The Heart of Redness

A startling novel by the leading writer of the new South Africa In The Heart of Redness — shortlisted for the prestigious Commonwealth Writers Prize — Zakes Mda sets a story of South African village life against a notorious episode from the country's past. The result is a novel of great scope and deep human feeling, of passion and reconciliation. As the novel opens Camugu, who left for America during apartheid, has returned to Johannesburg. Disillusioned by the problems of the new democracy, he follows his "famous lust" to Qolorha on the remote Eastern Cape. There in the nineteenth century a teenage prophetess named Nonqawuse commanded the Xhosa people to kill their cattle and burn their crops, promising that once they did so the spirits of their ancestors would rise and drive the occupying English into the ocean. The failed prophecy split the Xhosa into Believers and Unbelievers, dividing brother from brother, wife from husband, with devastating consequences. One hun...

Author: Mda Zakes
Year of publication: 2010
Genre: Modern prose
Number of pages: 325
Reading time: 5 h. 25 min.
Formats: FB2, EPUB, PDF
Language: english
Requests: read online, download without registration, e-book