Black South African Artists in Conversation: Nongqawuse, ‘The Bellow of the Bulls’ and Other Travelling Tropes in Zakes Mda’s The Heart of Redness

Abstract

This article attempts to move beyond readings of Zakes Mda’s The Heart of Redness in relation to Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness and other novels within the Western literary canon. My aim is to transcend the exhausted tropes of “writing back” that inevitably frame black artistic expressions as necessarily engaged with empire, responding to whiteness or trapped in the Manichean self-other dialectic, the obvious danger of which is the implication that black people are objects in the Western project of domination. Blackness, after all, is not merely a reflection of white selfnegation. By contrast I re-read The Heart of Redness as in dialogue with, and contributing to, the broader (and ongoing) existential conversations that black South African artists working in different media and genres have been engaging in for many years now. I argue that these artists have been talking to each other – whether consciously or not – in their adoption of certain motifs or tropes, which they approach from within a range of distinct disciplines, perspectives and historical moments.

Keywords:  Zakes Mda, Nongqawuse, writing back, tragedy, transdisciplinarity, the Bellow of the Bulls, Black Consciousness