ABSTRACT
Children’s rights, and particularly those of street children, have long been at the center of a wide field of research: law, sociology, medicine, psychology, and literature. Tsotsi (1980), the well-known (and only) novel by the South African playwright Athol Fugard, indirectly investigates the violation of black children’s rights in the South African context of the late 1950s. As a psychological novel it may be fruitfully read in the light of theories of early trauma in childhood. By negating very basic rights children should enjoy universally—a family, a house, formal education—early trauma strongly influences a child’s life and may even turn him/her into a criminal. In this specific case, trauma theory will be mainly approached through Jungian psychoanalysis, which convincingly explains deranged behavior or a borderline personality.
