My friend Zakes Mda asked me to be more specific about the comments I had made some weeks ago about Gavin Hood’s film adaptation of the Athol Fugard novel Tsotsi. So here we go.
Adapting a film from a novel demands some severe choices. Inevitably much of the essence of the novel’s complexities will be lost in the interest, supposedly, of meeting the tighter demands of a film — especially a film that wants to meet the conservative demands of Hollywood.
Then again, in the tough new South Africa that we live in, getting closer to the truth demands its own obligations. Glossing over the details hardly helps us to come to terms with the tough realities we face, whether in looking at the horrible and almost forgotten recent past, which still haunts us, or telling it like it is in the present.
The controversy over the television series Yizo Yizo is a case in point. We all recall how the African National Congress Women’s League, among others, yelled for it to be banned because it came too close to the bone. Mercifully, the series went ahead, to much acclaim locally and internationally. But the filmmakers suffered some menacing moments further down the line, and for several months had their very livelihoods threatened by sinister, state-driven forces. So much for freedom of expression.
Hood’s choices in selecting which parts of Fugard’s novel to tell, and which not to tell, therefore, raise questions about what the film’s real intentions were.
The biggest issue is his decision to move the action from the apartheid era 1950s to the post-Madiba 2000s. There has been a huge leap in sensibilities in that time. But in many other ways nothing has changed.
In Fugard’s novel, the tsotsi in question is an alienated creature directly traumatised by the disappearance of his mother in a white-led police raid that was typical of the times. The whole atmosphere in which he lives is pervaded by the menace of white authority and he becomes a survivor in this alien landscape.
In Hood’s updated version, he is just one of many thugs in the rambling, uncontrolled territory that is South Africa today. The difference is important.
The critical moment when he discovers that he has someone else’s baby on his hands is another instance of the curious choices a director makes when adapting a novel.
In Hood’s version, the baby happens to be on the back seat of an upmarket car that the tsotsi hijacks from a typically upmarket black woman living in what used to be the all-white northern suburbs of Johannesburg.
In the original, the tsotsi is wandering with mischievous intent in those same northern suburbs when he spots a young black woman running through the streets with a shoe box under her arm. She is obviously distressed. They are both in a nervous state because of the anti-black curfew of the times.
Then comes the moment of truth. The tsotsi waits for his moment and then corners her in an avenue of trees, intending, perhaps, to rob and/or rape her. In her state of distress, she thrusts the shoe box into his hands. It turns out to contain a newborn child — her own, from which she is trying to escape. Maybe she intended to dump it in a storm drain or on someone’s doorstep. It happens all the time.
So the tsotsi is left literally holding the baby. The woman runs off into the night to deal with her demons. An interesting and decisive meeting of two people at the bottom of the social pile in a white world.
Everything else in Fugard’s flawed but believeable version of the 1950s unravels from thereon. The stage has been set and what happens to the characters has a relentless, inevitable feel to it.
In Hood’s version of how it all comes to a climax, the tsotsi makes a conscious decision to return the baby to its mother. Incredibly, instead of ringing the doorbell and running off, he hangs around for long enough to allow the cops (white guy, black guy — nice Holly-wood touch) who have been on his case, to arrive in time to arrest him.
In the original Fugard version, the tsotsi has been through a spiritual journey that has no decisive conclusion. He has fatally decided to keep the child, but is not sure what he is going to do about it. In the final moments, he dies, trying to rescue the precious child, hidden in a derelict building, from the vengeful bulldozers of the forced removals of Sophiatown.
There is tremendous drama in all of this. But also there is tremendous truth, which Hood seems to have chosen to sidestep. And there’s the rub.
The telling of our tales has a long way to go. The legacies of our past continue to haunt us. I see no point in trying to escape them.
For me, the movie version of Tsotsi does just that.