Abstract
Using The Heart of Redness by Zakes Mda as its focus, this chapter explores the continuities between colonial-era violence and neoliberal interventionist attempts to ‘steer’ democracy across the continent. By placing South Africa’s democratic development within a wider, ongoing narrative of decolonisation, The Heart of Redness transforms a fitful series of tragic circumstances and ‘failed’ renewals into a long, eventful, and incomplete narrative of empowerment. With a narrative focus split between an apparently unfulfilled prophecy in the colonial era and post-apartheid citizens disillusioned with the South African democratic establishment, The Heart of Redness positions failure as an essential phase of incompletion in democratic development. Ultimately, the web-like narrative structure of The Heart of Redness is read here as a multi-voiced riposte to the over-familiar narrative of linear progress that has defined ideas of Africa’s (under)development from colonialism to the present day. Democracy, development, and decolonisation may be ongoing processes across much of Africa, but such incompletion is far from tragic or symptomatic of failure.
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Notes
- 1.
For a full explanation of how ‘development’ is defined and understood throughout this book, see Chap. 2.
- 2.
By ‘dialogic narrative’, I refer to Mikhail Bakhtin’s notion of the novel thriving on the tension created by ambiguity, contradictions, and—perhaps most importantly—a multiplicity of voices within any given narrative. For Bakhtin, the language of the novel is an ‘eternally mobile, eternally changing medium of dialogical intercourse. It never coincides with a single consciousness or a single voice’. The language of the novel ‘can never wholly free itself from the dominion of the contexts of which it has been a part’; see Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, trans. R. W. Rotsel (Michigan: Ann Arbor, 1973) p. 167.
- 3.
Jeanette Eve, A Literary Guide to the Eastern Cape: Places and the Voices of Writers (Cape Town: Double Storey, 2003) p. 354.
- 4.
Figures from Jennifer Wenzel, Bulletproof: Afterlives of Anticolonial Prophecy in South Africa and Beyond (Chicago and London: University of Chicago, 2009), p. 17. For more details on the figures and their sources, please refer to Wenzel, p. 242, n. 3.
- 5.
Zakes Mda. The Heart of Redness (New York: Picador, 2000) p. 86.
- 6.
Sara Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion (New York and London: Routledge, 2004) p. 109.
- 7.
Mda, pp. 45–46.
- 8.
Jennifer Wenzel provides a succinct, detailed overview of the various local, colonial, and global contexts of the cattle-killing prophecy: see Wenzel, pp. 16–23.
- 9.
Neil Lazarus, ‘The South African Ideology: The Myth of Exceptionalism, the Idea of Renaissance’, South Atlantic Quarterly, 103.4 (2004) 607–628 (pp. 610–11).
- 10.
Brown, p. 167.
- 11.
See Zine Magubane, ‘The Revolution Betrayed? Globalization, Neoliberalism, and the Post-Apartheid State’, South Atlantic Quarterly, 103:4 (2004) 657–71 (p. 660).
- 12.
Patrick Heller, ‘The Politics of Democratic Decentralization’, Politics & Society 29.1 (2001) 131–163 (p. 143).
- 13.
Lazarus, ‘South African Ideology’, p. 616.
- 14.
- 15.
Lazarus, ‘South African Ideology’, p. 618.
- 16.
Lazarus, ‘South African Ideology’, p. 610.
- 17.
Mda, p. 137; italics in original.
- 18.
Mda, p. 169.
- 19.
Mda, p. 137; italics in original.
- 20.
Dirk Klopper, ‘Between nature and culture: The place of prophecy in Zakes Mda’s The Heart of Redness’, Current Writing: Text and Reception in Southern Africa, 20.2 (2008) 92–107 (p. 95).
- 21.
Klopper, p. 95.
- 22.
Mda, p. 76.
- 23.
Mda, p. 85.
- 24.
Mda, p. 86.
- 25.
Mda, p. 259.
- 26.
Paul Jay, Global Matters: The Transnational Turn in Literary Studies (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2010) pp. 142–3.
- 27.
Wenzel, p. 161.
- 28.
Mda, p. 73.
- 29.
Mda, p. 107.
- 30.
Mda, pp. 230–33.
- 31.
Mda, pp. 105, 176, 277.
- 32.
Renée Schatteman, ‘The Xhosa Cattle-Killing and Post-Apartheid South Africa: Sindiwe Magona’s Mother to Mother and Zakes Mda’s The Heart of Redness’, African Studies, 67.2 (2008) 275–91, p. 290.
- 33.
Mda, p. 54.
- 34.
Ahmed, Cultural Politics of Emotion, p. 102.
- 35.
Ahmed, Cultural Politics of Emotion, p. 109. Ahmed is here referring to nations such as Australia and the US as well as Europe in the demand to recognise and apologise for injustices to native peoples and slavery.
- 36.
Achille Mbembe, ‘South Africa’s second coming: the Nongqawuse syndrome’’, OpenDemocracy.net (14 June 2006) https://www.opendemocracy.net/democracy-africa_democracy/southafrica_succession_3649.jsp [accessed 30 November 2015] (para. 6 of 33).
- 37.
Mda, p. 245.
- 38.
Mda, p. 77.
- 39.
Wenzel, p. 163; original emphasis.
- 40.
Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor (Cambridge, MA, and London: Harvard University Press, 2011) p. 175.
- 41.
Anthony Carrigan, Postcolonial Tourism: Literature, Culture, and Environment (New York and London: Routledge, 2011) p. 7.
- 42.
Nixon, p. 176. According to Nixon, in its biodiversity, South Africa is third only to Brazil and Indonesia (p. 175).
- 43.
Sharae Deckard, Paradise Discourse, Imperialism, and Globalization (New York and London: Routledge, 2010) p. 3.
- 44.
Mda, pp. 59–60.
- 45.
Deckard, Paradise Discourse, p. 15.
- 46.
Mda, p. 103.
- 47.
Carrigan, p. 35.
- 48.
Carrigan, p. 61.
- 49.
Nixon, p. 198.
- 50.
Mahmood Mamdani explains that ‘the more Western settlement a colony experienced, the greater was the violence unleashed against the native population’, as ‘settler colonization led to land deprivation’; see Mamdani, When Victims Become Killers: Colonialism, Nativism, and the Genocide in Rwanda (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2001) p. 10.
- 51.
Mda, p. 132.
- 52.
Mda, p. 147.
- 53.
Mda, p. 93.
- 54.
Mda, pp. 132, 93.
- 55.
Carrigan, p. 33.
- 56.
Mda, p. 118.
- 57.
Nixon, pp. 184, 198; Deckard, Paradise Discourse, p. 15.
- 58.
Mda, pp. 239, 247.
- 59.
Mda, p. 247.
- 60.
Mda, pp. 247–48.
- 61.
Nixon, p. 184.
- 62.
Mda, p. 67.
- 63.
Mda, pp. 174, 261. See Introduction chapter for full discussion of irrealism.
- 64.
Benita Parry, ‘Aspects of Peripheral Modernisms’, ARIEL: A Review of International English Literature, 40.1 (2009) 27–55: p. 39.
- 65.
Michael Niblett, ‘World-Economy, World-Ecology, World Literature’, Green Letters: Studies in Ecocriticism, 16.1 (2012) 15–30 (p. 22).
- 66.
Klopper suggests that although Qukezwa ‘inhabits the space of prophecy, and seeks to recover the past in a way that is meaningful for the present, she is not exclusively identified with the past and does not endorse the actual millenarian visions of Nongqawuse. Her prophetic role is at once more contemporary and more circumscribed’ (p. 104).
- 67.
Ibid.
- 68.
Mda, p. 174.
- 69.
Mda, p. 261.
- 70.
Mda, pp. 113–4, 256–7, 258.
- 71.
Schatteman, p. 276.
- 72.
For more on the ‘divide and rule’ (also referred to as ‘colonial tribalism’) strategies of European colonialism in Africa, see Basil Davidson, Modern Africa (1983; London and New York: Routledge, 1994) pp. 69–74, 198; Dowden, Africa, pp. 425–7; Mamdani, pp. 23–27.
- 73.
There have been a number of well-publicised development projects that have furthered or even caused poverty in localities. I am particularly thinking of examples such as Wangari Maathai’s observations about the training offered in Cameroon by the Commission for the Forests of Central Africa and Arundhati Roy’s ongoing activism on the controversies of dam building and other ecologically damaging business practices across India; see Wangari Maathai, The Challenge for Africa (London: Random House, 2009) pp. 11–17; Arundhati Roy, ‘Trickledown Revolution’, in Broken Republic (2011; New Delhi: Penguin India, 2013) pp. 95–142.
- 74.
Mda, p. 67.
- 75.
Mda, p. 103.
- 76.
Mda, p. 117.
- 77.
Mda, p. 55.
- 78.
Wenzel, p. 185.
- 79.
Wenzel, pp. 189, 185.
- 80.
Ilan Kapoor, The Postcolonial Politics of Development (London: Routledge, 2008) p. 50. Kapoor cites Robert Chambers as the chief exponent for PRA and his criticisms of PRA are in response to Chambers’s published output. See Robert Chambers, ‘The origins and practice of Participatory Rural Appraisal’, World Development, 22.7 (1994) 953–69 (pp. 953–69).
- 81.
In particular, see Participation: The New Tyranny?, ed. by Bill Cooke and Uma Kothari (London: Zed Books, 2001), as well as the majority of essays in Hickey and Mohan’s edited collection, Participation—From Tyranny to Transformation.
- 82.
Mda, pp. 198–99.
- 83.
Kapoor, p. 51.
- 84.
Mda, p. 146.
- 85.
Mda, p. 143.
- 86.
Mda, p. 15.
- 87.
Wenzel, p. 179.
- 88.
Rosa Luxemburg, ‘The Russian Revolution’, in The Russian Revolution, and Leninism Or Marxism? (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1961) pp. 81–108 (p. 62).
- 89.
Rose, p. 39.
- 90.
Lansana Keita, ‘Introduction’ in Philosophy and African Development: Theory and Practice, ed. by Lansana Keita (Oxford: African Books Collective, 2011), pp. ix–xviii (p. xvii).
- 91.
Rose, p. 42.
- 92.
Schatteman, pp. 288–89.
- 93.
Mda, pp. 271–75.
- 94.
Mda, p. 277.
- 95.
Schatteman, pp. 288–89.
- 96.
Mda, p. 277.
References
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Carrigan, Anthony. 2011. Postcolonial Tourism: Literature, Culture, and Environment. New York and London: Routledge.
Deckard, Sharae. 2010. Paradise Discourse, Imperialism, and Globalization. New York and London: Routledge.
Eve, Jeanette. 2003. A Literary Guide to the Eastern Cape: Places and the Voices of Writers. Cape Town: Double Storey.
Heller, Patrick. 2001. The Politics of Democratic Decentralization. Politics & Society 29 (1): 131–163.
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Niblett, Michael. 2012. World-Economy, World-Ecology, World Literature. Green Letters: Studies in Ecocriticism 16 (1): 15–30.
Nixon, Rob. 2011. Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor. Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press.
Parry, Benita. 2009. Aspects of Peripheral Modernisms’. ARIEL: A Review of International English Literature 40 (1): 27–55.
Schatteman, Renée. 2008. The Xhosa Cattle-Killing and Post-Apartheid South Africa: Sindiwe Magona’s Mother to Mother and Zakes Mda’s The Heart of Redness. African Studies 67 (2): 275–291.
Wenzel, Jennifer. 2009. Bulletproof: Afterlives of Anticolonial Prophecy in South Africa and Beyond. Chicago, IL and London: University of Chicago.
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Rushton, A. (2024). The Longer Walk to Freedom: South African Prophecy and Neoliberal Intervention upon ‘Tragic Africa’. In: Re-Reading Tragic Africa. New Comparisons in World Literature. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-50955-1_3
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