Books are one way of making experiences you could not possibly make in real life. They can immerse you in phantasy worlds, in worlds of the past or the future or in times far away.

Zakes Mda’s heart of redness takes the reader to the real-life South African seaside village of Qolorha where a struggle is going on between proponents of development and civilisation on the one hand and defenders of the traditional ways on the other hand. Nobody in this village wants to turn back times and revert to an »authentic« Xhosa lifestyle without the amenities of modern technology – but some people do indeed have good reasons to prefer the quiet, relaxed and unspectacular life of an underdeveloped village to modernisation that takes more than it can offer.

Qolorha also is the place where in the 1850s prophetess Nongqawuse prophesied the return of the dead who would then drive the British occupiers into the sea if only all the cattle were killed and all the fields left alone. The prophesy never came true, but Nongqawuse claimed that this was because a small minority of unbelievers refused to kill their cattle and leave barren their fields. A second storyline takes us to the days of Nonqawuse and her followers and the struggle between the believers and the disbelievers.

The protagonist families in both the storylines are the same, and basically, the conflicts seperating them are identical as well: Whether to be true to the tradition and the old authorities or to adopt the new ways and and new comforts. What makes the novel so interesting is that it creates many almost-parallels between the past and the present which offer lots of food for thought but never imply that history repeats itself. As I have said above, Zakes Mda advocates the pleasures and the peace of rural life without condemning modern amenities that are enjoyed even by the traditionalists or believers in his novel.

A downside is that the many unfamiliar names are hard to read and even harder to rmeember. Whoever is already familiar with the Nongqawuse prophecy may like the new views and assoiciations created in Heart of Redness, but to those who have only a vague or idea or none at all of what happened in the 1850s the allusions are hard to identify and near impossible to interpret. Also, the plot certainly does not develop quckly. We have to wait for a long time before anything happens at all.

All of this makes Mda’s book a good, but not an easy read.