Ways of Dying

Toloki has made himself South Africa's only professional mourner, arriving uninvited at strangers' funerals in a nameless city, dressed in a costume of his own design, to grieve on behalf of families too exhausted, too poor, or too numbed by loss to grieve properly themselves. Mda treats the invented profession less as eccentricity than as a rational response to a specific historical moment, the early 1990s, when political violence is producing bodies faster than communities can absorb the grief for them, and a stranger willing to mourn professionally starts to look like a form of essential infrastructure rather than a joke.

At one of these funerals Toloki finds himself grieving for Noria, a woman from his own home village whom he loved hopelessly as a boy, now burying a son killed in the same political violence that fills the city's cemeteries every week. Mda narrates much of the novel in a collective 'we', the voice of the township itself watching and commenting on Toloki and Noria's reunion, a technique that keeps individual grief permanently visible against a community's larger, ongoing catalogue of loss rather than letting either character's mourning become simply private.

Noria's own gift, an improvised singing that can calm crying children and hold a room's attention, and Toloki's costume and self-appointed ritual, both read as acts of creation staged directly against destruction, evidence that dignity in Mda's township is not handed down by any authority but built, deliberately and often strangely, by people with almost nothing else to work with. The novel's many, wildly different funerals, from the dignified to the absurd, become the book's real structural spine, a catalogue of how a community keeps insisting on ceremony even when death has become almost routine.

Mda gives Toloki's mourning its own vocabulary and technique, the correct posture, the calibrated wail, the discipline of arriving early and staying respectfully in the background, treating what looks like a morbid joke as an actual craft with standards. That craft framing lets the novel take Toloki fully seriously as a professional rather than a curiosity, and makes his eventual willingness to let Noria's grief become personal, rather than another job, register as the real risk he takes in the book.