Set in the Eastern Cape of South Africa, homeland of the amaXhosa people, Zakes Mda’s novel Heart of Redness (2003) weaves together past and present in addressing issues of modernity, ethnicity, environment, spirituality and politics. On the Eastern Cape frontier of the 1850s a girl-prophet, Nongqawuse, delivered a message from the ancestors that all cattle should be killed and crops destroyed so that the dead may arise, regenerate the nation, and drive the white colonists into the sea. The zeal with which this instruction was executed devastated the amaXhosa nation and crippled whatever resistance remained to colonial subjugation. The novel portrays the extent to which the unresolved conflicts of the past are re-enacted in the present.
Critical readings of Mda’s novel have focused on issues of historical embeddedness and intertextuality; tradition, gender and identity; ecology and global economics; community and the politics of development. My paper draws on the insights provided by these readings to investigate more specifically the space the novel opens up between the seemingly disparate realms of the sacred and the secular. Through an examination of Mda’s understanding of the literary or aesthetic imagination, I will argue that the novel explores the imaginative possibilities of understanding the relationship between the sacred and secular not as a dualism but as a dialectic.