Duplicity and Plagiarism in Zakes Mda's The Heart of Redness

Hailed as "the first great novel of the new South Africa" ("Mda Sets Tone" 12), Zakes Mda's The Heart of Redness (2000) received widespread critical acclaim for intertwining numerous dualisms—modernity/tradition, belief/ disbelief, city/country, youth/elders—to create a vibrant and complex postapartheid novel. The Heart of Redness acknowledges historian Jeff Peires's The Dead Will Arise (1989) as "informing" the novel's historical events, centered on the Xhosa Cattle-Killing Movement of the 1850s. Careful examination of the two books, however, reveals an abuse of textual borrowings and significantly undermines the novel's literary value. This article questions the use of historical materials in The Heart of Redness by surveying past syntheses of history and literature in writings on the Xhosa movement, and by exploring issues of intertextuality and plagiarism in African literature. Based on this analysis, The Heart of Redness should be understood as duplicitous in two ways: as a novel that explores binary themes, but also as a derivative work masquerading plagiarism as intertextuality.