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Athol Fugard's first and only novel is about the same thing
most of the great South African writer's plays are about: how
the poor and downtrodden are continually, inexorably beaten
down to the earth. His works are often about the earth.
Boesman ludicrously lords his male superiority over Lena who
loves him, even as they crouch in a crude lean-to on the
Swartkops mudflats. A Lesson from Aloes, which recently
ended a much-too-brief run on Broadway, takes its title from a
plant that thrives in the hard dry dirt of South Africa's
Eastern Cape. And on the last page of Tsotsi, the title
character is literally "flattened into the dust."
People called him tsotsi ("hoodlum"), so he
took that as his name. He is very young, black of course, and
the decision-maker for a small gang that subsists by daily
committing some vicious crime, usually but not always for the
money. They don't think much about it, they just do it. Tsotsi
tries not to think about anything and therefore has no
memories. The gang falls apart when Boston, who can't help
thinking, asks one question too many and Tsotsi nearly kicks
him to death. "Tsotsi tolerated no questions from
another. It wasn't just that he was caught without answers. It
went deeper than that. Those questions sounded the vast depths
of his darkness, making it a tangible reality. To know nothing
about yourself is to be constantly in danger of nothingness,
those voids of non-being over which a man walks the tightrope
of his life. Tsotsi feared nothingness. He fear it because he
believed in it. Even more than that, he knew with all
the certainty of his being that behind the facade of life
lurked nothing."
Then one day, alone, he ambushes a woman who unexpectedly
thrusts into his arms a shoebox containing a squalling infant.
He could destroy it instantly, but he doesn't, and so to keep
it alive he must think. "Tsotsi had always thought about
life as a straight line...There had only been the present,
that one continuous moment carrying him forward without
questions or regrets on his part. Now, it seemed, he was
wrong. One day had shaken the whole basis of his life."
Into that one day Fugard crams the despair, rage and numbness
of life in a Soweto slum, allowing the oppression of the white
minority governors to go as realistically unstated as Tsotsi's
need to kill (or love). Well, almost unstated. He describes a
Bantu eating house: "It was a cheerless room, and
reflected the poverty of a people who measured their
essentials and excesses in the smallest unit of the white
man's money." The kitchen boy who painted food prices on
the door left out the penny sign beside each numeral. "He
didn't think it necessary."
The novel's scenario is as bleak and streamlined as one of
Beckett's, yet its language is still rich and beautiful.
Folksinger Tony Bird, like Fugard a white South African, once
wrote a gorgeous song extolling the wildlife and landscape of
his countryside, yet his song ends, "With my mind so
tormented in her province I wandered/While beauty and pain
mocked my stride/For to feel so much freedom where no freedom
exists/Was too much in the Cape of Flowers." Beauty and
pain mock Fugard's stride constantly, yet he continues to
trace the impossible hopes and inevitable destruction of his
black and colored countrymen. Tsotsi is an estimable
contribution to his catalogue, and we should be grateful to
the two students who found the novel (completed in 1961) among
Fugard's papers and inspired its publication.
Soho News, February 25, 1981
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