1The Heart of Redness, published in 2000, is Zakes Mda’s second novel after Ways of Dying (1995). It won two literary awards: The Commonwealth Writers Prize (Africa), and the Sunday Times Fiction award. The Heart of Redness is a richly textured novel intertwining two narrative strands over a period of almost one hundred and fifty years. It is a historical, satirical and ecological novel and, like many South African novels published after the demise of apartheid and in the aftermath of the Truth and Reconcilation Commission (hereafter TRC) hearings, it delves into the colonial past of the country and examines it in the light of contemporary issues. The Heart of Redness addresses post-colonial issues of ambivalence, empowerment, and epistemology. It deals with the difficult choice a disempowered and divided community in an amaXhosa seaside village, the birthplace of a legendary prophetess, Nongqawuse, has to make in order to adapt to the complexity of a changing world. While one set of characters obdurately adheres to rigid and even absurd traditional customs for the sake of loyalty to their tragic history, the other is just as obdurately and absurdly confident that the future prosperity of their village will be secured by capitalist developers. In evoking a tragic episode in the history of the amaXhosa, the Cattle Killing Movement, Mda seems to follow a twofold agenda: he delves into a dramatic turning point in the history of South Africa from the vantage point of a country which has now formally got rid of colonial oppression, and at the same time he examines how the resurgence of past quarrels affects the present. As he vividly recalls the events surrounding Nongqawuse’s prophecies and their tragic consequences, Mda engages in a critical assessment of the possibilities of empowerment really offered to poor and marginalised rural communities in the new South Africa. In this paper I will first examine how, through the historic evocation of Nongqawuse, Mda points to the ambivalence which permeates the writing and perception of colonial times; second, I will analyse how Mda’s conception of art for development underpins his narrative choices; and last, I will analyse how his novel presents an epistemological challenge to the inadequacy of dual thinking in post-apartheid South Africa.

2Mda resuscitates the legendary figure of Nongqawuse as a metaphorical operator to expose the ambivalence of her role in South African history and literature. The Heart of Redness is set during the “Wars of Dispossession” on the eastern border of the Cape colony, which brought into conflict the British authorities and the amaXhosa nation for over a century, between the end of the eighteenth century and the second half of the nineteenth century. The particular historic episode, which is the focus of the novel, is known as the Cattle Killing Movement. It took place on the frontier of the Eastern Cape in 1856-1857 and practically put an end to the autonomy of the amaXhosa as a nation. The Movement was triggered off by a young prophetess, Nongqawuse, who, after hearing the voices of two strangers, predicted that if all the amaXhosa killed their cattle and destroyed their crops, an army of ancestors would rise from the sea, chase all the white people from the land and bring back prosperity. The movement lasted ten months, spreading throughout Xhosaland, and reached a crescendo in February 1857 with dire consequences: over 40,000 people died of starvation, 400,000 head of cattle were killed and over 150,000 people sought refuge and help in the Cape Colony.

3The text of The Heart of Redness alternates between two narrative strands: one is the history of the Cattle Killing Movement, and the other, which takes place four years after the first democratic elections in 1994, deals with the life of a poor marginalised amaXhosa community in the seaside village of Qolorha-by-Sea. Both temporal levels combine historic events and characters with fictional ones. But both, as David Attwell points out, are “two moments of seminal importance in the relationships that black humanity has forged with modernity at various points in history” (Attwell 3). Attwell further defines modernity as “the currently governing concept of what it means to be a subject of history” (3). This is precisely the question which lies at the core of Mda’s novel and why he has chosen to link up two key moments in the history of the amaXhosa, while sidestepping all the intermediate years of the liberation struggle. The question which underlies this compositional choice is: how can people retrieve a sense of selfhood and self-empowerment when confronted with two historically different modes of imperialism, a nation-state colonial imperialism on the one hand and a global economic and political imperialism on the other (Peeters 32)?

5Prior to Mda’s novel, the ambivalence of Nongqawuse and her dubious heritage was imaginatively explored by a Zulu writer, Herbert I. E. Dhlomo (1903-1956), in a play entitled The Girl Who Killed to Save: Nongqawuse the Liberator, published in 1935 by the mission press at Lovedale in the Eastern Cape. The play is written from the perspective of a Christian convert who sees the cattle-killing as the work of superstition and ignorance. It shows a prophetess who is assailed by doubt and uncertainty as to the real significance of her own prophecies. The sub-title “liberator” is ironically applied to the prophetess because her action facilitated the influence of Christianity among the amaXhosa and therefore “liberated” them from the “evil” of their traditions. Ambivalence is woven into Mda’s novel through another intertext, Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, as suggested by the title, with the difference though that, whereas Conrad’s title refers to a European reductive perception of the African continent, Mda’s “redness,” in alluding to the red ochre used to dye isiXhosa garments, implicitly and ironically refers to the way Africans designate the backwardness of country folks whose lifestyle still follows the way of tradition.

6From these different elements—the frontier wars, the spread of Christianity and the influence of amaXhosa prophets—Mda constructs an eschatological discourse which runs through his novel, ensuring the structural and thematic continuity between the two narrative levels. The myth of the Christian millennium and the return of a messiah were reinterpreted in terms of amaXhosa beliefs and practices. The idea that the dead would arise and “witches would be cast in the belly of the world” (HR 15) was first expressed by Nxele in the 1820s and taken up thirty years later by Mlanjeni. In Nongqawuse’s prophecies, the same elements of sacrifice, purification and resurrection resurface: all cattle now living must be slaughtered because they have been reared by contaminated hands, fields must not be cultivated, the whole community of the dead will arise when the time is ripe, new cattle will be brought along and people must leave their witchcraft. The theme of resurrection is thus linked to the question of how to deal with the cause of a people’s suffering and humiliation. The solution to this desperate situation was believed to be found in the intervention of supernatural forces at the cost of collective self-sacrifice. Believers in the prophecy killed their cattle and waited for the ancestors to rise out of the sea, while Unbelievers refused to kill their cattle and sought other means to fight against the British, or even forms of accommodation with them (Peeters 36). The division of the amaXhosa definitely weakened any form of resistance against colonial encroachment: they lost both their land and their political autonomy.

7In Mda’s novel, these historic events are mediated through the individual experiences and perceptions of two twins, Twin, the elder, and Twin-Twin, the younger. The former was a serious and meditative person who fell in love and married a Khoikhoi woman, Qukezwa, who had prostituted herself to British soldiers so as to smuggle gun powder from them to help a joint Xhosa and Khoikhoi rebellion against the British. Twin-Twin, on the other hand, was a lover of women, had many wives and children and was a rich man. But the twins had fallen out over Nongqawuse’s prophecies: Twin sided with the Believers and his brother with the Unbelievers. Twin killed his cattle and died insane while Twin-Twin managed to save his cattle and sided with the British.

8Mda intertwines this narrative of the past with a narrative of the present, using as protagonists the descendants of Twin and Twin-Twin, respectively named Zim and Bhonco. Nongqawuse is still the cause of a feud which hinges around false or distorted interpretations of both tradition and modernity. Their quarrels usually bear on trifles, but take on a more acute turn with a proposed development project for the village. Bhonco and the Unbelievers, including his daughter Xoliswa Ximiya, the secondary school’s headmistress, bring their support to a proposal by a black-empowerment consortium to build a vast tourist complex including a luxury hotel, a casino, water-sports and a roller-coaster because they believe this is the kind of development that the village needs since it will bring civilisation to it, as the narrator ironically remarks: “If it is something that brings civilisation, then it is good for Qolorha.” (HR 230) Further, the black chief executive in charge of the black empowerment company piloting the project explains to the villagers that “[t]he riding of the waves is a sport that civilised people do in advanced countries” (HR 231). On the opposite side, Zim and the Believers are bent on preserving their customs, modes of thought and natural environment.

9Both stances are satirically presented by Mda as simulacra of progress and tradition. A simulacrum consists, as Deleuze and Guattari write, in “appropriating reality in the operation of despotic overcoding” (in Massumi 93). This despotic “overcoding” results here in the creation of artificial or irrelevant divisions in the social body which stultify any form of creativity. Action on both sides boils down to useless repetition. Zim, like his ancestor Twin, spends most of his days sitting on a hill, staring at the sea in the vain hope of seeing the arrival of the Russians who, in the days of Nongqawuse, were believed to be black because they had killed the former Cape colony governor George Cathcart during the Crimean war and who, led by departed amaXhosa generals and kings, were expected to come and liberate the amaXhosa nation: “He knows the Russians will not come. But he waits for them still in memory of those who waited in vain.” (HR 203) On the other side, Bhonco and his followers have resurrected the cult of the Unbelievers, which in the days of Nongqawuse had been “elevated to the height of a religion” (HR 4). His daughter Xoliswa has unreservedly embraced European concepts and values and is fascinated by America: “It is a fairytale country, with beautiful people. People like Dolly Parton and Eddy Murphy.” (HR 71) The profound divide harking back to the Nongqawuse myth thus generates senseless processes of deterritorialisation whereby characters seek forms of identity and models of empowerment, either in an ossified past or in an idealised foreign country. It takes another character and a movement of reterritorialisation to dispel these alienating effects and refocus on the themes of development and empowerment in post-apartheid South Africa.

10Before he became famous as a novelist, Mda was a prominent playwright who wrote committed plays to raise the awareness of people during the years of struggle and, from the early 1990s on, to encourage people to participate in their own development. “Truly popular theatre,” he says, “roots itself in tradition and develops this in a positive manner” (Mda, When People Play People 46). In his vision of the theatre for development, he shows that elements of the past can be retrieved to be used in the present. The Heart of Redness can be regarded as a continuation of the theatre for development, taking the form of “fiction for development,” as one critic qualified Mda’s previous novel Ways of Dying (Mervis 10). Mda insists that “development is meaningful only if it allows for the empowerment of local communities […] to promote a spirit of self-resilience among the marginalised” (Mervis 40).

11The literary theme which Mda utilises in the theatre for development and which he introduces in his novel is that of the “facilitator” or “catalyst.” Mda stipulates that the catalyst should be a person who is different from the community in “attributes such as beliefs, manners, education, and class position” (Mervis 43), but one who should empathize with them, because it is through this contact with an external point of view that the community can reflect on its own shortcomings, debate among themselves of what should be done, and eventually come up with feasible solutions. In The Heart of Redness, the “catalyst” is embodied by Camagu. He is at first the improbable hero of this story of transformation and regeneration in a rural area he knows nothing about. He is a man in his mid-forties, an incorrigible womaniser whose identity has been shaped by long years of immersion in a western urban culture. He returns to South Africa after thirty years of exile in the United States, where he “obtained a doctoral degree and worked as a consultant in New York” (HR 31), to take part in the first democratic elections. In South Africa, he was “swept up by the enthusiasm of the time” (HR 31) and decided to stay to contribute to the development of the country. However, after four years he becomes disillusioned as he realizes that it is impossible to get a job in spite of his qualifications because, as the narrator remarks, he does not belong to the “Aristocrats of the revolution, an exclusive club that is composed of the ruling elites, their families and close friends” (HR 36) and, besides, he has not “learnt the freedom dance” (HR 31). His disillusionment stems as much from the fact that his skills and experience are not recognised as from the corruption, nepotism and violence which seem to have taken hold of the country. As a consequence, at the beginning of the novel, Camagu is ready to return to the United States where he knows his merits will be acknowledged and rewarded.

12The chance encounter with a beautiful young singer with a “hauntingly fresh” voice (HR 27), at the wake of an unknown artist on the rooftop of a building in the infamous Hillbrow district of Johannesburg, entices him to abandon his project. He feels strangely attracted to the young girl but on this occasion, he is not assailed by his usual pangs of lust: what he feels is not lust; “otherwise parts of his body would be running amok” (HR 30). He thinks of her as a “spirit” who can comfort him, and it alarms him because “he has never thought of any woman like that before” (HR 30). This is why, the following morning, he finds himself pursuing her to Qolorah-by-Sea, instead of driving to the airport. He thus lands in an unknown region and an unknown community to whose welfare he will eventually commit himself. Camagu’s journey recalls the classical trope of the journey into the unknown, hence the ironical allusion of the novel’s title to Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. However, Camagu’s journey, unlike Marlow’s, is not one to a hostile and threatening country but, on the contrary, one fraught with pleasant and arresting discoveries. Camagu wonders at the beauty of the landscape, concluding “that a generous artist painted the village of Qolorha-by-Sea, using splashes of lush colour” (HR 61), and is satisfied that “some people […] still wear isiXhosa costume” (HR 61). Camagu also reverses a common trope in South African literature: that of the Jim-goes-to-the-city theme, whereby a country bumpkin goes to the city and, after several encounters and ordeals, gets wise to the ways of city folk. Here, he leaves the city to settle in the country, and his romantic search for an unknown girl becomes in fact an initiation into a new mode of life. He becomes aware of the complexities of rural life and of his position in present-day tradition or “redness” (Woodward 180).

13Camagu’s empathy for this rural community is also expressed in terms of remembrance and rediscovery. The setting stirs vague memories of his childhood in a similar landscape, and when one day he discovers a mole-snake in his bed, he suddenly remembers that it is the totem snake of his clan, the amaMpondise. His refusal to have it killed gains him the respect of the villagers: “[T]hey did not expect a man with such great education […] to have such respect for the customs of his people.” (HR 112-113) Camagu is also a Xhosa term used to address important superior persons or spirits, meaning “be gracious,” “be pacified” (Via Afrika 42). In the novel, Camagu gradually changes his identity as he tries to help people and reconcile the two contending parties of Believers and Unbelievers.

14What empowers Camagu and helps him make a relevant choice, in spite of his past and of the opposition he encounters, is his holistic vision of things which, notwithstanding its idealistic undertones, in fact amounts to an artistic vision. He sees the village, its environment, the flora, the fauna, the lagoon, the valley of Nongqawuse, with the eye of an artist. What was at first a fanciful desire to follow an unknown woman finally reaches out to the entire world that virtually wraps her up, and which the quality of her voice alone had given him an intimation of: “Her voice remains hauntingly fresh. It is a freshness that cries to be echoed by the green hills, towering cliffs and deep gullies of a folktale dreamland.” (HR 27) If he gradually sheds his romantic illusions about the country, it is nevertheless his capacity to encompass a multiplicity of elements within a single act of perception and to arrange them on a single plane of immanence—landscape, woman, village, community, identity—–that underpins his will to understand the villagers and their needs, and eventually initiate a movement of reterritorialisation. Camagu’s commitment to the people of the village is correlated with his conviction that he can be useful only insofar as he manages to help them “produce a form of economic and social development that benefits them within economic, social and political realities of globalisation” (Peeters 39), that is to say, foster their own agency.

15Camagu as a facilitator or catalyst transcends the deadlock created by the stultifying legacy of the Cattle Killing Movement by re-inscribing certain traditional values and cultural practices within modern strategies of development. He thus stimulates and orientates people’s energies, skills and creative capacities, especially women’s, towards the realization of an economic empowerment project which they will entirely control. He suggests that Nongqawuse Valley be declared a heritage site and turned into an eco-tourism centre in order to build a holiday camp run on a cooperative basis by all the people of the community interested in it. The connection, which is thus established between Camagu and Nongqawuse, points to the proper use of the past. Owing to his commitment to the protection of the environment and to his marriage to a young country girl named Qukezwa who, in spite of her youth and lack of education, has nevertheless helped him dispel his illusions about traditional life, Camagu appears to be the symbolical reincarnation of Twin the ancestor who married a Khoikhoi woman also named Qukezwa. Yet unlike the true descendant of Twin, Zim, he refuses to be made powerless by the burden of the past: what is needed is a policy of collective regeneration for the present and not a sterile loyalty to the past for the sake of the ancestors’ sufferings. Thus, through Camagu’s intervention, the name of Nongqawuse, which for generations had divided the amaXhosa, becomes a signifier for transformation and reconciliation as the holiday camp he builds on the very spot where the prophetess heard the voices of strangers is named after her. It is no less ironical that the judicial decision which cancelled the former capitalist project supported by Bhonco and the Unbelievers was instigated by a white man, John Dalton, the local white trader and descendant of a former British soldier and magistrate who was directly responsible for the death of Zim’s and Bhonco’s ancestor, Xikixa. It is one of the many ironies of the novel which blurs the supposedly irreconcilable antagonisms of the past, and particularly the black-white or African-European divide.

16As one critic puts it, Mda’s novel “deploys epistemological challenges to dualistic thinking” (Woodward 173). If Mda has chosen to deal with the Cattle Killing Movement, it is precisely on account of its implied ambiguities. The social and cultural heterogeneity and hybridity, which characterized colonial history, cannot be simply accounted for, especially today, in terms of dualisms which have become irrelevant. If distinctions must be established for the sake of explanation, they should be based on relevant criteria. Thus the attempted murder by Bhonco on the person of John Dalton is a case in point. Bhonco wants to kill him because he is held responsible for the failure of the development project he supported. Yet his true motivation is probably related to the old antagonism between British and amaXhosa, since Dalton’s ancestor killed Bhonco’s ancestor during a frontier war. Still, this black-white antagonism makes no sense, as John Dalton, like Camagu and Zim, is also determined to protect the traditions and the site of the amaXhosa community. M,oreover, like Bhonco and Zim, he has gone through the amaXhosa rites of initiation and has been circumcised. Despite his white appearance, Dalton’s heart “is an umXhosa heart” (HR 6).

17The gist of the novel consists precisely in creating ambivalent situations which make the reader realize that rigid dualistic patterns of thinking are no longer sufficient to arrive at a clear understanding of things. The novel undermines the barriers that exist between animals and humans, the living and the dead, the wild and the tame, tradition and modernity. Bhonco’s wife’s remark— “Maybe there are indeed different ways to progress” (HR 261)— encapsulates this epistemological approach. The heterogeneity of the colonial impact on the modern world demands that one should be in a position to contemplate contradictory things at the same time. As a critic puts it, “Mda undermines, quite profoundly, with recourse to traditional beliefs, dualistic (sometimes Western) thinking about differences.” (Woodward 183)

18The recurrent motif of the split-tone song or undertone song becomes the artistic metaphor of this epistemological necessity. Overtone singing is a traditional amaXhosa practice which consists in producing several tones, combining fundamentals and melody tones, with the same voice sometimes accompanied by the sound of the umrhubbhe or mouth bow (Jacobs 3). Mda uses singing as a key theme: it is after hearing a woman at a wake in Hillbrow that Camagu follows her to Qolorha-by-the-Sea. It is also upon hearing another young woman, Qukezwa, Zim’s daughter, sing in split-tones that he falls in love with her. The split-tone song is more significantly used as a source of artistic synesthesia, conveying in vivid shapes and colours the beauty of the local environment:

Many voices come from her mouth. Deep sounds that echo like the night. Sounds that have the heaviness of a steamy summer night. Flaming sounds that crackle like a veld fire. Light sounds that float like flakes of snow on top of the Amathole Mountains. Hollow sounds like laughing mountains. Coming out all at once. (HR 175)

19Complexity understood either as synesthesia or as the blurring of differences is also manifest in the narrative composition of the novel and in the subtle shifts between the collective voice of the witness-narrator and the other characters’ voices. The two narrative levels are fragmented into different temporal sections which almost imperceptibly tail off into each other, creating a seamless narrative sweep. The asterisks and blanks which regularly mark a shift from one period of time to another, or from one character to another, entirely disappear at the end of the novel, raising some confusion in the mind of the reader. The only criterion which introduces a difference at the end of the novel is the nature of the song of the two women named Qukezwa. The Qukezwa of the past “fills the valley with her many voices. She fills the wild beach with dull colours. Colours that are hazy and misty. Grey mist not white” (HR 317), while the Qukezwa of the present sings in soft pastel colours (HR 319). The mist in which the landscape is often shrouded is a recurrent trope and almost always linked to Nongqawuse’s alleged visions of the ancestors rising from the sea.

20The narrator’s voice shows that he is both familiar with the amaXhosa community but also close to the white settlers. Most often, however, it articulates the collective values and judgements of the former, couched in a syntax that is meant to echo the tonality and turns of phrase of isiXhosa. It is a voice which is sufficiently detached to pass criticisms levelled at the characters involved. Besides the narrator’s voice, there is a range of individual voices which vent personal concerns with all their idiosyncrasies: lucidity or obduracy, courage or cowardice, nobleness or meanness. The advantage of this narrative configuration is that the grand historical narrative is mediated by single perceptions which convey a sense of immediacy and proximity and allow the reader to better grasp their motivations and, particularly, those of the major protagonists. Accordingly, Mda forges a style that suits this aim. He draws on the narrative tradition of folklore and combines them with contemporary forms and issues, the result being read as a kind of magic realism.

21The ghostly presence of the past thus serves as a warning against the temptation to oversimplify contemporary issues. It is meant to encourage people to ponder over them and cope with ambivalence without losing a sense of their identity. The figure of Qukezwa, the Khoikhoi woman who offered her body to British soldiers to steal gunpowder from them, is a case in point. Her action did not deter her from her commitment to the struggle, her religious beliefs and her husband, Twin. She could cope with these contradictions, maintaining them in tension. Whether in the past or in the present, Qukezwa plays the role of a mediator. In the past she initiated her husband to her own Khoikoi religion, whereas the Qukezwa of the present initiates Camagu to the beauty of the landscape, the fascinating mystery of the Valley of Nongqawuse and, above all, convinces him of the necessity to protect the environment.

22The novel introduces the reader to the complexities and ambivalences generated by both colonial and postcolonial history and points to the necessity of discovering new ways of thinking the present. Throughout the novel, Camagu tries to come up with original solutions to cope with the difficulties he encounters while eschewing the facileness of dualist thinking. His project, unlike those of his protagonists, does not seek to entrench amaXhosa traditions in a kind of “nativist revivalism” and provoke a new Nongqawuse syndrome. As we have seen above, not all developmental projects necessarily benefit the people, and the legacy of liberation can be questioned insofar as it tends to maintain existing social divisions. The novel shows characters confronted, willingly or unwillingly, with ambiguities. The range of responses varies from the totally ludicrous or absurd, like Zim’s and Bhonco’s, to the more questionable, like John Dalton’s project which, under the pretext of preserving so-called Xhosa authenticity, is merely a display village offering a simulacrum of the way amaXhosa used to live in the past. Camagu’s project is a compromise between tradition and modernity, between past and present, but one which has been thought out on the basis of experience and urged by a renewed feeling of identity. The choice which is finally made is one which a critic calls “accidental activism,” in the sense that “it is tied in with and responsive to the specific contingencies and possibilities of particular places, times and people while at the same time remaining open to more global contexts and possibilities” (Peeters 41).

23The Heart of Redness is best understood against a background of reconciliation and reconstruction. It is not a narrative which nostalgically longs for the past. The resurgence of the past serves a twofold purpose: first, it achieves exactly what some whites refuse to accept—to recall the unquestionable exactions committed by the colonialists and how their meddling with African affairs precipitated the downfall of an entire nation. Second, the novel recalls the past without idealising it, keeping a critical distance from it through a narrative system combining different voices, points of view and languages. It also brings into focus the plight of neglected, disadvantaged and marginalised communities in today’s South Africa. The satirical thrust levelled at ill-conceived development projects for the sake of modernity serves to foreground the idea that there are cultural elements of the past which are worth preserving if the new political dispensation in South Africa is to make sense. It is therefore a story of empowerment showing how people can become instrumental in their own development. The Heart of Redness also boils down to a kind of epistemological exercise which invites readers to break away from rigid dualistic patterns of thinking, in order to apprehend the complexities and ambivalences of the present. The legacy of the Nongqawuse narrative as used by Mda in his novel has a twofold purpose: it serves to remind readers that what happened in the past must never happen again and cannot be forgotten but, at the same time, the evocation of the past does not mean, as he observes, “that we must cling to [it] and wrap it around us, and live for it, and be perpetual victims who wallow in a masochistic memory of our national humiliation” (Mda, “The Role of Culture” 7).