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Realism In Zakes Mda's The Heart Of Redness

1272 Words6 Pages
Zakes Mda, the highly acclaimed novelist wrote the novel titled The Heart of Redness, which is a work of realist fiction. The novel shows the struggle for the community to accept sudden changes of having their land used for tourist business attraction as a new idea of building a casino rose. The idea of a Casino near the Xhosa seaside Village of Qholorha in the Eastern Cape created a division between those who believed it’s for the good course and those who believed it’s a destruction of the environmental well-being as it would take away their land and resources. In bringing such transformation to the community, there’s a lot to put into consideration such as risking the loss of individual and community identity as well as abandoning of historical meaning the place is attached with. The novel takes Mda’s interest in the social dynamics of urban space to the seaside village of Qholorha-by- sea on the wild coast. For Zakes Mda, Place was key, this is how he created a foundation for his stories on the basis of space and the kind of people who would stay in that place and for what reason. Now the novel takes on a chronotope (which refers to how configurations of time and space are represented in a work of literature). When one examines the present day living conditions one may consider how the British colonialism, cattle killing and apartheid psychologically affected the minds of people as much as it did with their bodies. In 1856, Nongqawuse had a vision that by
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