The Heart of Redness

"Yes, The Heart of Redness is set in the early post-apartheid period and it’s about a black man who is in exile and he comes home and finds that he isn’t sufficiently connected to the new elite to do well. He goes off to a rural province in the Eastern Cape in pursuit of a girl to try and make a life there. This story is intertwined with another story, an old very famous historical story in South Africa which took place in the mid-19th century. A young prophetess, Nongqawuse, prophesied that if all black people killed their cattle, the black ancestors would rise up and chase white people out of Africa and they would be free. Her prophesy was heeded and thousands upon thousands of people killed their cattle and ended up starving to death. It was a psychotic moment in South African history and had a terrible lot of repercussions in terms of how black people greeted colonialism. It was a deep deep tragedy which resonated down the ages and has so much relevance at every moment of South African history. Mda takes this psychotic story and makes something playful, difficult and uncomfortable about it. In the present Eastern Cape to which his character returns, people are divided into believers and non-believers and the believers are those who believe that the prophecy was correct and the non-believers think she was a superstitious fool and they want to modernise South Africa. Mda plays with categories and in the end he does not show who is right and who is wrong, whether he is on the side of tradition or of modernisation. The modernisation people are pretty trashy and want to build a casino. The traditional people have something rooted deep about them. So he takes this very difficult moment of South African history and makes a very opaque parable out of it, something that makes you think."