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 sun in the morning.” It is only when he begins to care for an abandoned baby, an action that doesn’t “fit into the pattern of his life,” that he begins to realize he has agency over his behavior. Caring for the baby leads him to realize, in turn, that even though killing people is “as natural in the pattern of his life as waking and sleeping,” he doesn’t actually have to commit acts of violence. This realization allows Tsotsi to spare the life of the beggar Morris Tshabalala, whom he thought he had to kill. By contrast, other members of Tsotsi’s gang, Butcher and Die Aap, never realize their own power to choose. When Tsotsi, their leader, abandons them, they try to maintain their gang-life habits as best they can: Butcher joins another gang, while Die Aap tries to convince Tsotsi to form a new gang with him. Thus, Tsotsi suggests that people do have the power to choose and change—but only if, like the character Tsotsi, they consciously recognize that they have such power.
Related Themes from Other Texts
Habit vs. Choice ThemeTracker
Habit vs. Choice Quotes in Tsotsi
[Tsotsi’s] knowledge was without any edge of enjoyment. It was simply the way it should be, feeling in this the way other men feel when they see the sun in the morning. The big men, the brave ones, stood down because of him, the fear was of him, the hate was for him. It was all there because of him. He knew he was. He knew he was there, at that moment, leading the others to take one on the trains.
[Tsotsi’s] own eyes in front of a mirror had not been able to put together the eyes, and the nose, and the mouth and the chin, and make a man with meaning. His own features in his own eyes had been as meaningless as a handful of stones picked up at random in the street outside his room. He allowed himself no thought of himself, he remembered no yesterdays, and tomorrow existed only when it was the present, living moment. He was as old as that moment, and his name was the name, in a way, of all men.
This was man. This small, almost ancient, very useless and abandoned thing was the beginning of a man.
Tsotsi knew one thing very definitely now. Starting last night, and maybe even before that, because sitting there with a quiet mind to the events of the past hours it seemed almost as if there might have been a beginning before the bluegum trees, but regardless of where or when, he had started doing things that did not fit into the pattern of his life. There was no doubt about this. The pattern was too simple, too clear, woven as it had been by his own hands, using his knife like a shuttle to carry the red thread of death and interlace it with others stained in equally sombre hues. The baby did not belong and certainly none of the actions that had been forced on him as a result of its presence, like buying baby milk, or feeding it or cleaning it or hiding it with more cunning and secrecy than other people hid what they had from him.
It was the awareness of alternatives that disturbed Tsotsi and seemed to paralyse his will. Up to that moment he had lived his life as the victim of dark impulses. They had been ready, rising to his moments of need all through his life. Where they came from he never knew, and their reasons for coming he had never questioned. What he realized now was that something had tampered with the mechanism that had governed his life, inhibiting its function.
So she carried on, outwardly adjusting the pattern of her life as best she could, like taking in washing, doing odd cleaning jobs in the nearby white suburb. Inwardly she had fallen into something like a possessive sleep where the same dream is dreamt over and over again. She seldom smiled now, kept to herself and her baby, asked no favours and gave none, hoarding as it were the moments and things in her life.
So he went out with them the next day and scavenged. The same day an Indian chased him away from his shop door, shouting and calling him a tsotsi. When they went back to the river that night, they started again, trying names on him: Sam, Willie, and now Simon, until he stopped them.
‘My name,’ he said, ‘is Tsotsi.’
‘Why Boston? What did do it?’
A sudden elation lit up Boston’s face; he tried to smile, but his lips wouldn’t move, and his nose started throbbing, but despite the pain he whispered back at Tsotsi: ‘You are asking me about God.’
‘God.’
‘You are asking me about God, Tsotsi. About God, about God.’
‘Come man and join in the singing.’
‘Me!’
‘I’m telling you anybody can come. It’s the House of God. I ring His bell. Will you come?’
‘Yes.’
‘Listen tonight, you hear. Listen for me. I will call you to believe in God.’
