Carnival as an Embedded Narrative in Mbulelo Mzamane's Short Stories

Reflecting on the spate of violence and political uncertainty that plagued South African society prior to the 1994 general election, Hein Viljoen mused with a deep sense of desperation as follows:

Things are becoming even more mind-bogglingly spectacular than in Ndebele's (1984:37) description of protest literature. Big masses are marching resolutely and solemnly down the streets. The education system is hurtling towards disaster. The new is agonizingly unable of being born in morbid spectacles of burning houses, vehicles and bodies, youths grimly attacking walls and hurling stones, police shooting, old couples being murdered as regularly as clockwork. People are bellowing for guns, reveling in fire as a means of liberation. The tension is becoming unbearable as whites vent their hatred of blacks and blacks of whites. Attitudes are hardening on both ends of the political spectrum and the center is falling apart. The only resolution that seems possible is a smothering of the hatred in blood. (4) ¹

As a way of exorcizing the morbid and tense mood generated by that carnage of violence and death, Viljoen then suggested that society temporarily immerse itself into a carnival spirit, as described by Mikhail Bakhtin in Rabelais and His World (1984). However, in this essay I argue through a study of Mbulelo Mzamane's Mzala--a collection of short stories marked by skillfully handled grotesque realism--that what Viljoen accurately captured and described, but pathetically misrecognized in the above quotation, was in fact the culmination of the carnival action that had been going on in South African society since the beginning of the apartheid order in 1948.

Faced with restricting, confining, and dehumanizing apartheid laws such as the Immorality Act, the Group Areas Act, and the like, the oppressed of all racial groups in South Africa created a second world in which they acted out, promoted, and hoped for freedom. That world constantly subverted and undermined the official apartheid order, and by so doing gradually brought it down. It was indeed a popular world animated by the spirit of carnival with its emphasis on "the material bodily principle" and popular laughter, a world that degraded and killed in order to regenerate life that the apartheid system suppressed. As Mongane Serote remarked at a conference in The Netherlands in 1987, "the abnormality of apartheid lies in its having imposed on us a condition which requires that as human beings we had to reject life so that we can accept life. [. . .] Apartheid is a negation of life; it exists to ensure that life is lived in the darkness of dungeons and survives because that condition exists" (13). Bakhtin has regarded this fusion of death and life as an essential condition of the regenerative carnival spirit :

To degrade is to bury, to sow and to kill simultaneously, in order to bring forth something more and better. To degrade also means to concern oneself with the lower stratum of the body, the life of the belly and the reproductive organs; it therefore relates to acts of defecation and copulation, conception, pregnancy, and birth. Degradation digs a bodily grave for a new birth; it has not only a destructive, negative aspect, but also a regenerating one. (21)

Perhaps nowhere in South African literature is the carnivalesque world of the oppressed given a sounder expression than in Mzamane's fiction. However, although carnival elements are also found in his historical novel The Children of Soweto (1982) and his most recent collection of short stories entitled The Children of the Diaspora and Other Stories of Exile (1996), it is in Mzala (1980), the collection of short stories under discussion here, that Mzamane distinguishes himself as South Africa's master of popular laughter. In these stories Mzamane's "folk-figures," to use the words of one of his characters, live "some generations ahead of our time, and a few miles beyond the borders of our country's moral climate...