“do not go gentle into that good night / rage rage against the dying of the light”

Following the release of the shantytown gang life flick “Tsotsi,” a Cape Town paper was inspired to round up four real life tsotsis – slang for thugs – from the city’s townships to ask: How does the movie compare to real life?

Their answer: The scenes of poverty and violence were certainly reminiscent of each man’s own rough upbringing, but a thug who turns himself in to the police? Not likely. Thus, here is a film – based on a 1961 novel written by South African playwright Athol Fugard and adapted for the screen by writer-director Gavin Hood – that knowingly intercepts its subjects’ likely trajectories.

A sharp rattle of dice and an impatient rat-a-tat of a blade open the first scene. In a shantytown shack atop a hill, a quartet of young thugs are engaged in a game of craps – that is, minus their leader, who stands in front a window with his naked back to us. He peers silently into the glowing dusk to Soweto below, his mind elsewhere, until a question from the crew demands his attention: “Hey Tsotsi, what we doing tonight?”

Tsotsi – not even his friends know his real name – whips his gaze in our direction, the hip-hop soundtrack swells, and we are transported into the thick of township life.

The gang of four makes their living in Johannesburg, preying on any cash-holding, unsuspecting passer-by. Not even a subway station’s half-blind, wheelchair-bound bum can escape unharassed when he’s got a tin of change. Tonight, the exchange of a couple silent, knowing glances among the crew is all it takes to agree on their target: a suited man carrying a fat wad of bills. The four follow their marked victim onto a crowded subway car and surround him. As soon as the beginnings of a cry for help escapes the man’s lips, he is murdered, his lifeless body left behind like rubbish.

The deed sickens Boston, a bespectacled member of the crew who dreamed of being a schoolteacher. At a bar afterwards, fueled by alcohol, Boston lets explode his stewing remorse, smashing a bottle and drawing a piece of the broken glass across his own flesh. The show angers Tsotsi so much that he nearly pummels his friend to death before the very subject of Boston’s anguish – their offhanded savagery – registers. Panic-stricken, Tsotsi runs out to the empty night, steals a running car from the driveway of a wealthy surburban mansion and shoots the woman who tries to stop him.

There’s another life in the car, however – a present from fate. From the back seat comes the wail of an infant, whose tender life now depends upon his mother’s shooter. The baby’s helplessness eventually draws out Tsotsi’s latent decency and leads the way to the thug’s redemption.

In the course of the plot, Tsotsi fancies raising the stolen babe on his own. He makes friends with a new mother, and, under the guise of robbery, leads his crew back to the parents’ palatial home to pick up supplies. While his lackeys help themselves to the house’s treasures, Tsotsi slips off to the baby’s room, grabbing every stuffed animal and carton of powder milk in sight.

Just as easily as he saves the baby boy, Tsotsi wants badly go back 10 years and save himself from his ailing, bedridden mother and violent, alcoholic father. Indeed, the film’s most touching images are found in the expressions of Tsotsi’s serene, androgynous features as he is changed step by step in his personal journey. Though a fully grown adult ultimately responsible for his sins, Tsotsi forever has the touch of an innocent child, a victim of the circumstances.

The original novel by Fugard, a white Afrikaner born in 1932 who became a leading voice of protest during apartheid, is set a half-century earlier in Sophiatown, but not much seems to have changed in the intervening years. From Tsotsi’s tin-roofed perch on a hill above Johannesburg, Hood shows us sweeping views of still-impoverished townships and the skyscrapers of city center beyond. South African townships, which first grew out of apartheid, have survived apartheid intact. Orphans live in nothing more than a cold stack of sewer pipes until they graduate to a maze of corrugated tin shacks. The only thing is that in present-day, wealthy Africans now replace wealthy whites in the same suburbs.

Still, a thought nags: Given the harsh realities “Tsotsi” unflinchingly confronts, why did Hood choose such an out-of-place ending?

Fugard’s Tsotsi found God, then death. The movie would rather turn itself over to the mortal authorities. “Tsotsi” seems to be a film that yearns for its own salvation as much as it wants it for its subjects. Enjoying the imprimatur of Hollywood with its Best Foreign Film Oscar, “Tsotsi” has proudly brought attention and legitimacy to South African film. But can we disregard the fact that it’s a movie made by a white director based on a book written by a white man, praised by white audiences a world over? And what about those 50 years of little change?

“Tsotsi is a very interesting black story, told for a white audience,” a Sowetan journalist, Patience Bambalele, told The Guardian in 2006. Black South Africans watching the film have scoffed at Hood’s sympathetic portrait of the street ruffian, she said. “The reality is that the thug never cries.”

One has enough evidence to take the pessimistic view that “Tsotsi” both refuses to engage the harshest reality of all – that there is no future or possibility of redemption for the millions of poor black South Africans bound to townships. In the words of one of the tsotsis called in to rate the film, “In real life they would have dumped that baby.”

And therefore the film contributes nothing in the way of meaningful social change. Its unlikely ending comforts those who would like to fantasize about saving the poor black Africans, all the while averting the gaze of the ghosts of its original subjects, long dead.

black, white and everything in between

More than a week after Zimbabwe’s latest presidential elections, President Robert Mugabe’s administration has yet to release the results. Opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai has appealed to the High Court, the president of neighboring democracy South Africa and the U.N. to pressure the president to make an announcement.

Word on the street seems to be that Mugabe had 43% of votes — not enough to win a majority — and that a runoff between the him and Tsvangirai, with 47% of votes, may be necessary. Meanwhile, the country sits on edge as fears of violence breaking out grows by the day. Riot police and water cannons appeared in Harare last weekend, reported the Washington Post.

Every bit of this week’s news reads as if it were recycled from reports of the legislative and presidential elections in 2000 and 2002.

Take this example of Mugabe’s enduring association of capitalism with colonialism.

“President Robert Mugabe launched a make-or-break election campaign Friday by describing a controversial new law allowing seizure of white-owned farmland without compensation as a ‘victory over colonialism.’” — Agence France-Presse, April 7, 2000.

“… President Robert Mugabe on Monday called on veterans of the nation’s fight for independence in the 1970s to ‘safeguard’ the land seized from ‘the former colonizers,’ …” — New York Times, April 8, 2008.

The resemblance is downright uncanny, though few would be surprised. After all, Mugabe has been in power for nearly three decades, and he hasn’t really changed his spots.

In The Shackled Continent, Economist writer Robert Guest places the blame on what he calls “predatory, incompetent governments” as being responsible for Africa’s impoverished state. Though democratic polls are now commonplace on the continent, bad economic policies, corruption, and an atmosphere of terror has scared off native entrepreneurs and overseas investors alike. Most Africans — South Africans a notable exception of recent — cannot vote their leaders peacefully out of the office.

Guest used the term “vampire” states. Last week, supporters of the opposition MDC waved copies of South Africa’s Sunday Times, on which was bannered “Save Us From This Vampire!”

Back in 2000, Mugabe’s war veterans whipped and raped farm workers who did not seem enthusiastic about ZANU. Card-carrying members of the party stood near voters, metal bars in hand, as they stalked the voters queues in 2000. In 2007, dozens of Tsvangirai’s followers were beaten, and Mugabe has gone so far as to jail journalists from Western countries reporting on the elections. To wit:

“Political violence is rising in Zimbabwe despite growing international pressure on President Robert Mugabe to rein in militant supporters spearheading his re-election campaign, human rights groups said on Thursday.” — Reuters, Jan. 17, 2002.

“A top ruling party official, Didymus Mutasa, said party officials were planning to “purge” the electoral commission of alleged opposition supporters…” — The Washington Post, April 5, 2008.

In the end, Mugabe has proved that African elections aren’t truly free or fair. At age 84, he continues to rule his country like his revolutionary army, dictating prices and printing money to pay off the month’s debts — in perhaps the most ridiculous fact printed this week, the New York Times reported that Mugabe, having jailed Times journalist Barry Bearak, released him on bond of 300 million Zim dollars, or $10,000 at official exchange rates. The black market rate is a mere $7.

Africa has moved little beyond the sick land that Guest examined more than three years ago. South Africa and other nations continue to tacitly approve Mugabe’s actions by not doing much to disapprove. So what about the light at the end of the tunnel?

Guest espouses the notion of baby steps in the right direction. For Zimbabwe, hopefully, that translates to Mugabe’s finally releasing the results of the election.