The Heart of Redness

Mda splits the novel between two timelines a century and a half apart: in the 1850s, the teenage prophet Nongqawuse tells the Xhosa that their ancestors have promised to sweep the British into the sea if the people kill every last head of cattle and destroy their own grain stores, a real historical event that produced a catastrophic famine when the ancestors did not appear. Mda tracks the community's split into Believers, who carried out the killing on faith, and Unbelievers, who refused, as a wound that never actually closes, reappearing in the present-day village of Qolorha as rival descendants still arguing the same argument over a proposed casino and resort development.

Camagu, back from decades in the United States and deeply skeptical of the NGO and government development jargon he encounters in Johannesburg, initially reads the village's factionalism as backwardness, until his growing relationships with two women pull him in opposite directions: Xoliswa Ximiya, the Westernized headmistress who wants Qolorha modernized and homogenized along the casino developers' lines, and Qukezwa, descendant of the old Believers, whose deep, specific knowledge of the land, its plants, its birds, its ecological history, reframes tradition for Camagu as a form of expertise rather than superstition.

Mda, who trained as a development-studies scholar as well as a novelist, uses the casino subplot to stage an argument he clearly has a side in: economic development imposed from outside and answerable only to a distant company balance sheet against a slower, locally rooted alternative grounded in the very land and history Nongqawuse's story is bound up with. The nineteenth-century plot is never simply background to the twentieth-century one; both are about who gets to decide a community's relationship to the future, ancestors or accountants, and Mda declines to pretend that question was settled the first time it was asked.

Historians still debate whether Nongqawuse was a manipulated child, a genuine visionary, or a symptom of a colonized society searching for any explanation for a lungsickness epidemic already killing its herds before she ever spoke; Mda refuses to resolve the question inside the fiction either. His two timelines let the cattle-killing function simultaneously as a documented catastrophe, one of the deadliest self-inflicted famines in South African history, and as an open, ongoing interpretive fight, since the novel's present-day characters are still descended from and defined by which side of that fight their ancestors landed on.