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In 1991, when the issue of Kunapipi on `New Art and Literature from South Africa' appeared, Njabulo S Ndebele's complaint about the way in which black South African writing, committed to political engagement, had deteriorated into struggle allegory, was already a critical commonplace. South African fiction, Ndebele had said back in the 80s, was `the product of an ideology whose analysis of society is based on moral premises' (23), and its characters consisted essentially of the stereotypical villains and victims of apartheid, impersonal ciphers in a moral debate. Formulaic rather than analytical, such novels had come to reproduce apartheid's negation of human individuality in a heroic narrative of `numbing sensationalism' (24) and spectacle, requiring nothing beyond recognition. What was needed, Ndebele argued, was the rediscovery of the ordinary and the restoration of the truly human dimension to black South African storytelling.

Margaret Mervis has offered a persuasive reading of Ways of Dying, the first novel by the South African playwright, Zakes Mda, as a fictional exploration of `new ideas and an alternative ideology through which he can envisage a place for himself and his art in the future' (42). She develops the thesis that in a narrative `combination of Brechtian didacticism and indigenous African participatory story-telling' (55), Mda has succeeded in translating his theories of `Theatre for Development' (Mda 1993) into what she calls `Fiction for Development', a new kind of text informed by a humanistic ethos.

This essay, however, will attempt to show how, in his third and most recent novel, The Heart of Redness, Mda has responded to Ndebele's challenge by addressing the present history of South Africa in regional terms rather than those of national allegory, and in a narrative that draws on distinctive cultural practice and a particular event from the South African past to structure its concern with contemporary realities. The Heart of Redness not only graphically represents the formal and informal occasions by means of which a culture enacts both its perpetuation of ancient traditions and its engagement with present circumstances, but the text itself is also a performative one. The Heart of Redness bears out David Coplan's observation that, `The importance of expression in action, of making meaning visible, has been documented in genres of dance, oral poetry, and narrative throughout black South Africa' (1).

Zakes Mda's The Heart of Redness: The Novel as Umngqokolo