The Madonna of Excelsior (Magill’s Literary Annual 1991-2005)
At a glance:
- Author: Zakes Mda
- First Published: 2002
- Type of Work: Novel
- Time of Work: Approximately 1950-2003
- Setting: Excelsior, South Africa's free state
- Principal Characters: Niki, Pule, Popi, Viliki, Sekatle, Father Frans Claerhout, Johannes Smit, Stephanus Cronje, Tjaart Cronje, Groot-Jan Lombard, François Bornman, Adam de Vries
- Genres: Long fiction
- Subjects: Civil rights, Africa or Africans, Class conflict, Blacks, Biracial people, Twentieth century, Ethnic groups, Minorities, South Africa or South Africans, Apartheid
- Locales: South Africa
In his novel The Madonna of Excelsior, based on an event that occurred in Excelsior in South Africa in 1971, Zakes Mda begins in the middle of the plot, then returns to the past to explain how the significant event occurred, and then charts the results of that event. He devotes his first short chapter to a meeting between Niki, with her blue-eyed child, Popi, and Father Frans Claerhout, a priest who paints native women amid the South African landscape. Mda often begins chapters with descriptions of the paintings of Claerhout, a kind of Flemish expressionist whom Mda had actually...
[The entire page is 1782 words long]
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