A startling novel by the leading writer of the new South Africa
In The Heart of Redness -- shortlisted for the prestigious
Commonwealth Writers Prize -- Zakes Mda sets a story of South African
village life against a notorious episode from the country's past. The
result is a novel of great scope and deep human feeling, of passion and
reconciliation.
As the novel opens Camugu, who left for America during apartheid, has
returned to Johannesburg. Disillusioned by the problems of the new
democracy, he follows his famous lust to Qolorha on the remote Eastern
Cape. There in the nineteenth century a teenage prophetess named
Nonqawuse commanded the Xhosa people to kill their cattle and burn their
crops, promising that once they did so the spirits of their ancestors
would rise and drive the occupying English into the ocean. The failed
prophecy split the Xhosa into Believers and Unbelievers, dividing
brother from brother, wife from husband, with devastating consequences.
One hundred fifty years later, the two groups' decendants are at odds
over plans to build a vast casino and tourist resort in the village, and
Camugu is soon drawn into their heritage and their future -- and into a
bizarre love triangle as well.
The Heart of Redness is a seamless weave of history, myth, and realist
fiction. It is, arguably, the first great novel of the new South Africa
-- a triumph of imaginative and historical writing.
