Professor Prapopoulos
ENC 1102
April 23, 2015
Poverty and Criminality are just a Cover of the True Self
Life is supposed to be all about good health, happiness and without violence, but that does not happen in South Africa. In South Africa, during the time of the law of apartheid, which meant that black people were separated from the white people, black people were the ones who suffered the most because of the lack of education, low income, violence, gangs, and the emergence of A.I.D.S. The continued violence in black society had an enormous impact because even the children had their own gangs and so did the adults. Gavin Hood’s film Tsotsi shows the poverty and violence that black people lived in due to apartheid and how someone who is violent because of the environment feeds off of violence, but manages to enter a state of metamorphosis to do good to the society. Rodwell Makombe in, “Gang Violence and Postcolonial Survival in Athol Fugard’s Tsotsi” argues that, “the emergence of gangs in apartheid South Africa is an attempt by the marginalized to subvert and transform the dominant social, economic, and political culture of the time”. Makombe also pointed out that apartheid is not only in South Africa. The United States of America also had similar laws but with a different name Jim Crow. Rosalind C Morris’s article shows how Tsotsi is associated with masculine violence, personal autonomy, and unfettered mobility — everything apartheid withheld from black subjects (Morris 88). Galens, Smith, and Thomason’s overview of “Kaffir Boy: The True Story of a Black Youth's Coming of Age in Apartheid South Africa” shows how the father is emasculated in front of his children and taken away to work in farms because he did not have the money to pay taxes. It also shows the violence of the police against poor people in the apartheid era. One sees though that these issues do not just visit South Africa, but are instead universal, as seen in: Flannery O’Connor’s “ A Good Man is Hard to Find,” This story is similar to Tsotsi because society has no compassion for other people, and life is reduced to nothing. Stephen C. Bandy in his article “One Of My Babies: The Misfit and the Grandmother,” shows that the Misfit killed the grandmother not because he wants to. It is because of everything that she saw and knows about him and his crew. This article is similar to Tsotsi when he decides to kill the man that he and his crew have already robbed because the man know their faces, so the only way to save themselves is by killing. Some of the above authors and their work highlight that one can transform the dominant social, masculine violence and a desire to change their economic status. Others Meanwhile make a comparison between other stories to show the lack of compassion of some human’s beings. Through violence, one can have a moment of awakening of what has happened in the world of violence that one is living in, and turn it in to something productive for ones live that can make one grow.
Life has always been one of the most amazing gifts that one possesses because it is full of good and bad things, and most of the times, there are more bad things than good ones. It all depends on which period of time, country, and race one was born in. In many countries, life is not consider by people to be an important gift because of the conditions that many people live in and the amount of violence suffered. South Africa, during the time of apartheid, black people suffered from violence, poverty, and A.I.D.S due to the conditions and economic status of each individual. This Apartheid Era means that black people is separated from the white people, letting black people to live almost in complete misery turning they world dark without any hope to move forward. This era also put handcuffs on to all black people because they have to use a passbook, and if they were found without them, they were taken away to the work farms. In this dark world,