The Heart of Redness: A Novel

Acclaim for
The Heart of Redness

“A major step in the new South African novel—now a polyphony of voices, suddenly freed yet still shadowed by deep and immense riddles.”

—
The Village Voice

“Zakes Mda writes of his troubled homeland with as much affection as outrage, as much love as lamentation . . . . This emotionally rich novel dares to seek redemption amid desolation. In these devastated lives, Mda finds grace, tenderness, even the kind of world-weary humor that is born of hardship.”

—
The Boston Globe

“A novel of tremendous scope and deep human feeling, of passion and reconciliation. . . 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.”

—
The Seattle Skanner

“In an unaffected, generous style that blends social and magical realism, oral tradition and written history, Mda spins stories that both read like myth and chronicle ordinary South African life.”

—
The Philadelphia Inquirer

“Jumping handily between past and present, Mda deftly renders the tensions between maintaining an indigenous culture and altering it in the name of progress.”

—
Entertainment Weekly

“Mda tells his country’s stories through beautifully realized characters whose search for love and connection take you up close to the black experience, past and present.”

—
Booklist

“A prolific and prominent new voice of South African literature, Mda transforms historical events and invents new ones that express his continued concern, as in these two novels, that the liberators do not become the oppressors . . . A brilliantly profuse novel. . . provocatively offbeat and tragically weird.”

—Los
Angeles Times Book Review

“A nuanced story about belief, memory, and the complex legacies of colonialism and its contemporary heir, global capitalism. [Mda] paints a vivid picture of a new South Africa of uncertain future . . . where the past is deeply contested terrain and social equality remains a faraway dream.”

—
Mother Jones

“Mda’s fascinating narrative skill reveals the past as a powerful presence in the present: of his characters, and of all of us, as we live.”

—Nadine Gordimer

“A work of extraordinary richness, suffused with genuine mythic power: comparable to the recently discovered fiction of Moses Iszegawa and Emmanuel Dongala—and not unworthy of comparison with the masterpieces of Chinua Achebe.”

—
Kirkus Reviews
(starred review)

“Rich in the sensuality and exoticism of African life.”

—
The Commercial Appeal
(Memphis)

Also by Zakes Mda

The Madonna of Excelsior
She Plays with Darkness
Ways of Dying

Zakes Mda

THE HEART OF REDNESS
. Copyright © 2000 by Zakes Mda. All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. For information, address Picador, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Mda, Zakes.

The heart of redness / Zakes Mda.

         p. cm.

ISBN 0-312-42174-5       ISBN 978-0-312-42174-8

1. Triangles (Interpersonal relations)—Fiction. 2. Xhosa (African people)—Fiction. 3. South Africa—Fiction. 4. Villages—Fiction. 5. Casinos—Fiction. I. Title.

PR9369.3.M4 H43 2002
823'.914—dc21                                                           2002025008

First published in the United States by Farrar, Straus and Giroux

First published in South Africa by Oxford University Press

10   9   8   7   6

DEDICATION

There is a real-life trader in Qolorha, whose name is Rufus Hulley, who took me to places of miracles and untold beauty. He must not be mistaken for John Dalton, the trader of
The Heart of Redness
, who is purely a fictional character. I am grateful to Rufus, and to Jeff Peires, whose research—wonderfully recorded in
The Dead Will Arise
and in a number of academic papers—informed the historical events in my fiction. As for the people of Qolorha, they will forgive me for reinventing their lives.

I wrote this novel in honor of new lives, among which I count my son Zukile, my daughter Zukiswa Zenzile Moroesi, and my daughter’s son, Wandile.

The
Heart
of
Redness

“Tears are very close to my eyes,” says Bhonco, son of Ximiya. “Not for pain . . . no . . . I do not cry because of pain. I cry only because of beautiful things.”

And he cries often. Sometimes just a sniffle. Or a single tear down his cheek. As a result he carries a white handkerchief all the time, especially these days when peace has returned to the land and there is enough happiness to go around. It is shared like pinches of snuff. Rivers of salt. They furrow the aged face.

Bhonco is different from the other Unbelievers in his family, for Unbelievers are reputed to be such somber people that they do not believe even in those things that can bring happiness to their lives. They spend most of their time moaning about past injustices and bleeding for the world that would have been had the folly of belief not seized the nation a century and a half ago and spun it around until it was in a woozy stupor that is felt to this day. They also mourn the sufferings of the Middle Generations. That, however, is only whispered.

Bhonco does not believe in grieving. He has long accepted that what has happened has happened. It is cast in cold iron that does not entertain rust. His forebears bore the pain with stoicism. They lived with it until they passed on to the world of the ancestors.

Then came the Middle Generations. In between the forebears and this new world. And the Middle Generations fleeted by like a dream. Often like a nightmare. But now even the sufferings of the Middle Generations have passed. This is a new life, and it must be celebrated. Bhonco, son of Ximiya, celebrates it with tears.

NoPetticoat, his placable wife, is on the verge of losing patience with his tears. Whenever someone does a beautiful thing in the presence of her husband she screams, “Stop! Please stop! Or you’ll make Bhonco cry!”

She dotes on him though, poor thing. People say it is nice to see such an aged couple—who would be having grandchildren if their daughter, Xoliswa Ximiya, had not chosen to remain an old maid—so much in love.

It is a wonderful sight to watch the couple walking side by side from a feast. He, tall and wiry with a deep chocolate face grooved with gullies; and she, a stout matron whose comparatively smooth face makes her look younger than her age. Sometimes they are seen staggering a bit, humming the remnants of a song, their muscles obviously savoring the memory of the final dance of a feast.

The custom is that men walk in front and women follow. But Bhonco and NoPetticoat walk side by side. Sometimes holding hands! A constant source of embarrassment to Xoliswa Ximiya: old people have no right to love. And if they happen to be foolish enough to harbor the slightest affection for each other, they must not display it in public.

“Tears are close to my eyes, NoPetticoat,” snivels the man of the house, dabbing his eyes with the handkerchief.

“A big man like you shouldn’t be bawling like a spoiled baby, Bhonco,” says the woman of the house, nevertheless putting her arm around his shoulders.

A beautiful thing has happened. They have just received the news that Xoliswa Ximiya, their beloved and only child, has been promoted at work. She is now the principal of Qolorha-by-Sea Secondary School.

Xoliswa Ximiya is not called just Xoliswa. People use both her name and surname when they talk about her, because she is an important person in the community. A celebrity, so to speak. She is highly
learned too, with a B.A. in education from the University of Fort Hare, and a certificate in teaching English as a second language from some college in America.

“They will not accept her,” laments NoPetticoat, as if to herself.

“But she is a child of this community,” says Bhonco adamantly. “She grew up in front of their eyes. She became educated while others laughed and said I was mad to send a girl to school.”

“They will say she is a woman. Remember the teacher who left? He was a man, yet they didn’t accept him. They made life very difficult for him. How much more for a woman?”

“They made life difficult for him because he was uncircumcised. He was not a man. How could he teach our children with a dangling foreskin?”

“I tell you, Bhonco, they won’t accept her. They will give my baby problems at that school!”

“She is not a baby. She is thirty-six years old. And if they don’t accept her it will be the work of the Believers. They are jealous because they don’t have a daughter who is as educated,” says Bhonco, making it clear that the discussion is terminated.

It had to come back to the war between the Believers and Unbelievers. They are in competition in everything.

The early manifestation of this competition happened a few years ago when the Ximiyas bought a pine dining table with four chairs. The family became the talk of the community, since no one else in the village had a dining table those days. But Zim, of the family of Believers, had to burst the Ximiya bubble by buying exactly the same dining table, but with six chairs. That really irked the son of Ximiya and his supporters.

Since then the war between the two families has become a public one. Their good neighbors await with bated breath the next skulduggery they will do against each other.

The Cult of the Unbelievers began with Twin-Twin, Bhonco Ximiya’s ancestor, in the days of Prophetess Nongqawuse almost one hundred and fifty years ago. The revered Twin-Twin had elevated unbelieving to the heights of a religion. The cult died during the Middle Generations, for people then were more concerned with surviving and
overcoming their oppression. They did not have the time to fight about the perils of belief and unbelief.

But even before the sufferings of the Middle Generations had passed—when it was obvious to everyone that the end was near—Bhonco, son of Ximiya, resurrected the cult.

He does not care that only his close relatives and himself subscribe to it. Nor does it matter to him that people have long forgotten the conflicts of generations ago. He holds to them dearly, for they have shaped his present, and the present of the nation. His role in life is to teach people not to believe. He tells them that even the Middle Generations wouldn’t have suffered if it had not been for the scourge of belief.