Tsotsi (Revised Edition)

His name was Gumboot Dhlamini and he had been chosen. But he never knew until it was too late. They gave him no warning.
Gumboot was a man. Measured in hope he stood in his shoes tall amongst men, but even barefoot on a day back with an empty belly and a chesty laugh sounding the vastness of his humour as he walked into the city so that those who heard him looked up and laughed at him, even then Gumboot had stood as high as a head in heaven.
‘Maxulu,’ he had said a thousand miles away, standing on the side of the road with his wife, ‘Maxulu, I will be back.’ The white man had pointed along the road to Sabata’s place as the way to the Golden City, so he started walking that way. His wife stood and watched him for a long time and later when she got tired, because she was heavy with child, she sat down on the grass and he saw her like that until the road took him over the hill, and he remembered her like that ever since.
He had also asked the white man how many days it would take and the white man had said he reached the city travelling in two days in his motorcar, which of course was faster than walking. Anywa

In the city he found work on

nothing had ever been as sharp in its effect on him, no pain, no pleasure, no event in the years since that certain moment when he had found himself alive and inwardly a darkness, keeping it that way until the bluegum trees when out of the past he knew nothing about, and had wanted to know nothing about, had come a yellow bitch, crawling, in great pain ...