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ABSTRACT
Gavin Hood's Tsotsi, the 2006 Oscar-winning South African film adapted from Athol Fugard's novel, proves more politically astute than its academic critics first thought, notably by implicating Thabo Mbeki, the president who succeeded Nelson Mandela and ruled South Africa from 1999 to 2008. Hood's updating of Fugard's narrative to postapartheid South Africa, as well as the film's layered AIDS discourse, results in a significant cultural indictment of Mbeki's economic and HIV policies. Despite various shortcomings, Tsotsi anticipated the seismic shift in South African politics that prompted Mbeki's ouster from the presidency late in his second term. The film's ending confronts two exemplars of postapartheid South Africa-the township shack dweller whose economic fate stagnated under Mbeki and the newly empowered South African whose wealth seems the very emblem of Mbeki economics. That symbolic encounter builds Tsotsi's political and artistic relevance beyond what its director or initial academic critics may have envisioned.
The selection of director Gavin Hood's Tsotsi for the 2006 foreign language Oscar by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences threw South Africa's political and academic elite into something of a quandary, though perhaps for different reasons. Popularly, the award set off a deeply patriotic Oscar celebration within South Africa, taken as a sign that the nation's motion picture industry had come of age by producing a postapartheid film in a mélange of Zulu, Xhosa, Sotho, Tswana, Afrikaans, and English with actors who would have had no opportunity under the previous regime. Yet despite the "Proudly South African" celebrations for the nation's first Oscar by the government-sponsored National Film and Video Foundation and a proclamation by then-President Thabo Mbeki that the film "bears testimony to the abundance of South African talent and symbolizes what South Africans can achieve when we work together towards a common objective" ("President"), Mbeki seemed to recognize something of a veiled indictment of his regime in Tsotsi. Gavin Hood recalls Mbeki commenting to the director at a reception for the film that "perhaps we have made a mistake. . . . Perhaps we haven't focused enough on the soul of the country" (qtd. in Kennedy F8). Meanwhile, the film engendered lingering scorn from socially conscious South African academic critics, who worried that the Oscar honors showed that...