Yellow Dog Symbol Analysis

In Tsotsi, the yellow dog represents Black families’ destruction by South African apartheid. The novel’s protagonist Tsotsi, a gang member who remembers nothing about his past, has his first flashback to the yellow dog after a desperate young Black woman gives him a baby in a shoebox and runs away. That an abandoned baby triggers the flashback clearly associates the dog with family separation. Later, when Tsotsi steps on the hand of Morris Tshabalala, a former mine worker who lost his legs in a tunnel collapse, Morris calls him “whelp of a yellow bitch.” Immediately, Tsotsi has another flashback to the yellow dog, who is female (literally a “bitch”). By having Morris call Tsotsi a yellow dog’s “whelp,” the novel mysteriously connects the yellow dog to Tsotsi’s own mother, whom Tsotsi cannot remember. When Miriam Ngidi, a young mother whom Tsotsi coerces into breastfeeding his adopted baby, criticizes the woman who abandoned the baby, saying, “a bitch in a backyard would look after its puppies better,” Tsotsi finally remembers his childhood. When he was 10 years old, his father was scheduled to return to him and his mother the next day after a long absence. The yellow dog was Tsotsi’s family pet, pregnant with puppies. The night before his father’s return, white police raided his neighborhood and arrested his mother for not having the pass required of Black people under apartheid law. The next day, his father knocked on the door, but Tsotsi, terrified, hid in the backyard. When his father came into the backyard, the yellow dog snarled at him, so the father kicked her, breaking her back legs. After his father left, Tsotsi saw the dog give birth to dead puppies and then die from her injuries. Thus, late in the novel, it is revealed that the yellow dog haunting Tsotsi’s memories symbolizes how apartheid destroyed Tsotsi’s family—stealing his mother and alienating him from his father.