The representation of place and religion in Nkosinathi Sithole's Hunger eats a man

Abstract

Nkosinathi Sithole's Hunger eats a man, published simultaneously in isiZulu and English in 2011, is set in an area of semi-urban sprawl in an economically depressed zone of the South African province of KwaZulu-Natal. While the village of Ndlalidlindoda (translated as “Hunger eats a man”) borders a lush wild life conservation area, its immediate environment is degraded, infertile and overpopulated. Poverty and unemployment destabilise traditional codes of rural civility and co-operation. Unemployment results also in deep tensions between men and women in the domestic sphere. People turn to a variety of Christian and traditional spiritual beliefs and practices, which offer them spurious promises of wealth and status but impoverish them even further. At the end of the novel, though, a more political form of “truth” is offered that leads to an actual attack on men who sexually abuse women and children and imaginatively, in the form of a short story, to a revolutionary act of communal restoration by means of the physical appropriation of the resources of the elite who inhabit the nearby suburb of Canaan. This article will examine how the novel's representation of place and spirituality contributes to its central theme of economic transformation.

Keywords:

• place
• spirituality
• class struggle
• poverty
• unemployment
• South African literary studies