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ABSTRACT
This article explores Zakes Mda’s fascination with and deployment of the (leit)motif of twins, doubles/doppelgängers, and the notion of duality in his novels. In a close reading of The Heart of Redness, I explore how Mda dramatizes the breakdown of Xhosa society during the colonial encounters with the British and their continued impact on the present. I am also interested in the ways in which this novel animates the tensions between colonial modernity and Africanist traditionalism, while also drawing our attention to societies that do not thrive on the fixed taxonomies of rationalism. Through twinship, the figure of the double, and the notion of duality, Mda’s novel not only illustrates the complexity of the South African colonial experience, but also recuperates a historical episode that has been predominantly relegated to the margins of hysteria and delusion.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1 T. Spreelin Macdonald, Gail Fincham, and Johan Jacobs also argue similarly in “Twinship and Humanism in She Plays with the Darkness,” Dance of Life: The novels of Zakes Mda in post-apartheid South Africa, and “Performing the Precolonial: Zakes Mda’s The Sculptors of Mapungubwe,” respectively.
2 Mda, Ways of Dying, 140.
3 Ibid.
4 Ilechukwu, “Ogbanje/abiku and Cultural Conceptualisations of Psychopathology in Nigeria,” 239.
5 Ibid., 242.
6 Mazibuko, “Mothers, Madonnas and Musicians,” 82; van Wyk, “Catastrophe and Beauty,” 79.
7 Mda, She Plays with the Darkness, 3.
8 Jacobs, “Zakes Mda and the (South) African Renaissance,” 69.
9 Sewlall, “Love in the time of mirrors,” 38–9.
10 Mda, Sculptors of Mapungubwe, 28.
11 Ibid., 3.
12 See Patrick Stokes’s Kierkegaard’s Mirrors: Interest, Self and Moral Vision, 2010.
13 Sewlall, “Love in the time of mirrors,” 29.
14 Mda, Sculptors of Mapungubwe, 3.
15 Sewlall, “Love in the time of mirrors,” 28.
16 Vital, “Situating Ecology in Recent South African Fiction,” 308.
17 Jacobs, “Performing the Precolonial,” 15.
18 Ndibe, “History and Memory,” 34.
19 According to historian, Jeff Peires, at least 40 000 Xhosa people died of starvation during this time (The Dead Will Arise, 319).
20 Mda, Heart of Redness, 36.
21 Ibid., 105.
22 Feldbrügge, “The Human and the Non-Human World,” 154.
23 Ibid., 155.
24 Mda, Heart of Redness, 19.
25 Attwell, Rewriting Modernity, 195.
26 Mda, Heart of Redness, 30.
27 Ibid., 28.
28 Ibid., 61.
29 Barnard, “The Place of Beauty,” 114.
30 Mda, Heart of Redness, 5.
31 I am using this term in the sense that Wamba dia Wamba uses it, that is, to denote public, court-like processes which reflect on indigenous forms of governance and democracy.
32 Mda, Heart of Redness, 105.
33 Ibid., 55–7.
34 Ibid., 13.
35 Ibid., 13.
36 Ibid., 12.
37 Andrade, “Cinema’s Doubles,” 2.
38 Historically, Nxele is said to have drowned while trying to escape from the island, and the amaXhosa have developed the saying “Ulindele uNxele” which roughly translates as “you are waiting in vain.” It is telling here that Twin, who is a supporter of the cult of the Believers, should be associated with this bottomless longing/futile waiting, particularly in the light of Nongqawuse’s “failed” prophesies.
39 Mda, Heart of Redness, 15.
40 Ibid., 14.
41 Ibid., 15, emphasis mine.
42 As African philosopher, John S. Mbiti explains, in his inversion of Descartes’ cogito ergo sum: “[the individual] owes his existence to other people […] He is part of a whole […] Whatever happens to the individual happens to the whole group, and whatever happens to the whole group happens to the individual. The individual can only say: “I am, because we are; and since we are therefore I am” (108).
43 Mda, Heart of Redness, 19.
44 Ibid., 20.
45 Ibid., 21.
46 Senghor, On African Socialism, 115.
47 Mda, Heart of Redness, 22.
48 Stefan, “Heartache and Pain in two Commonwealth Novels,” 23.
49 Mda, Heart of Redness, 20.
50 Ibid., 18.
51 Ibid., 26.
52 Vital, “Situating Ecology in Recent South African Fiction,” 307.
53 Mda, Heart of Redness, 55.
54 Ibid., 25.
55 Ibid., 60.
56 Ibid., 59.
57 Ibid., 54.
58 The amaXhosa are not really interested in this distinction, however, because they believe that all white people were cast into the sea for murdering the only son of their god (Mda, Heart of Redness, 54).
59 Ibid., 52.
60 Ibid., 53.
61 Mzileni, “Supernatural’s Role in the Juxtaposition of the Ideas of Modernity, Traditionalism and Identity,” 12.
62 Mda, Heart of Redness, 98.
63 Ibid., 99.
64 Ibid., 98.
65 Ibid., 99.
66 Ibid., 95.
67 Lloyd, “The Modernisation of Redness,” 35.
68 Mda, Heart of Redness, 95.
69 Ibid., 97–8.
70 Saccaggi, “Reinvention of Historical Discourse,” 111.
71 Ibid., 111.
72 Ibid., 113.
73 Mda, Heart of Redness, 240.
74 Ibid., 241.
75 Ibid., 294.
76 Bell, “Intimate Presence of Death,” 98.
77 Hankoff, “Healing Gods are Twins,” 307–8.
78 Ibid., 309.
79 Ibid., 309.
80 Boniface Davis, “History in the Literary Imagination,” 192.
81 Du Bois, The Soul of Black Folks, 5.
82 Gikandi, Reading Chinua Achebe, 21.
83 Ibid., 20.
84 ctd. in Diagne, African Art as African Philosophy, 6.
85 Ndibe, “History and Memory.”
86 Atwell, Rewriting Modernity, 199.
87 de Nooy, Twins in Contemporary Literature and Culture, 5.
88 Mda, Heart of Redness, 3.
89 Ibid., 4.
90 Ibid., 1.
91 Ibid., 217.
92 Ibid., 105.
93 Ibid., 79.
94 Lloyd, “The Modernisation of Redness,” 36.
95 Mda, Heart of Redness, 105.
96 Lloyd, “The Modernisation of Redness,” 36.
97 Mda, Heart of Redness, 122.
98 Ibid., 226.
99 Ibid., 227.
100 Ibid., 44.
101 Ibid., 7.
102 Ibid., 169.
103 Ibid., 7.
104 Ibid., 36.
105 For a more in-depth analysis of failures of the nationalist project, see Fanon’s “The Pitfalls of National Consciousness,” in The Wretched of the Earth.
106 Mda, Heart of Redness, 31.
107 Peeters, “The Accidental Activist,” 30.
108 Mda, Heart of Redness, 29.
109 Ibid., 27.
110 Ibid., 30.
111 Ibid., 28.
112 Ibid., 299.
113 Ibid., 30.
114 Ibid., 66.
115 Ibid., 30.
116 Stefan, “Heart-ache and Pain in Two Commonwealth Novels,” 23.
117 Mda, Heart of Redness, 29.
118 Ibid., 184.
119 Ibid., 110.
120 Ibid., 99.
121 Ibid., 10.
122 Ibid., 3.
123 Ibid., 184.
124 Ibid., 71.
125 Ibid., 114.
126 Ibid., 172.
127 Ibid., 12.
128 Ibid., 184.
129 Mzileni, “Supernatural’s Role in the Juxtaposition of the Ideas of Modernity,” 14.
130 Mda, Heart of Redness, 172.
131 Ibid., 10.
132 Ibid., 302.
133 Woodward, “Jim Comes to Joburg,” 178.
134 Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk, 5.
135 Mda, Heart of Redness, 175.
136 Ibid., 175.
137 Samuelson, ““Nongqawuse, National time and (Female) Authorship,” 241.
138 Mda, Heart of Redness, 62.
139 Ibid., 103.
140 Ibid., 100.
141 Ibid., 118.
142 Sewlall, “’Portmanteau Biota’ and Ecofeminist Interventions,” 3.
143 Ibid., 102, 248–9.
144 Klopper, “Between Nature and Culture,” 101.
145 Živković, “The Double as the ‘Unseen’ of Culture,” 126.
146 Mzileni, “Supernatural’s Role in the Juxtaposition of the Ideas of Modernity,” 11.
147 Mda, Heart of Redness, 289.
148 Vital, “Situating Ecology in Recent South African Fiction,” 30.
149 Mda, Heart of Redness, 223.
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A. Yolisa Kenqu
A. Yolisa Kenqu is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Literary Studies in English at Rhodes University. Her thesis explores failure and disillusionment in black post-apartheid fiction, and the move from social realism to more experimental narrative modes such as magical, animist, spiritual and sacred realism, as well as the spectral turn or postcolonial gothic politics in this writing.