Between Nature and Culture: The Place of Prophecy in Zakes Mda’s "The Heart of Redness"

Abstract

While earlier studies of Zakes Mda’s The Heart of Redness have drawn attention to the way in which the novel challenges the binary opposition of past and present, traditionalism and modernity, and have expounded on the novel’s ecological theme, none have thus far examined the significance of prophecy in the novel, the mode of thought that informed the Xhosa cattle killing of the 1850s and the logic of which the narrative sets out to explore.
Drawing on anthropological research on the role of the diviner-prophet in Xhosa society, this article argues that the challenge posed by the novel to binary thinking and the novel’s preoccupation with an ecological awareness converge in the notion of the prophetic as involving an interrogation of the relationship between nature and culture.