“A leopard doesn’t change its spots”

“A leopard doesn’t change its spots” is Janina Mentz’s verdict on Thobela Mpayipheli’s apparent return to violence. The proverb turns his past into a prediction: after ten years out of the “big game,” she thinks he is back because he enjoys it. Yet the novel places this certainty beside competing accounts of his conduct and, ultimately, Thobela’s own insistence that a person remains responsible for what he chooses to do.

Janina’s Reading of the Return

Janina uses the saying to frame Thobela’s renewed involvement in the pursuit as a return to an enduring nature. Her claim is not simply that he has a violent past: she argues that the decade he spent away from the “big game” did not change him, and that he is now enjoying being back. The proverb makes that interpretation sound settled, translating a complicated history into the reassuring simplicity of an unchanged pattern.

Character, Threat, and Labels

Orlando Arendse offers a more qualified account. In conversation with Allison Healy, he objects to the media’s tendency to press people into labels, arguing that people contain both good and bad. He distinguishes Thobela’s capacity to threaten from a desire to use violence: at six foot five, Thobela’s presence could make a dealer on the Flats fear the consequences of provoking him, even when violence was the last thing Thobela sought. Arendse’s account does not erase the danger surrounding Thobela, but it complicates the proverb’s implication that a threatening past reveals an unchanging appetite for violence.

Choice Against Excuse

Thobela’s position makes the proverb’s fatalism still less secure. After considering Zatopek van Heerden’s argument that evolution shapes human bodies, thoughts, and behaviour, Thobela rejects the idea that such explanations can account for everything people do. He groups evolution with religious, colonial, racial, political, and democratic justifications for harm, and declares himself tired of both his own excuses and other people’s. His alternative is responsibility: people have choices about how they live, and change must begin with oneself.

The saying therefore functions as more than a comment on Thobela’s past. It sets Janina’s confidence in fixed character against Arendse’s resistance to reducing people to labels and Thobela’s resolve to act without excuses. The contrast leaves the proverb’s central claim in question: a history may shape how others read a person, but it does not by itself settle what that person will choose next.