Zakes Mda’s artistic versatility as well as his practical involvement with a diverse range of people is richly demonstrated in his novels Ways of Dying, The Madonna of Excelsior, The Heart of Redness, The Whale Caller, and Cion. Central to his achievement as the most striking new voice in South African literature is his celebration of the values of community. Mda’s explorations of refigured identity are rooted in his strongly painterly imagination, which teaches the reader how to see anew by creating changed spaces in memory and culture that redress the negativity of the colonial experience. Mda uses authorial and figural point of view, perspective and focalization to induct the reader into an altered understanding of socio-historical realities. Ways of Dying transforms the horror of death and the pain of mourning into artistic commemoration, The Heart of Redness translates the chiaroscuro of Conrad’s novella into the vibrant colours of an Africa rich in culture and ritual, The Madonna of Excelsior turns the context of repressive legislation into an occasion for artistic expression, while Cion interweaves the sufferings of slaves in the American deep south with the liberating art of their descendants. The artist’s saturation in the visual enables the construction of a dynamic postcolonial subjectivity.

Mda’s writing, transforming everyday life into art, shows the reader how to live in peace both individually and communally. Refusing to be co-opted into any political or cultural elite, his work promotes reflections on how to practise postcolonial pedagogies in an increasingly uncivil public sphere.