kagablog

A RESPONSE

by Zakes Mda

The Heart of Redness is a work of fiction and not a history textbook. Historical record is only utilized in the novel to serve my fiction – to give it context, for instance. In the historical segments the fiction centers on the patriarch Xikixa, his sons Twin and Twin-Twin, and his daughter-in-law Qukezwa. All these are fictional characters created from my imagination. But the world they inhabit comes directly from historical record (Jeff Peires’ The Dead Will Arise) and from the oral tradition. For instance when my characters migrate as a result of the lungsickness they are led to new pastures by the stars known as the Seven Sisters, they pray for guidance to Tsiqua and his son Heitsi Eibib and they perform their rituals on the cairns that they occasionally find on the crossroads. This journey is not informed by historical record but by the oral tradition of my mother’s people, the Cwerhas of the Gxarha sub-clan, descendant from the Khoikhoi people. But when my fictional characters interact with historical characters such as Mlanjeni, Mhlakaza and Nongqawuse the events surrounding these characters come directly from Peires’ book. That is why I have credited Peires in all editions and translations of The Heart of Redness as the sole source for all my material that comes from historical record. However he is not the source for the oral tradition from which I draw. Peires does not deal with Khoikhoi cosmology in his book. Nor does he mention King Sarhili’s nature reserve. My source for this was the trader Rufus Hulley who is also credited in my book.

It is not an accident that Peires is my sole source of historical record. His book had all the information I needed for the context for my fiction. There was therefore no need for me to replicate his work by going back to his primary sources. Peires had done all the research for me, and for anyone else who wanted to use his book, in a most meticulous manner. My intention in the novel was never to interrogate Peires and his interpretation of the Cattle Killing; it was never to “challenge or revolutionize” (I think I have “revolutionized” enough with my fictional character Camagu, the Aristocrats of the Revolution, and the saving of Qolorha-by-Sea from environmental rape). I was quite satisfied with Peires’ version of events not because it presented the sole “truth”, but because it served my fiction effectively. I was not creating a scholarly work but a work of fiction. I could have easily consulted other historians who have written on the subject as well, but Peires’ work spoke to me because it had the necessary ontological elements in it, and captured the myths and beliefs as I remembered them growing up among the amaXhosa people. One of the strategies of my fiction is the portrayal of local beliefs and myths as part of objective reality. Faris (1995) has observed that “in magical realist narrative, ancient systems of beliefs and local lore often underlie the text.” (p.182) I may add that they are often depicted in a deadpan manner, as if they do not contradict our laws of reason. That is why my Nongqawuse flies with the crows from a river to a distant pool (oral tradition) and Mlanjeni lights his pipe with the rays of the sun and dances until his sweat causes rain to fall (also from the oral tradition, but recorded in Peires).

The distinction between The Heart of Redness and the other Nongqawuse narratives that the author cites is that in my novel Nongqawuse is not the central figure but the backdrop. My story is not about her, but about my principal fictional characters, both in the past and the present, whose lives were affected by her prophecies. If Nongwawuse had been the central character then I would have felt the need to “challenge” and “revolutionize.” Under the circumstances if I had done that she would have assumed center-stage and would have hijacked the story from Camagu, Qukezwa, John Dalton, Zim and Bhonco in the present, and from Twin, Twin-Twin, Qukezwa, John Dalton and Xikixa in the past. Nongqawuse is only important in my novel in so far as her prophecies influence my characters for better or for worse. To portray this influence it was necessary to present the context of those prophecies, and the most effective way to do that was through intertextuality with Peires’ work. Contrary to what the author claims in his/her article I do not attempt to offer an “interpretation of the Xhosa Cattle killing” in my novel. I use Peires’ interpretation lock stock and barrel. I do proffer some interpretation of the circumstances and environment of my fictional characters though. I however leave most of the interpreting to you, the reader and the critic. Mine is to tell the story, using any effective tool at my disposal.

To assert, as the author of the article does, that The Heart of Redness is formed by The Dead Will Arise is to state the obvious; more so if you look at the historical segments of the novel. Indeed if Jeff Peires had not been engaged as my consultant when I was commissioned to write the Nongqawuse episode of the TV series Saints Sinners and Settlers, if he had not arranged my trip to the Eastern Cape and my meeting with Rufus Hulley (this is not a “minimal” role), and if he had not written The Dead Will Arise, we would not be discussing The Heart of Redness today but a different novel wholly set in the present following Camagu’s misadventures with the Aristocrats of the Revolution.

Should I then designate Peires as the co-author of The Heart of Redness? That is an absurdity. If I had used original material from Peires that had not been published elsewhere, and that had been written by him to suit the needs of The Heart of Redness, then of course he would be co-author of my book. But I used material from his book, of which he is credited as sole author, and I duly acknowledge him as the sole source of the historical aspects of my novel. That should do it, don’t you think?

Even if the author of the article does not think so, Peires certainly does. If he wanted to be designated co-author of The Heart of Redness he would have said so. He is an intelligent man – a great South African scholar, a developmental activist and a political leader. He would know immediately if he had been plagiarized and he would not cower in some corner and shut up about it. Instead, as the author of the article grudgingly admits, Peires has expressed how honored he feels that I have relied on his work in this manner. In fact The Heart of Redness gave The Dead Will Arise a new lease of life, and exposed it to new readers who would not otherwise read a history text.
One thing very strange about this article is that its author claims that I am likely to be haunted by the findings of some historians that Mhlakaza was not Wilhelm Goliath after all. I knew of this debate long before I wrote The Heart of Redness, so nothing will haunt me here. I chose Peires’ version because it is the more romantic of the interpretations and therefore serves my fiction best. If historical accuracy (which I still consider important) was paramount to everything else then my Nongqawuse would not be flying with the Nomyayi bird (the crow) to Gobe and the magical moments of Mlanjeni and Nxele would have been expressed as mere belief instead of fact; there would have been a clear line of demarcation between the supernatural and empirical reality; we would not even have seen the miracles at the Gxarha River actually happening as they would have been portrayed as people’s delusions and superstitions.
The author of the article is complaining that a reader of The Heart of Redness who has not read The Dead Will Arise will think that I have a great grasp of history. That reader will be correct. I do have a great grasp of history. And guess where I get this wonderful grasp? From Jeff Peires, of course! From the time he was my consultant, to reading his books and other academic articles, I couldn’t help but have a great grasp of history. But let’s not forget that my grasp also comes from the oral traditions of my people, hence the magic in my history!
The author’s list of all the phrases, sentences and passages paraphrased (or “borrowed” to use his/her term) from The Dead Will Arise is impressive but it is not original. It is very similar to the list compiled by Colombana (2004) in her examination of intertextuality between The Heart of Redness and three other texts, including The Dead Will Arise. One major difference is that Colombana reaches a more intelligent conclusion. She writes: “After these observations one may assert that, all in all, Mda’s work is not very creative because it seems to consist in a sort of ‘copy and paste’ from Peires’ book. But this is not true. The creativity of Mda’s work has to be seen in the continuous twinning that Mda is able to do between the past narrative and the present one. The latter depends completely on what happened in the past and cannot be read without reference to it.” (p.93 )
The author of the article further says that I use Peires’ “material sequentially and chronologically, making the task of identifying borrowed passages an easy one.” Well, the task was easy because I was not trying to hide these “borrowed passages”. For intertextuality to function successfully it is important that those readers who are familiar with the original text should be able to identify its influences as it interplays with the new text. Where I felt that Peires’ phraseology was so apt that it served my fiction effectively I used that phraseology and built on it a new fictional world for my characters. I also used his phraseology (which is largely the phraseology of some of Peires’ primary sources and transliterations from isiXhosa) to pay homage to my historical source. This was a conscious and overt decision on my part – to reproduce history as recorded by Jeff Peires in order to give context to my own invented world. That is what intertextuality is all about. At no point did I ever claim that I use intertextuality to “disengage colonial dualism” or even to be subversive. Once more, I use it to give my storytelling a credible context!
And by the way, intertextuality is not peculiar to post-colonial African literature. It is an international post-modern phenomenon. It is even found in music in the form of “sampling” and in art in collages composed of images borrowed from other creators. In The Heart of Redness I go beyond the practitioners of sampling and collaging because I credit the originator of the historical narrative that has influenced my novel so profoundly.
Plagiarism, on the other hand, is theft. A plagiarist passes someone else’s work as his own without crediting the owner and with the intention to deceive. The author admits in his article that I do credit Jeff Peires in my “Dedication”, yet s/he proceeds to libel me as a plagiarist. A major weakness of his/her case is that the concepts are not defined at all. We therefore never get to know what his/her understanding of them is. At one point the crime of which s/he accuses me is termed “intertextuality”, and then “borrowing”, “excessive intertexuality”, and finally “plagiarism”. There is even “acknowledged theft” somewhere (What on earth is it? I never acknowledged stealing anything from anybody.) All these are used interchangeably throughout the text, and we never get to understand at what point, for instance, intertextuality becomes excessive, who sets these boundaries and how the excessiveness is measured. His/her graph, giving some semblance of empiricism, does not really do the trick! For instance the percentage that he claims comprises Peires’ work also contains the actions of my fictional characters, and a number of fictional events that are driven both by historical characters (Peires’ - though he didn’t invent them) and by fictional characters invented by me. How is the author of the article going to empirically separate these in order to have an accurate measure of “excessive intertextuality”?

Colombana, Sara. The Heart of Redness by Zakes Mda. (Thesis for Laurea in Lingue e Letterature Straniere, University of Padua, Italy, 2004)

Faris, Wendy B. “Scheherazade’s Children: Magical Realism and Post-Modern Fiction” in Magical Realism: Theory, History, Community (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1995)