Bo-Tsotsi: The Youth Gangs of Soweto, 1935-1976

Glaser,Clive. Bo-Tsotsi: The Youth Gangs of Soweto, 1935-1976. Heinemann: Portsmouth, NH. 2000. 214 pp.

Clive Glaser uses oral, archival and ephemeral-newspaper, bureaucratic and private-source materials to recreate the street world of Johannesburg's south-western townships, latterly known as Soweto. His study of tsotsis (a non-work culture is how he describes their world) covers the years from 1935 to the eponymous student uprising of 1976. Working with field assistants skilled in the multi-variant street argot, tsotsitaal, a speech sometimes Afrikaans, Zulu, or Sotho-based, Glaser enjoyed rare access to former gang members who explained oft-ambiguous, always amorphous gang identities. Just as importantly, the author delineates popular perceptions of street gangs.

Glaser's Bo Tsotsi shows the term tsotsi, still current usage for gangster, originated either from the tightly tapered trousers of 1950s zootsuits, preferred by township 'wide-boys,' or from the Sotho phrase ho tsotsa, meaning to sharpen, another sartorial reference to trousers. Glaser's keen eye for newspaper reportage, his ear for oral historiography and his skill with archival sources, particularly those of the Non-European Affairs Department of Johannesburg City Council, allow him to trace shifting significations of words like 'clever', ndofaya, kalkoen, com-tsotsis and comrades.

Skillfully, Glaser weaves broader themes into an account of urban style and Hollywood influence, racketeering and territorial fights, machoism and battles against being 'endorsed out' (removed from) urban areas. Glaser describes tsotsi responses to freehold removals from Sophiatown (1956-1960); tsotsi perceptions of Pan African Congress student youth, including their Sharpeville anti-pass campaigns (1960-1962), and shifting tsotsi-student relations during the Soweto uprisings of 1976. As apartheid collapsed in the late 1980s, Glaser concludes with an up-dating of tsotsi-student themes. He reports as now atrophied the student-gang solidarity of earlier days.

The turn over in gang membership that Glaser describes gives his analysis its characteristic urban quality as well as its urban-rural link-ups. From the 1940s amalaita gangs with their rural orientation to the 197Os Hazels gang with its urban identity, Glaser highlights national themes as they distinguish each from every other gang. Tantalizingly, he also suggests links between the generational hierarchies of pre-colonial groupings and the multiethnic realities of township life.

Under apartheid controls, Glaser shows how tsotsis, lacking work passes, prospered parasitically off township residents, who were vulnerable to such extortion, since ineffectual apartheid policing focused on racist regulation rather than on the maintenance of basic law and order. The author, therefore, details the efforts of unofficial 'civic guards' to defend respectable folk from gangsterism.

From Glaser's work, there emerges a persuasive argument about the importance of secondary education, especially for the trajectory of urban antiapartheid struggles. He posits an antithesis between tsotsi and student that follows the built-up township environment, especially during expansions of Bantu secondary education in the 1950s and 1970s. Despite the restrictive, repressive nature of Bantu Education, street youth gradually yielded influence to school youth, as, in an increasingly politicized world, student numbers and sophistication grew.

Both tsotsis and students resented each other, working together only in times of exuberance, such as Sharpeville and Soweto. As totally inappropriate as Bantu Education was, it served a gate-keeper function like schooling elsewhere, reinforcing the asocial beliefs of the tsotsis it excluded, providing alternate loyalty to the secondary students it frustrated. In Glaser's own words, his 'book has emphasized the importance of urban family structures, generational tensions, and the relationship between schooling and gang cultures' (p. 190). Common cause between school and gang emerged only when the teaching of Afrikaans, leading to the Soweto uprising, further constricted already limited opportunities in Soweto's secondary schools.

These are valuable themes, but it is the context against which the author sets them that reveals this work's maturity. Owing to the sophistication of his treatment of central-local government relations, Glaser's is a political history as well as a social study of Soweto. The central government, wedded to influx control-the exclusion of all rural migrants until all township residents were employed-opposed the ameliorative pre-apartheid officials whom Glaser interviewed. Local-central government relations are an important, but under-emphasized theme in the history of Southern Africa's racially oppressive urban areas.

A lecturer at the University of the Witwatersrand, Glaser depicts tsotsis and all those touched by their crimes empirically. Against tsotsism, the Johannesburg City Council (JCC), still under pre-apartheid, United Party control in the 1950s, sought to ameliorate township conditions; only for apartheid central government to constantly block these endeavors. Glaser's account of changes in economic conditions, local and national politics also shows how it was that the 1970s West Rand Administration Board (WRAB), Soweto's centrally-appointed local government, provoked the 1976 student uprisings.