The right to tell stories is one of the themes of this powerful gem of a novel. The community is the owner of the story, and it can tell it the way it deems it fit.
When in our orature the storyteller begins the story, ‘They say it once happened…’ we are the ‘they’. We are the all-seeing eye of the village gossip. We even know things that happen when we are not there things that happen behind people’s closed doors deep in the middle of the night. Just like back in the village, we live our lives together as one. It is not different, really, here in the city.
But as Mda shows through his omniscient first-person plural narrator, the community owns the story and it will not be silenced any more. For generations the voices of Black Africa were silenced because they were denied access to education and their stories were suppressed for political purposes. Endemic Black poverty was made worse by political strategies on all sides: while the government continued to bulldoze shanty-towns to bully people away from city areas reserved for Whites, Black South Africans exercised the only political power they had, using their industrial might to impact the economy with strikes and stayaways – which worsened their own unemployment and hardship.Īppropriately, Mda tells his tale using the oral storytelling tradition of Black South Africa.
The violence was inflicted by White supremacists determined to hang onto power by tribal rivals competing for political influence and by a still intransigent government which while publicly negotiating reform was behind the scenes provoking violence in order to show that the Black majority was too divided to assume power. This traumatic transitional period was marked by violence which shocked the world community.
The novel is set in an unnamed city in the dying days of South Africa under apartheid, between the release of Nelson Mandela from Robben Island and the relaxation of bans on Black political parties in 1990, and the democratic vote which brought Black majority rule in 1994. Ways of Dying by Zakes Mda, is a brilliant book.
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