In Athol Fugard's only novel [Tsotsi], which has been lying unpublished for 20 years, the protagonist is a murderer because he is a victim—victim of a régime and a philosophy which condemned him to the shanties of Sophiatown, and then virtually orphaned him in a police raid when he was a child of ten.

Tsotsi leads a gang of four young black men. They mug and murder, chiefly for money but also for kicks…. One night, he meets a young black woman who hands him a shoebox and runs away. In the box he finds a tiny baby…. The baby has the odd effect of triggering off memories in Tsotsi's mind and arousing the youth's curiosity about his own past. As he remembers, he changes character, coming to realise that he can choose whether to kill or not, instead of merely choosing whom to kill. At the...