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Tsotsi, directed by Gavin Hood. With Presley Chweneyagae, Terry Pheto, Mothusi Magano, Kenneth Nkosi, Zola, Ian Roberts and others.

There is one scene in Tsotsi that sums the central logic of the film. It sets up the binary between individuals and the masses, state and citizens, and order and chaos. When the police find a car that the central character, Tsotsi (Chweneyagae) had hijacked, the camera first dwells on the how the car has been stripped of all removable parts that can be sold for scrap, then pans to show a wide expanse of shacks on the other side of an open field. The camera favours the vantage point of the police, standing helplessly outside the massive township.

This perspective of individuals up against an undifferentiated mass gets affirmed soon after by dialogue in which the police officers tell the car’s owner (whose child was inside the car when it was hijacked), that they cannot even find a stolen car in the township, never mind a baby.

In essence South Africa ten years into democracy is one in which the Freedom Charter’s ‘security for all’ has largely been narrowed down to those that can afford to pay for it, one in which ‘private-public partnerships’ are the order of the day, and as such it is no coincidence that it is a private security firm that is later called upon to save the good middle-class citizen from the claws of Tsotsi and his gang.

The film tells the story of a character known as Tsotsi (roughly translated, ‘thug’), leader of a criminal gang in Johannesburg. After a violent altercation with one of his comrades, Tsotsi (movingly played by Chweneyagae) is confronted by his inner demons. He runs off into the night, traversing the empty space between the township and the suburbs, the no man’s land that signifies what still seems like an insurmountable (and growing) divide between rich and poor in post-apartheid South Africa.

In a series of flashbacks, hints are given to Tsotsi’s childhood experiences of hardship. In a suburban street Tsotsi, still in emotional turmoil, sees a women get out of her car to buzz open the gate to her house. As she turns her back, Tsotsi - in what seems like an involuntary, mechanic action – shoots the woman, hijacks the car and speeds off. A few blocks away he hears crying from the back seat – a baby had been left in the car. For a moment Tsotsi hesitates, then stuffs the baby in a carrier bag and takes him along.

The rest of the narrative centers around the consequences of this decision, both on a mundane level (some comic effect is gained from the impracticalities of Tsotsi plying his trade as a gangster while having to care for the infant), but more significantly, on a psychological level.

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