A RESPONSE to "Duplicity and Plagiarism in Zakes Mda's The Heart of Redness" by Andrew Offenburger

The Heart of Redness is a work of fiction and not a history textbook. Historical record is only utilized in the novel to serve my fiction–to give it context, for instance. In the historical segments the fiction centers on the patriarch Xikixa, his sons Twin and Twin-Twin, and his daughter-in-law Qukezwa. All these are fictional characters created from my imagination. But the world they inhabit comes directly from historical record (Jeff Peires' The Dead Will Arise) and from the oral tradition. For instance, when my characters migrate as a result of the lungsickness they are led to new pastures by the stars known as the Seven Sisters, they pray for guidance to Tsiqua and his son Heitsi Eibib and they perform their rituals on the cairns that they occasionally find on the crossroads. This journey is not informed by historical record but by the oral tradition of my mother's people, the Cwerhas of the Gxarha sub-clan, descendant from the Khoikhoi people. But when my fictional characters interact with historical characters such as Mlanjeni, Mhlakaza and Nongqawuse the events surrounding these characters come directly from Peires's book. That is why I have credited Peires in all editions and translations of The Heart of Redness as the sole source for all my material that comes from historical record. However he is not the source for the oral tradition from which I draw. Peires does not deal with Khoikhoi cosmology in his book. Nor does he mention King Sarhili's nature reserve. My source for this was the trader Rufus Hulley who is also credited in my book.

It is not an accident that Peires is my sole source of historical record. His book had all the information I needed for the context for my fiction. There was therefore no need for me to replicate his work by going back to his primary sources. Peires had done all the research for me, and for anyone else who wanted to use his book, in a most meticulous manner. My intention in the novel was never to interrogate Peires and his interpretation of the Cattle Killing; it was never to "challenge or revolutionize" (I think I have "revolutionized" enough with my fictional character Camagu, the Aristocrats of the Revolution, and the saving of Qolorha-by-Sea from environmental rape). I was quite satisfied with Peires' version of events not because it presented the sole "truth," but because it served my fiction effectively. I was not creating a scholarly work but a work of fiction. I could have easily consulted other historians who have written on the subject as well, but Peires's work spoke to me because it had the necessary ontological elements in it, and captured the myths and beliefs as I remembered them growing up among the amaXhosa people. One of the strategies of my fiction is the portrayal of local beliefs and myths as part of objective reality. Wendy Faris has observed that "in magical realist narrative, ancient systems of beliefs and local lore often underlie the text" (182). I may add that they are often depicted in a deadpan manner, as if they do not contradict our laws of reason. That is why my Nongqawuse flies with the crows from a river to a distant pool (oral tradition) and Mlanjeni lights his pipe with the rays of the sun and dances until his sweat causes rain to fall (also from the oral tradition, but recorded in Peires).

The distinction between The Heart of Redness and the other Nongqawuse narratives that the author cites is that in my novel Nongqawuse is not the central figure but the backdrop. My story is not about her, but about my principal fictional characters, both in the past and the present, whose lives were affected by her prophecies. If Nongwawuse had been the central character then I would have felt the need to "challenge" and "revolutionize." Under the circumstances if I had done that she would have assumed center-stage and would have hijacked the story from...