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
In a flashback, a child (David) listens to his mother hum with “warm security.” An elderly woman says his mother seems happy. His mother agrees and sings more loudly. David is on the floor in a little room listening to his mother and watching a fly hit the window. He recognizes everything in his world and feels “comforted.”
This family scene, with its “security” and comfort, contrasts with the impoverished, dangerous situations that Black characters living under apartheid have suffered throughout the novel. Because this chapter comes directly after Tsotsi has gained a new memory, the reader may suspect that this chapter contains Tsotsi’s childhood memories. The singing mother reminds the reader of Morris’s claim that mothers sing to their children. Since Tsotsi denied that mothers sing to their children, this connection may foreshadow that something will happen to stop David from hearing his mother’s singing.
Themes
The elderly woman asks, “What time tomorrow, my child?” The mother says, “He says to be here all day.” The elderly woman suggests that this is typical male behavior. The mother asks whether, after years, one more day of waiting matters.
The novel has not yet made clear who “he” is. Yet given the frequency with which family separations occur in the novel—a mother abandoning her child to Tsotsi, Tsotsi forgetting his parents, Miriam losing her husband while pregnant with his child—the reader may suspect that “he” is a lost family member who is finally returning.
Themes
The mother asks David to bring the salt. While he’s fetching it, he hears the elderly woman ask whether he knows. His mother says yes, and the elderly woman asks what he says about it. His mother says that he’s too young to remember. David runs to his mother with the salt, and she hugs him. Looking at the old woman, he thinks about his fear and respect for her: fear, since she pinched him hard when he misbehaved, and respect, because adults respect her and because she really sees him and doesn’t laugh at him.
It seems that the mother and the elderly woman have ceased talking about the unidentified “he” and have started talking about the child David, since the mother mentions that “he” is too young to remember. Although the passage leaves unstated what David doesn’t remember, the reader may guess that David can’t remember the lost “he” who has been absent for years. David’s thoughts about the elderly woman suggest that she has taken on a quasi-parental role with respect to him: she punishes him when he misbehaves, but she also sees him, understands him, and takes him seriously—in other words, sympathizes with him.
Themes
The elderly woman asks whether David looks like him. David’s mother says yes. The elderly woman calls David, but David hesitates until his mother tells him to go. The elderly woman asks his age. After his mother encourages him, he tells the old woman he’s 10. The old woman says 10 is very young—David hasn’t yet “been born to the troubles of this world.” David’s mother says he will be. They lapse into silence.
The elderly woman’s question about whether David looks like the unidentified “him” implies that “he” is an older male relative—most likely David’s father, since the novel has made no mention of a father being present in the house. The mother’s comment that David will soon be “born to the troubles of this world,” meanwhile, ominously suggests that apartheid South Africa threatens Black children’s wellbeing and innocence and foreshadows trouble for David.
Themes
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David goes into the yard and stops a “safe distance” from the yellow dog. David and the dog once played together, but now she snarls if he comes near to where she’s tied up. David edges close to her and prepares to edge closer before running away. His mother comes out and tells him to stop it. When he complains that the dog won’t play with him anymore, his mother says he’ll have “other playmates soon enough.”
The yellow dog’s appearance may strengthen the reader’s suspicion that this chapter represents Tsotsi’s childhood memories. The mother’s comment that David will have “other playmates soon enough” implies that the yellow dog is pregnant with puppies—a fact that partially explains why Tsotsi associates the yellow dog with babies and mothers but does not reveal why the memory has so much traumatic weight for him.
Themes
The mother sends David to fetch a mat. He gets it out. She gives him food to bring to the elderly lady, who pretends not to notice she’s taking it, because she lacks a family and would starve without David’s mother. David, his mother, and the elderly woman eat dinner. At the meal’s end, David’s mother tells him his father will arrive the next day. For a long time, David’s mother has been saying his father would come back, and now the time has come.
This passage reveals that the elderly woman is not related to David and his mother and makes explicit that the man David’s mother is expecting is David’s father. In tandem, these two facts suggests that the elderly woman has taken on a quasi-parental role toward David, not because of any biological obligation, but because his father—for reasons not yet explained—has been absent.
Themes
Because David’s mother told David his father is warm, laughing, and soft, David imagines his father “glowing,” laughing constantly, and covered in feathers. He imagines his father flying home. After dinner, David and his mother go to bed. In bed, David’s mother talks more about David’s father and the past. David falls into a dream about himself and his mother riding on his flying, feathered father’s back. Out of nowhere, a storm comes and begins driving them out of the air.
Although David’s home seems secure and comforting in contrast with most other settings in the novel, this passage reveals the sadness of David’s family situation: he was deprived of his father for unknown reasons when he was too young to know his father or fully understand what was happening. The storm attacking David’s reunited family in his dream foreshadows trouble for them.
Themes
David wakes. He hears stones on lamp-posts—a signal that the police are about to raid the neighborhood. Policemen break down the door to David’s house and come with flashlights into the room where he and his mother are sleeping. He begins to cry out, but his mother grabs him and tells him not to, so he stops.
That the people in David’s neighborhood have a signal to alert their neighbors of a police raid implies raids are both common and threatening—hinting at how the apartheid government uses the police to regulate and oppress Black people and how Black people resist this oppression.
Themes
From the street David hears voices, police vans, people being moved, and people hiding. The police look to him like “enormous khaki-coated shadows.” He hears one say, “Pas kaffir.” His mother tries to say something. They grab her out of bed and take her away without letting her put other clothes on. She yells back at David not to cry. Then he sees the police shove her into one of their vans and shut the door.
By noting that the police look to David like “enormous khaki-coated shadows,” the novel emphasizes how young David is and how frightening this situation is for him. One policeman, demanding David’s mother’s pass, calls her a “kaffir”—an anti-Black racial slur—which suggests that the policeman is personally racist as well as an enforcer of racist laws (apartheid law required Black people to carry passes and regulated where they could live or travel). Here, the reader sees how apartheid law can destroy Black families by separating parents from children—just as apartheid South Africa’s economically oppressive white supremacist society seems to have separated Gumboot Dhlamini from his pregnant wife, motivated the young mother to abandon her baby to Tsotsi, and taken Miriam’s husband from her and their son.
Themes
Once the police have crammed the vans with people, they leave. The people in the vans call out instructions about money, courts, police, and what to bring them, but it’s difficult to hear full sentences. The vans leave, and eventually the neighborhood sinks into quiet. The people in the neighborhood feel the destructiveness of the police raid less in the physical damage than in the emotional injury it leaves behind. After they have cleaned up a bit, they go to bed because they have no other options.
The people the police have arrested are calling out instructions to those left behind, which suggests that such arrests are common and that people believe they know what to do in response. Yet the novel makes clear that those left behind can’t hear the arrested people well, implying that their instructions may be fruitless. The sense of powerlessness that haunts the neighborhood after the police leave underscores the lack of legal rights Black people had under apartheid: those left behind do not believe the law will treat their loved ones fairly.
Themes
David stays in bed without moving. His mother has promised him many times that if someone takes her away, he should wait in their room, and she will come back. He listens for noise indicating she’s coming. He hears the yellow dog outside but not his mother. He begins to call out for her.
This passage reveals that David’s mother has explained to him what to do if she is arrested, which shows that their Black neighborhood is constantly under threat from white police enforcing racist apartheid laws. Since David hears the yellow dog after his mother’s arrest, the reader may begin to understand why Tsotsi associates the dog with children separated from their mothers.
Themes
The elderly woman calls back to ask what’s the matter, comes into the room, and examines it. She asks where David’s mother is. When he doesn’t reply, she asks whether it was the police. He wails for his mother and makes for the door. The elderly woman catches him, waits for him to finish struggling and yelling, and puts him back in bed. He cries until he falls asleep.
The elderly woman guesses right away that the police have taken David’s mother, which underlines once again how regularly the police raid David’s neighborhood. Here, she steps into a quasi-parental role, caring for David in his mother’s absence.
Themes
David wakes up in the morning and, for a moment, doesn’t remember the police have taken his mother. When the elderly woman offers him coffee, the memory comes back. He demands to know where his mother is. The elderly woman replies, “Where is God in Heaven?” When David begins to cry, the elderly woman asks what kind of man he’ll be when he grows up. David stops crying, drinks some coffee, and reassures himself that his mother will come back.
The elderly woman’s strange rhetorical question in response to David asking about his mother shows, once again, religion’s powerlessness to protect Black South Africans against white supremacist oppression: the elderly woman seems to be implying that God is absent from their lives, just as David’s mother is now absent.
Themes
The elderly woman dresses and tells David she’s going to search for his mother. David says his mother promised to return. The elderly woman says she’ll take David’s mother her dress and help her come back. David asks to accompany the elderly woman, but she tells him to wait for his father to arrive.
The elderly woman is trying to help David’s family by finding his mother, but she’s also leaving a young child alone. That she has to choose between finding David’s mother and supervising David shows the impossible situations in which apartheid puts Black adults trying to fulfill parental roles.
Themes
When the elderly woman leaves, David is terrified of meeting his father without his mother. He waits in bed and falls asleep around noon. Someone wakes him up by knocking on the door and calling, “Tondi.” David flees into the back yard and hides in a chicken coop. He hears footsteps and a voice continuing to call for “Tondi.” Another voice calls out that Tondi is gone—the police took her.
From context, the reader can assume that “Tondi” is David’s mother’s name and that the person searching for her is David’s father, now returned. Yet without a supervising adult, David has no one to introduce him to his father, whom he’s never met. He’s naturally afraid of an unknown intruder in his house.
Themes
The voice keeps crying Tondi’s name. David hears “wild breaking noise” from the house. Footsteps travel into the yard. The yellow dog snarls, and then David hears her yell in pain. The footsteps move away, the voice cries, “Tondi! I’m come back,” and then David can only hear the dog’s pained noises.
The “wild breaking noise” from the house implies that David’s father is so upset by his wife’s arrest—the day before their family was supposed to reunite—that he destroys something. The yellow dog snarling and then yelling in pain, meanwhile, implies that she warns off or attempts to attack David’s father, who responds by hurting her.
Themes
David looks at the yellow dog. Someone has kicked her and broken her back legs. She crawls toward the coop with her front legs until she hits the end of her chain. She lies down, births dead puppies, and dies. All day David watches flies collect around the bodies. Then he runs away from the coop.
In his anger at Tondi’s arrest, David’s father has fatally harmed the yellow dog. That the yellow dog and her puppies die the day after David’s mother is arrested (and as an indirect result of her arrest) suggests that the yellow dog represents how apartheid destroys families and separates parents from children. It is now clear why a baby abandoned by his mother triggered the memory of the yellow dog in Tsotsi—it reminded him of his own childhood separation from his mother.
Themes
At night, David is cold, hungry, and unsure what day it is when a group of children approach him. They ask who he is, where he came from, and whether he has a mother or father. When he doesn’t answer, they decide David is one of them and invite him to join them. They take him to the river, where they sleep in pipes, and offer him water, bread, and orange peels.
The existence of these homeless, parentless children implies that poverty and oppression under apartheid have destroyed many more families than just David’s.
Themes
The group’s youngest boy, Simon, won’t eat. The others examine his swollen belly and say he’s “going like Willie.” When David asks who Willie is, someone replies that they “put him away.” The group decides to give David—whose name they haven’t learned—Willie’s name. They decide the day was a failure because they got so little food and agree to “try somewhere else” the next day. David asks what they mean, but they don’t seem to understand the question.
Simon’s swollen belly is a symptom of malnutrition. This fact, together with the children’s discussion of Willie—who seems to have died and been “put away,” that is, buried or dumped, by the other children—reveals that these parentless children never have enough to eat and sometimes starve. This fact highlights how dysfunctional and oppressive apartheid South Africa is.
Themes
A boy called Petah says he’ll show David where to sleep, tells him they’ll get him a better name than the “dead” Willie, says they’ll be friends, and demands David say something. Then he leads David into a pipe, where Petah falls asleep. David realizes the pipes are warm and tries to remember where else was warm. He remembers singing and a voice telling him not to move. Realizing there’s somewhere he ought to be, he climbs out of the pipe.
The reader will remember that Tsotsi encounters Petah after he has lost his memory and that Petah calls him “David.” Petah’s appearance here is more evidence that David is Tsotsi as a child. At this point, David can only confusedly remember his mother’s singing and that he was supposed to wait for her, which reveals that the trauma of her disappearance has already caused him to start losing his memory.
Themes
Petah wakes up and asks where David’s going. David is trying to climb the steep riverbank when Petah catches him and tells him to stop. The other children emerge from their pipes and hold David on the ground. Someone asks David what he was doing, and he shakes his head because his reason is “gone.” When Petah suggests the problem was “home,” the other children disperse.
Already, David has lost coherent memories of his past: his reason for leaving the other children comes to him but is soon “gone.” When the other children get David on the ground and hold him there because he’s trying to leave, the novel may be hinting that David has entered a new, more violent way of life.
Themes
Petah says David shouldn’t go home at night. One child in the group, Sam, reunited with his mother during the day—but another, Joji, went back to his old home at night and was killed by the new inhabitants. Petah suggests that David, whom he calls Willie, try for home the next day—and then says the name Willie won’t work and asks for David’s real name. David tells Petah his name was David, but David is “dead.” Petah agrees that David should pick a new name when he’s “ready.” They return to the pipe. Petah goes to sleep, and David watches the sky all night.
Petah’s story about Joji, murdered trying to find his family, shows how dangerous the parentless children’s lives are. In losing his mother and his memories, David is also losing his identity: he declares his old self “dead.” This declaration shows how important family and memories are to keeping a sense of oneself under difficult conditions like poverty and oppression.
Themes
The next morning, the other children try to get David to scavenge with them, but he refuses and sits in the pipe all day. It rains and gets the papers they stuff into the pipes wet, which makes David associate the “scent of damp paper” with “mournful” emotions. Already, his only memory is of the other children, and their absence makes him lonely. He’s also terribly hungry.
Earlier in the novel, the reader learned that Tsotsi had emotional associations with the smell of wet newspaper. The novel now reveals that his traumatic experience sleeping in a pipe as a homeless child encoded these associations in his mind.
Themes
When the other children come back to the pipes that evening, Petah tells him that if David scavenges with them the next day, he’ll get bread. David agrees. When he asks where Simon is, no one answers. While scavenging that day, a shopkeeper runs him off and yells “tsotsi” at him. Later, when the group is trying to pick a name for David, he tells them he’s “Tsotsi.”
In this passage, the novel finally makes explicit that David is Tsotsi as a child. Although the adult Tsotsi embraced the “tsotsi” stereotype—his “gangster” identity—the reader now learns that he did not originally choose this stereotype for himself: a shopkeeper imposed it on him when he was a starving, homeless child. Thus, the novel suggests that Tsotsi became how he is due to apartheid law’s destruction of his family and the subsequent cruelty that his racist society showed him.
Themes
Eventually the police disperse the children by the river. Tsotsi joins other gangs, but he always remembers how he learned to survive. He gives up “sympathy and compassion” and spurns memory, which in any case he doesn’t have.
The police break up the group of homeless children apparently without trying to find their families or otherwise aid them, which shows that the police’s job in apartheid South African society is to control Black people, not help them. Here the reader learns that Tsotsi rejected “sympathy,” which he has only recently rediscovered in the novel’s present timeline, due to his separation from his mother, his ensuing homelessness, and the gang life that homelessness introduced him to. The novel seems to be suggesting, then, that oppression and cruelty can destroy sympathy and breed hatred.
Themes
