Tsotsi Themes

Tsotsi represents South African apartheid (a system of legally enforced segregation and discrimination) as a racist structure that destroys Black South Africans’ lives—even when they aren’t experiencing direct, interpersonal racism. Many of the Black characters’ lives are destroyed by racist apartheid laws despite having little direct contact with racist white people. For example, the Black South African protagonist, Tsotsi, lost his mother in childhood because white police rounded up Black people, including her, whom…

Tsotsi suggests that the inhumanity of South African apartheid (a period of enforced racial segregation) is clearest in how it separates parents from children. The novel represents family as fundamental to human fellow feeling and moral development. At the novel’s beginning, the gang-leader protagonist, Tsotsi, cannot remember his childhood or anything about his family. He begins to remember his past and thus his own humanity when he starts taking care of—acting as a father…

Tsotsi suggests that hatred and sympathy are two essential ways that people can relate to one another: hatred rejects human connection, while sympathy embraces human connection. At first, the gang-leader protagonist, Tsotsi, hates people who try to connect with him or otherwise remind him of his own humanity. For example, Tsotsi feels “cold hate, utterly merciless” for fellow gang member Boston when Boston asks him about his feelings and his past trauma. Tsotsi senses…

In Tsotsi, characters become stuck in habits, or patterns of behavior, because they do not recognize they have choices. Only once characters recognize their power to change are they able to take some control over their lives. At the novel’s beginning, the gang-leader protagonist, Tsotsi, accepts his own criminal behavior and other people’s fear of him as an immutable, natural fact, “feeling in this the way other men feel when they see the…