BABU’S BABIES TSOTSIED!

Kenya should have won the Oscar for best foreign language film in 2004’s Babu’s Babies written and directed by Christine Bala. Compare it to Gavin Hood’s South African Oscar award winning film Tsotsi. The reason why the later won and the former is relatively unknown is a lesson for every script writer, for everything else about them is so similar.

In Babu’s Babies, Babu Mereka aka Baba Juma, a driver in a coffee warehouse, is sent on an errand but diverts the company van to use as a public taxi, only to realise someone has dumped a white-fathered black-mothered infant in it, and he spends the rest of the film saddled with the motherless child. Tsotsi, whose name translates to ‘Gangster thug’ in south African street language, steals a car only to realise that there is an infant in the back seat, and for the rest of the film he too is saddled with it.

And the similarities do not end there. Babu lives in a low class income area, Tsotsi in the shanties. Babu carries the infant in a basket at some point in the film, Tsotsi carries the kid in a shopping paperbag all through. Both Babu and Tsotsi have comic moments whey they try to feed their infant ‘burdens’ with commercial milk. Both Babu and Tsotsi struggle to change the child’s diapers. Both Babu and Tsotsi don't want people to know that they have an infant in their care. And Both Babu and Tsotsi leave the child in care of a neighbouring woman for a period. Babu and Tsotsi who are portrayed as uncaring people at the start of the films end up being sentimentally attached to the child by the time the film ends.

So with all these similarities, how come Babu’s Babies did not get even a quarter of the worlds and even Africa’s attention that Tsotsi got? (despite Zimbabwe’s Ben Zulu being involved?) It can’t have anything to do with the acting, Ian Kaburu as Babu the broke company driver is as convincing as Presley Chweneyagaye as the ruthless young thug with a soft heart that no one had noticed.


The answer is that the script’s depths in Tsotsi were definitely deeper than in Babu’s Babies. By depth we don't mean that Babu was not well written, it was very well written by East Africa’s and indeed Africa’s standards, the reason why it was a project in the (now defunct?) African Development Script Fund.

The thing that Tsotsi capitalised on, making it such a gripping story, is raising the stakes for all the characters by creating extreme opposites in each situation. Contrasting the worlds at all levels, from economic, psychological and sexual, makes one understand more the urgency for the main character to do something fast or else, and makes one fear what would happen next, and generally made Gavin Hood smile at handling the golden naked statuette (whose sex isn’t moulded.)

Just look at it. Tsotsi is a ruthless killer, a youthful thug who doesn’t hesitate to kill. What better opposite than to make him take care of an innocent, sinless, voiceless, physically weak infant? Tsotsi is a single male criminal, why not give him Miriam the wide eyed, innocent looking lady (superbly acted by Terry Pheto ) to start having sentimental talks with? The child comes from the new very affluent neighbourhood where Tsotsi stole the car from its mother as she waited for the electric gate to open. Now what? Take the kid to the slums, the one roomed rusty metal contraption that Tsotsi calls home. Dangerous, noisy, violent, and dark, so opposite from the posh, electric gate, wine-racked, many roomed mansion that its parents live in.

Now you really start feeling for the kid, and wonder whether Tsotsi will kill it as he has beaten his best friend ‘Boston’ to a pulp or as he has killed even ‘Butcher’, his comrade in thuggery. But Gavin sidetracks and doesn’t dwell now on Tsotsi’s badness but its opposite: kindness, sentimentality, love undercurrents.

On Babu’s side, Babu already has a wife Rita (averagely acted by Lorna Irungu) and two children, one of whom needs medicine for Malaria. Babu, apart from his lack of money, doesn’t really come out as a mean guy from the very beginning. Leaving him with a child doesn’t raise the stakes. For one, while tsosti didn’t know how to feed the child, and doesn’t know how to change diapers, so that we have a tense moment when Tsotsi tears at the diapers to change him and comic moments as he tries to shut him up, for Babu these things are easy to do. So what are the stakes here? Why keep watching when there are no major obstacles for the main character?

We don't see where the infant left with Babu originates from, so we can’t feel whether when Babu goes with it to his estate the infant has entered another lower world or if the child was from a meaner ghetto and now is in a more safer area. It is no accident that Gavin Hood cuts from scenes of the infant with Tsotsi in the shanty town to those of the father in his posh residence.

While Bala has Babu buy milk from a street kiosk, Gavin has Tsotsi hold a woman (Miriam)hostage at GUNPOINT and force her to breastfeed the infant. Raising the stakes, that is the difference. What drama does one want if not a suckle at gun point, I mean people get guns pointed at them for their mobile phones or their cars or their cash, but a tit or the bullet? This was my first, and it was exciting, adrenaline was flowing thinking is the milk really that precious, is Miriam going to dilly dally and get shot because of breast milk, oh my God!


But Tsotsi is not all about angst and violence and Tsotsi trying to figure out how to stay with the kid. The film has breather scenes of sentimentality, digging deeper into the characters and their relationship with their immediate world; building three dimensional characters rather than cut out cardboard figurines. Babu’s Babies lacked these moments of passion, moments of breathing between Babu and his wife Rita. From the word go to the end of the film Rita and Babu are biting at each other with angry words and sarcasm. Well, it started out fine, but like an orchestra that has a song starting on the high notes and screaming them to the end, with no low notes to give a breather, it became constipating. That is why when Rita runs to her parents when she suspects Babu of cheating on her, there are no tears in our eyes, those oh my God and the way their relationship was so lovely why do they have to divorce? In a nutshell, if the screen writer had built a lovey dovey relationship between the two, then when they separate we would know what they have lost. Contrast this with the moment Tsotsi jeopardises his life with the cops at the gate. My mind first did not think of him in danger, but of the dangerous loneliness Miriam would have loosing a man with whom sparks of love were exploding. “Here she goes loosing another man, who similarly went and in the evening didn’t return,” was what brought tears to my eyes.

When Tsotsi gets taunted by children who will be the next generation of thugs yet he has lived in the same pipes they now live in, when the foul mouthed kids laugh at him yet he is a dangerous criminal, there is a look Tsotsi Tshegwaye gives them where he sees himself in them that doesn’t need words. Raising the stakes through opposites: Hopelessness is recycling itself. They see themselves as heroes wishing to live a life he has already lived and seen as not heroic.

What about when the cripple in the Railway station says that he still wants to live on so as “to feel the sun on his fingers?” how poetic in such squalid un-poetic surroundings full of darkness, gambling with life and of death? And Tsotsi with gun as he holds Miriam hostage and talks of the broken glass but is taken through lessons of “I see light and beauty on your face?” I mean, opposites raise the stakes. At the moments of danger and death, simple beautiful things are talked about, heightening the sense of danger and drama because for you to appreciate beauty, you must rate it against ugliness.

Like a well conducted Orchestra, the Tsotsi script writer takes us high then low. Just when we think Tsotsi is softening he swings us up and makes Tsotsi kill his comrade Butcher; reminding us of how he also ‘fucked up Boston real bad’ and how Aaap might be the next. This unpredictability in Tsotsi’s emotions are well written.

Audiences love good people, that is why they love Tsotsi, not because Tshenagwaye is handsome (is that why he is called Presley as in Elvis?) but because despite his gangsta nature, he seeks to do a good thing. Tsotsi gets stranded with an infant after a robbery, it is dangerous for him to keep it as it can lead police to him, It is embarrassing to his tough guy image in the gangsta land to be seen with it, he doesn’t know any girlfriend to clean it, he has every reason not to keep it, BUT HE CHOOSES TO KEEP IT. Babu gets stranded with an infant, it is not dangerous for him to keep it as he could have driven to the next police station and handed it in as a lost and found child, he has a wife who can clean it, he has children who can play with it, he has every reason to keep the baby, but HE WANTS TO DUMP IT. Who will the audience love?

The raising of the stakes is lacking even when Babu is told to take the parcel to the MD as it is crucial to the boardmeeting just before he greedily detours to do a taxi ride and get stranded with the baby at the end of the ride. The cruciality of the parcel is ‘talked’ about not ‘shown’, and even then it is talked after Babu has suffered delays delivering the parcel and is back in the office. The importance of the parcel is not even specified, we are just told it was important. But for Tsotsi, time is of essence, we are shown how crucial every second is when we realise John the father to the kid is an important rich man who orders police to track Tsotsi down. With this simple urgency every moment counts for Tsotsi and hence the urgency and confusion of his movements.

While Tsotsi raises the stakes by dragging you bang into the life of Tsotsi the thug whom we don't even know his name till three quarters of the film later, Babu’s Babies spends most of its time with the back story, taking almost twenty minutes to tell you how broke Babu is. In Tsotsi the back story is subtly hinted out when Tsotsi says he has once seen a dog with a broken back, then gently revealed halfway through that he is from a AIDS suffering mother and abusive father. But Babu has too much backstory of Babu’s brokenness. Babu quarrels with wife over lack of medicine, he goes to neighbour Nora and talks of his brokenness, then goes to office crying I am broke give me an advance, then cries to his friends in the coffee warehouse, we go back home again with him crying to wife oh no money yet, then the pub where his beer is watery from the tears of brokenness, then house again where wife asks for medicine, then the following morning he is woken up with ultimatums find money and medicine or else, oh God. How many scenes are those, do they really advance the story or do they have a stuttering effect? Tsotsi’s action in just one opening scene in the train and we know we better not fuck around with him, he is a dangerous thug.

The danger the infant is in is well illuminated in Tsotsi when he feeds it on canned milk and forgets to clean it up, and on coming back finds the infant attacked by an army of ants on its face. (opposites: beauty and innocence Vs Ugliness and terror) But the way Babu’s friend Jimmy lays the infant as they attempt to dump it in a garbage dump is too neat and clean and doesn’t evoke as much sympathy and terror that the kid is in. The best tension in Bab’s is when the Matatu (public transport van) tout takes the basket with the infant in it and swings it around as he hangs dangerously out of the dangerously driven vehicle. For Tsotsi, the stakes are high in many places, right to the very end when we think a crazy cop might try to shoot Tsotsi and he in turn would use the infant as a human shield to catastrophic results.

The soundtrack of the Tsotsi also goes a long way in raising the stakes in the story. Throbbing Kwaito beats, with its ‘almost Rock’ guitar beats, give a sense of raw urgency as well as the chants of the rapper. Babu’s Babies has a jazzy feeling in Eric Wainaina’s benga influenced ‘Nchi ya kitu kidogo’, with Eric’s silky voice creating a sense of calmness and smoothness. Contrast with Tsotsi’s rough Kwaito in -your-face music that creates a sense of confrontation and attitude, and you immediately get the feel of an unstable ghetto environment.

The sub stories for Tsotsi enhance the stakes: Tsotsi’s haunting childhood, violence in the streets, gangland politics and the competition between Tsotsi and Fela for supremacy, police zeal, ghetto betrayal; and loyalty between Aap and fellow thugs etc. it is a social commentary on the economic disparities, and how it hardens people. But for Babu’s, the sub stories infact burden the stakes. His lack of money, his lack of money, his lack of money.

At the end of the film, Tsotsi has a real character journey. We grow with him from a mean street smart thug to a sentimental, cornered, softie. What a contrast. Babu? Well, he started off a poor guy and ends up still poor, no inner character journey change. No contrasts.

Tsotsi, despite it being a Babu’s Babies look alike, gets its greatness from a superb script that justaposes contrasts to heighten stakes. It is a lesson that many screen writers need to learn from. Contrasts heighten stakes and bring drama. The people we cry for most when they die were the ones who were liveliest when we knew them.

So when is the Kenyan Oscar coming?