The Heart of Redness by Zakes Mda (Oxford)
The Heart of Redness is a history book, a rural comedy, an environmental treatise, a cultural manual, and a love story. With a seamless blend of irony and seriousness, Zakes Mda’s new novel shakes up fixed ideas on culture, tradition, and belonging.
His soap-opera plot is patterned into a structure that plays with the concept of twins, and the legacy of ancestors. Twin narratives about the people of Qolorha, a Xhosa village on the Wild Coast, run throughout the novel, separated by 150 years of history.
The first story is set in the 1840s, at the tail end of the war of Mlanjeni, one of many brutal frontier wars with “the children of Queen Victoria, those whose ears reflected the light of the sun”. Twin and Twin-Twin, inseparable twin brothers, attack a party of British soldiers boiling the head of a Xhosa warrior to remove his skull for “scientific purposes”.
They recognise the head it is their father. A headless father portends chaos for his sons, as well as for future generations, who will have a headless ancestor. When the cattle-killing prophecies of Nongqawuse arise out of “the spiritual and material anguish of the amaXhosa nation”, Twin and Twin-Twin split into opposite camps, the Believers and the Unbelievers.
The Believers kill their remaining cattle, after their herds are decimated by lung-sickness brought from Europe, and destroy their crops to fulfill Nongqawuse’s prophecy that “the whole community of the dead will arise”, chasing the white man back into the sea, “and new cattle will arise” to fill the empty kraals.
Qolorha, where Nongqawuse had her first vision, becomes a gathering place for the Believers, and Twin and his Khoi-Khoi wife, Qukezwa, join the multitudes of Xhosa thronging around the prophetess and her uncle. In opposition, the Unbelievers form an unwilling alliance with the British, to protect their remaining cattle from zealous Believers concerned that the doubt of the Unbelievers will anger the ancestors.
In the intertwining story, set in modern-day Qolorha after democracy is won, the community is split by the elders, Zim and Bhonco, who share the same ancestor, but have opposing views on the future of their village when a vast casino and tourist resort is promised. The split is just as strong, with Believers wanting to sustain their culture and the natural beauty of their village, and the Unbelievers pushing for progress and the benefits of gambling.
In the midst of this conflict arrives Camagu, a middle-aged exile who spent 30 years in the United States. Disillusioned with the new ruling party, he has fled Johannesburg in pursuit of NomaRussia, a traditional Xhosa woman from Qolorha he heard singing at a funeral in Hillbrow, who began to haunt his dreams.
He does not find the woman, but finds his own “redness” a dynamic sense of his Xhosa culture and traditions, without longing for a pre-colonial identity. Leading him to this “heart of redness” is Qukezwa, Zim’s daughter, a free-spirited Believer. Throughout the novel, Mda dangles words in front of us, dredging up anachronisms, whipping out bizarre metaphors and blending Xhosa vocabulary into English without the stigma of italics.
The names of trees, birds, and clothing are written in Xhosa, not English, and customs ?such as the reason why Camagu must bring three cows with him even before lobola can be discussed with Qukezwa’s family are part of the story rather than explained in a footnote.
Like the two brothers who began the Qolorha dynasty, the two narratives are twins, and events 150 years ago are mirrored in the present through the influence of the ancestors. Qukezwa has the traits of Twin’s wife, Bhonco that of Twin-Twin, and Zim that of Twin.
As the novel reaches its climax, the twin narratives move inexorably closer. Images of starving amaXhosa, their prophetess imprisoned, their prophecy a failure, crosscut with Qukezwa trying to teach Camagu’s son to swim, until in the final pages of the book, the past runs into the present. Yet the future is open-ended. Mda veers away from the predictable, and his Heart of Redness is a South African original.
Henk Rossouw is the books editor of BlueEar.com, a site for essays and discussion.