to take on a parental role: he got the wrong food for the baby, which attracted ants, which in turn harmed the baby. That Tsotsi continues to care for the baby despite his first impulse to flee from his mistakes shows that he is continuing to exercise his free choice to take on a new role and identity, even when it is difficult.
Themes
Tsotsi realizes the baby needs food and clean clothes. He examines the baby, feels sympathy, and remembers Morris. He considers buying more condensed milk but rejects the idea. Killing more ants, he remembers Butcher harassing the woman with a baby. Tsotsi concocts a plan. He takes the baby from the box, bundles it in his coat, and leaves.
Tsotsi associates the baby with Morris because he feels sympathy for both. This association suggests that the more people you sympathize with, the easier it becomes to recognize and sympathize with the common humanity in everyone.
Themes
Tsotsi’s room is down the street from a “communal tap” called Waterworks Square. Day and night, people come there to collect water. Because the line is long, people talk while waiting, and the tap is “rooted in their lives.” The church even uses its water to baptize infants who will soon have to wait in line for water themselves. On Sunday, an 18-year-old mother named Miriam Ngidi is waiting in the line while carrying her baby. She looks at her baby Simon, he waves to her, and she feels intensely proud of him.
That people in the township must wait in long lines for a necessity like water shows the poverty in which non-white people lived under apartheid. In mentioning that the water baptizes infants who will soon enough be waiting in the line, the novel suggests both religion’s social importance in the township and its inability to improve the material conditions of the township. Miriam and her son Simon, meanwhile, are noteworthy in that they are the first positive mother-child relationship represented in the novel—in contrast with Tsotsi, who cannot remember his mother, and with the woman who abandoned her baby to Tsotsi’s care.
Themes
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Miriam moves forward in line, feels her baby falling asleep on her back, and wonders where her husband, also named Simon, has gone. She wonders how a man in love, who’s gotten a woman pregnant, can just vanish on his way to work. When he vanished, Miriam was eight months pregnant. She walked Simon’s six-mile route to his factory job looking for him. The workers were all walking to their jobs at this time due to a bus boycott.
In apartheid South Africa, bus boycotts were one way that Black workers protested their legal and economic oppression. As Miriam’s husband vanished during a bus boycott, the novel may be implying that he was imprisoned or killed for his political activities.
Themes
A voice tells Miriam that if she falls asleep, the others will cut her in line. Miriam moves forward with the line, looks back toward the voice, and sees an elderly man. He asks Miriam about herself. After hesitating about whether to ask him the questions she asks all strangers, she tells him that her husband vanished on his way to work. The elderly man says that happened to many people. Miriam asks whether the man has seen Simon and tells him Simon’s name, address, and description, but she stops talking when she sees the look in the man’s eyes.
The elderly man’s claim that many people vanished on their way to work strengthens the implication that Black workers walking to their jobs during the bus boycott suffered racist violence in retaliation. Miriam’s hopelessness upon seeing the look in the man’s eyes, meanwhile, shows her fear that apartheid’s white supremacist culture has permanently taken her husband away from her and their son.
Themes
Miriam fills the elderly man’s tin, fills her own, and walks back to her room. There, she reflects that the elderly man told the truth—a lot of people did vanish on their way to work during the boycott. Yet most of them returned after time in jail, whereas Simon didn’t. Miriam asks aloud the question she only asks in this room she used to share with Simon: “Are you dead?”
That many of the boycotting workers spent time in jail reveals that it was primarily the white police who retaliated against them. This fact suggests that the police may have harmed Miriam’s husband as well and tightens the connection between the apartheid government and the destruction of Miriam’s family.
Themes
Miriam finds it easier to believe that Simon is alive when she’s out in the world, where she might run into him. At home, she thinks it’s likely he’s dead. Despite her grief, she has “carried on” with the new “pattern of her life” by getting jobs washing clothes and cleaning for white people. Yet she doesn’t socialize, trade favors, or share herself with others.
Due to the trauma that apartheid has caused her and her family, Miriam has gotten stuck in a “pattern” or set of habits and begun avoiding positive, sympathetic connections with other people—somewhat like Tsotsi at the beginning of the novel.
Themes
Someone knocks on Miriam’s door. She hopes it’s Simon, though he wouldn’t knock on his own door. When she opens it, she sees “just another young man” and asks him what he wants. The man (Tsotsi) checks behind him that no one else is around. Before Miriam can close the door, he covers her mouth, barrels into the room, and tells her he’ll kill the baby if she tries to escape or makes noise. He lets her go, examines the baby, and tells her to come with him. When she won’t move, he again threatens to kill her baby and tells her what he wants “won’t take long.” She flinches. He says, “It’s not that.” When she asks whether she can get someone to take care of the baby, he insists it won’t take long.
Earlier in the novel, characters such as Cassim and Morris have looked at Tsotsi and immediately identified him as a stereotype, a “gangster.” By contrast, Miriam looks at him and sees “just another young man.” This contrast illustrates Miriam’s disconnection from the social world, yet it may also foreshadow Miriam seeing Tsotsi more clearly as an individual than other characters have been able to do. Nevertheless, this passage does show Tsotsi falling back on his old, violent habits. Rather than asking for Miriam’s help, he coerces her, threatening her child and accidentally making her believe he plans to rape her.
Themes
Tsotsi walks to his room with Miriam following. He makes her enter ahead of him. He pulls her to the bed, where she sees a baby. He demands she feed the baby. When she doesn’t react, he rips open her shirt and repeats his demand. Miriam hides her breasts and retreats, disgusted by the strange baby with the bad smell. The situation has elicited her ungenerous, antisocial instincts. She tells Tsotsi the baby is too filthy to feed, so Tsotsi demands she clean and then feed the baby. He takes out his knife and, again, threatens to kill Miriam’s baby if she doesn’t do what he says.
Although Miriam is mother to a young child herself, she at first feels no sympathy for the neglected baby that Tsotsi wants her to help. Miriam’s lack of generosity here suggests that under conditions of threat and stress, people are less likely to react sympathetically to others. Similarly, Tsotsi regresses because he is worried about the baby: he falls back on his old, violent habits and brandishes the knife that represents his stereotyped “gangster” identity.
Themes
Miriam cleans the baby and dresses him in Tsotsi’s rags. Once cleaned, the baby no longer disgusts her. She shuts her eyes and feeds him, which triggers “a sudden wave of erotic feeling in her.” She would not have resisted much if Tsotsi had raped her then. When the baby finishes feeding, Miriam is exhausted. She puts him on the bed, feels the wounds around his mouth, and glances at Tsotsi. Tsotsi twice tells her that ants did it, but she doesn’t seem to grasp his meaning.
This strange and arguably sexist passage seems to imply that women so instinctively identify as mothers that they find breastfeeding “erotic,” which in turn makes women in caretaking roles vulnerable to men’s sexual advances.
Themes
Miriam fixes her clothes, walks to the door, and asks where the baby’s mother is. Tsotsi shrugs. Miriam says: “a bitch in a backyard would look after its puppies better.” Tsotsi, for some reason scared, tells her no. Miriam, mishearing it as “go,” leaves.
Just as Morris frightened Tsotsi by calling him “whelp of a yellow bitch”—in other words, puppy of a yellow female dog—so Miriam frightens Tsotsi by talking about female dogs and puppies. Tsotsi’s strange fear underlines the importance of the yellow dog to his psychology and heightens the mystery surrounding it.
Themes
Sunday night arrives. People gather and speak “dispiritedly” about their exhaustion and work the next day. Eventually, they go to bed. Tsotsi stays awake. He’s carried the baby when it cried, put it in his bed, and sat. He’s trying not to dislodge a memory that has come to him, which he replays over and over.
This passage contrasts people’s habitual actions—the things they do every Sunday—with Tsotsi’s sudden, singular revelation of a new memory. This contrast suggests that the memory will be very important for Tsotsi’s development.
Themes
