Nongqawuse Resurrected: Legend and History in Zakes Mda’s The Heart of Redness
Zakes Mda’s novel The Heart of Redness uses the legendary story of the amaXhosa prophetess Nongqawuse and of the Cattle Killing Movement of 1856-57, as it was handed down to posterity through historical records and literary texts, particularly H. I. E. Dhlomo’s play The Girl Who Killed to Save: Nong...
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| Опубликовано в: : | URI:https://journals.openedition.org/ces, |
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| Главный автор: | |
| Формат: | Article ou chapitre numérique |
| Язык: | Anglais |
| Опубликовано: |
Commonwealth Essays and Studies
2022
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| Online-ссылка: | Accès Université d'Orléans et IFPM Accès Université d'Orléans et IFPM |
| Итог: | Zakes Mda’s novel The Heart of Redness uses the legendary story of the amaXhosa prophetess Nongqawuse and of the Cattle Killing Movement of 1856-57, as it was handed down to posterity through historical records and literary texts, particularly H. I. E. Dhlomo’s play The Girl Who Killed to Save: Nongqawuse the Liberator (1936), to establish surprising and ironic correspondences between the past and the present. By evoking this tragic episode in the lives of the amaXhosa people and its reawakening in the present, Zakes Mda seems to follow a twofold agenda: he rewrites this historic episode from the point of view of a liberated South Africa and he examines the effects which the resurgence of the divisive issues of the past has on the present. The article focuses on how, through the rewriting of history, the South African past is being negotiated and how the novel through its own mode of writing conveys the ambiguities and contradictions of post-apartheid South Africa. |
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