Love in the time of mirrors: the real and the imaginary in Zakes Mda's The Sculptors of Mapungubwe

* This article was originally a paper read at the 2014 English Academy Conference.

Abstract

In his acceptance speech for the Oliver Schreiner Prize in 1997, Zakes Mda, while repudiating the influence of Latin-American magic realism in his fiction, went on to validate the presence of the real and the unreal in his works as an expression of a quintessentially African world-view (1997. The English Academy Review 14: 279–281). In The Sculptors of Mapungubwe (2013. Cape Town: Kwela Books), Mda conjures up the mythic aura of an ancient civilization that existed around the year ‘1223 CE’ (p. 3) in the precincts of Mapungubwe in Southern Africa. In recuperating the past, the novel sets in motion a contemporary dialectic on issues such as artistic freedom in a politically intolerant society, our ecological and ethical responsibility for other life forms that share our planet, attitudes towards homoeroticism, and above all, corruption in government circles and how it taints the rest of society. This article postulates that the appeal of The Sculptors of Mapungubwe lies in its dual conception – as a work of popular fiction on one level, imbricated in the mythical, and as an artistic chronotope on the other, attesting to the contrary states of human nature across time and space.

Key words:

• ecological responsibility
• homoeroticism
• imaginary
• Mapungubwe
• Zakes Mda
• sculptors

Acknowledgement

I wish to acknowledge my debt to the National Research Foundation (NRF) of South Africa under whose auspices my research is conducted. The views expressed are my own and do not reflect the views or the policy of the NRF.

Notes

* This article was originally a paper read at the 2014 English Academy Conference.

1 This was at the Auetsa/Saval/Saclals conference held at the University of Pretoria, 7–9 July, 2003. The‘young academic’ in question was Ashraf Jamal and the ‘senior academic’ Johan Jacobs, who subsequently co-edited, with David Bell, the first monograph on Zakes Mda.

2 An example of a subversive act by Márquez is to reduce the heroic status of the English admiral Sir Francis Drake to that of a buccaneer: ‘When the pirate Sir Francis Drake attacked Riohacha in the sixteenth century, Ursula Iguaran’s great-great-grandmother … lost control of her nerves and sat down on a lighted stove’([1967] 1972, 19).

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Harry Sewlall

HARRY SEWLALL is an alumnus of Unisa and North-West University (Potchefstroom Campus) where he obtained his MA (cum laude) and PhD respectively. His MA was on the poet Philip Larkin and his thesis on Joseph Conrad and Postcoloniality. A former superintendent of education (English), he has taught at Vista, Unisa, Fort Hare and North-West (Mahikeng). He has published in the fields of literature, ecocriticism and popular culture, with a bias towards Joseph Conrad, Zakes Mda and Elvis Presley. He is currently a Professor in the English department of the University of Venda.