SOURCE: Farred, Grant. “Mourning the Postapartheid State Already? The Poetics of Loss in Zakes Mda's Ways of Dying.” Modern Fiction Studies 46, no. 1 (spring 2000): 183-206.

[In the following essay, Farred argues that Zakes Mda's Ways of Dying is “a flawed work” due to its focus on the transitory and loosely defined values of the post-apartheid era.]

What good can come of grief?

—Homer, The Odyssey

Despite their rehearsal of the gestures of resistance theatre, Mda's plays never subscribe to resistance theatre's central dogma, the vision of revolution that will transform utterly the lives of those audacious enough to prosecute it. In the spirit of the doubting anarchists he describes as his lasting influences, Mda leaves the stage with few positive commitments. With its thoroughgoing suspicion of systems of every sort, his drama comes closer to the theatre of the absurd than the theatre of commitment.

—Jan Gorak, “Nothing to Root For: Zakes Mda and South African Resistance Theatre”

Zakes Mda's first novel, Ways of Dying, is a flawed work that is, in part because of its shortcomings, symptomatic of the condition of postapartheid South Africa. Resonating with the rich uncertainty of the political transition from the repressions of National Party (NP) rule to the democratic government of the African National Congress (ANC), Mda has produced a work that is located in an indistinct, contradictory historical moment. Set in an era that appears to belong in equal measure to the past, present, and future, Ways of Dying captures the entangled and uncertain tenor of an historic(al) era—a moment in which these different epochs are difficult to distinguish, complexly bound up in each other. In this novel the anticipations of the democratic future coexist awkwardly with the memories of past injustice. The poverty of the apartheid era, for instance, is sometimes indistinguishable from the current deprivations of the squatter camps, a ghetto that one Mda protagonist tersely refers to as the “informal settlement, as the place is politely called” (42).

However, while Mda's chief protagonists, the rural transplants Toloki and Noria, struggle to negotiate their pasts and map their futures, the immediacy of their moment is their chief concern. The present, both for the characters and for the “new” nation, functions as a barometer of change. Years after Toloki and Noria have moved from the nondescript South African countryside to the unnamed metropolis, five years after the first democratic elections, a few short months since the retirement of an iconic president (Nelson Mandela) and the inauguration of his successor, and almost a full decade after the release of political prisoners and the unbanning of the black liberation movements (1990), this is the point at which to take stock—personally for Toloki and Noria, and historically for the nation. It is at this fin-de-siècle conjuncture, which finds Noria in a crisis (having just buried a second child) and the postapartheid nation celebrating itself, that the present has to display its difference from the past: it has to offer more than a hint of chronological and ideological separateness—the postapartheid moment as opposed to the apartheid past. The present, Ways of Dying shows, bears the (often onerous) weight of both history and the expectations of the future. In order for the postapartheid future to be manifestly different, the novel suggests, it has to distance itself from the political atrocities and the (anti-apartheid) radicalism of the past. Although the novel's antipathy to the repressions of the past are explicable, Mda opposes (however mutedly) any recourse to earlier modes of political resistance: it is precisely because Ways of Dying implicitly rejects anti-apartheid radicalism that this essay will engage the problematics of this postapartheid position. Why is anti-apartheid opposition so untenable to Mda? What fears does the radicalism of the past hold for the present and the future?

A writer with a complex sense of historical process, Mda aims his critiques less at the excesses of the apartheid regime (though the apartheid security forces are by no means exonerated) than at the phenomenon known as “black-on-black” violence.¹ These ethnic-based clashes, which have in general pitted the migrant hostel Zulus against the urbanized Xhosas have, in some regions, wracked disenfranchised communities from the mid-1980s right up to the present. A writer with a strong affinity for the voiceless and the disempowered, and cautious about a black elite he has dubbed the “new gatekeeping class” (“Learning” 142), Mda conceives Ways of Dying from the perspective of an urban black underclass that understands itself as post-tribal and post-ethnic—ghetto dwellers united not by loyalty to a rural chief, but by poverty. In a moment that is at once telling and didactic, Shadrack (one of Noria's neighbors), inveighs against an expedient tribalism which sets urban hostel residents against the “informal settlement” community: “And you know, what is worse is that I am of the same ethnic group as those hostel dwellers. The tribal chief who has formed them into armies that harass innocent residents merely uses ethnicity as an excuse for his own hunger for power. I am from the same clan as this blood-soaked chief” (47). For Shadrack, tribal affiliation represents little but a “hunger for power,” a transparent rationalization for sponsoring and fuelling intra-black community violence.

While both Noria and Toloki are from the same rural area, their responses to the “ethnic,” state-sponsored violence (“sometimes [the migrant workers] were even helped by the police” [18]) reveals a distinct political difference between Mda's main protagonists. An integral member of the “settlement” (“they do not like to be called squatters” [42]), Noria is a feminist figure actively involved in improving life in the community. Toloki, on the other hand, takes up a unique position on the fringes of the settlement. After years of itinerant labor and homelessness, Toloki has improbably—if not unastutely—fashioned himself as a Professional Mourner, a man who attends funerals, mostly of people with whom he has no relation, in order to lead and orchestrate the public display of grieving: “Throughout the funeral, orator after orator, [Toloki] sat on the mound and made groaning sounds of agony that were so harrowing that they affected all those who were within earshot, filling their eyes with tears” (12).

Although Toloki learns from Noria how to situate himself within the settlement community after he moves in and shares her shack with her, he is never fully committed to integrating himself into the squatters' struggle. His politics is of the removed, abstinent variety, paying lip service to Noria's investment but never adopting her causes as his own. Toloki's political reticence is captured succinctly in his description of his job: “The work of the Professional Mourner was to mourn, and not to intervene in any of the proceedings of the funeral. It would lower the dignity of the profession to be involved in human quarrels” (18). Lacking a sense of irony, Toloki does not pause to reflect that professional mourning is an occupation created by (and practiced only by) him; he has, in his thespian-like garb, single-handedly colonized the territory of the black squatters' grief. At the same time, however, he remains unaffected by the cause of death or its social consequences. (The hollowness of his grieving is registered by the theatricality of his self-representation; Toloki performs his professional duties in a “particularly beautiful outfit all in black comprising a tall shiny top hot, lustrous tight-fitting pants […] and a knee-length velvety black cape buckled with a hand-sized gold-coloured brooch with tassels of yellow, red, and green” [20].)²

Because Toloki is a protagonist with a muted sense of politics, Mda has had to assign the function of sociopolitical interpreter, funeral orator, and community spokesperson/activist to another of his literary creations, the “Nurse.” “What qualified her to be the Nurse,” Mda writes, “was not that she was the last person to see him alive; she was the only one who went out of her way to seek the truth about his death, and to hunt his corpse down when everyone else had given up” (13). The novel itself has largely given up social intervention, repeatedly demonstrating a reluctance to account for the several deaths that mark settlement life. Determined as the Nurse is to “seek the truth,” hers—or his—is only a cameo role. More than Noria, however, the Nurse functions as the narrative antithesis of Toloki: her activism (and Noria's) stands in stark contrast to his non-involvement. It is in part because both these protagonists are historically and politically conscious women that the issue of gender emerges as the novel's most salient critique of the postapartheid state.

More tellingly, however, it is not the activist women but the Professional Mourner with his political remove who functions as a metaphor for postapartheid discourse. This essay argues that Toloki's retreat from a radical politics, articulated here as the refusal to “intervene in the proceedings of the funeral,” represents an unacknowledged, poorly disguised, and disturbing political neutrality. Toloki's position is, however, a complex one; so much so, in fact, that he simultaneously manages neither to give offence to the settlement dwellers nor to mobilize disenfranchised communities to popular dissent. What preoccupies Toloki is constructed as less the itinerant modernist than as formalist literary figure: the creative individual who transcends context and political strife even as he or she is surrounded by the tumultuous workings of history. Ways of Dying's artist represents Mda's attempts to carve out a new space for black writers in postapartheid South Africa, a mode liberated from the incessant political demands placed upon disenfranchised authors in the anti-apartheid struggle. However, such a conception of the black artist is problematic because it is founded upon the fallacious commensurability between the achievement of the postapartheid state and the upliftment of the historically disenfranchised black underclass. The end of apartheid may have created new possibilities for black literature, but it did not signal the onset of economic equality in South African society, and the ongoing inequity that affects every aspect of settlement life. Much as sub-Saharan anticolonial literature found itself confronted with both new and disturbingly familiar challenges in the postcolonial era, so postapartheid writing will have to (re)negotiate its relationship to a black underclass whose living conditions resemble the historical disenfranchisements of the apartheid past.

Finally, this essay offers a critique of Mda's regressive attempt to cast internecine black strife (a mode that belongs mostly, though not exclusively, to the apartheid past) as the most disruptive political enemy. Mda's position is not only problematic in this regard, but it is also disingenuous because it is unclear as to whom these migrants threaten. While the postethnic settlement communities are certainly vulnerable to the “urban(ized) tribesmen,” Ways of Dying shows that the source of violence against this community is as likely to be internal as external. The war-mongering, displaced “tribesmen” may disrupt certain sites in the new nation, but they do not endanger it in any substantial way. This, of course, begs the vital question: why does Ways of Dying configure “tribesmen” as ideologically antagonistic? Why is this collective anonymous straw figure, representative more of a residual, racially divided past than a democratic future, infused with such political import? What issues are deflected, or not engaged, by Mda's choice of antagonist?

ABSTINENT MOURNER, ABSTAINING FROM POLITICS

After eighteen years of living as a homeless man in an unspecified South African coastal city,³ Toloki crafts a social role for himself as Professional Mourner that is modeled on “monks of eastern religions” (10). Imagining himself as the only member of a “sacred order” (11) that demands spiritual and physical “austerity,” Toloki has sworn off sexual intimacy (10). On the first night that he and Noria spend together in the shack he has helped her build and decorate, Toloki finds himself sorely tempted:

There is nothing that he wants more in the world than to wake her up, and hold her in his arms, and tell her how much he admires her, and assure her that everything will be alright. But of course he cannot do such a thing. He can't look at her sleeping posture for too long either. That would be tantamount to raping her. It would be like doing dirty things to a goddess.

(143)

That Toloki “can't look at her sleeping posture for too long” because it “would be tantamount to raping” Noria is a revealing instance of “monastic hubris” (143). In maintaining his purity, Toloki compels himself to abstain from any substantive contact with the world. Unable to contemplate, let alone countenance, physical contact with Noria, Toloki situates himself as the perpetual observer, the spiritually esoteric and devout outsider looking in and at the settlement community—as well, of course, as gazing fondly on its “goddess.” Although the final scene in the novel is a moving one, with he and Noria sharing a sparse meal with the children of the neighborhood on New Year's Eve, Toloki remains aloof from everyone in the community—and their struggles—but Noria. Toloki the ascetic, the creative individual who decorates Noria's shack with pictures and advertisements from Home and Garden magazine, is only vicariously and partially affiliated with the settlement, in it but not truly part of it.

Toloki's role as Professional Mourner represents, because of his resilient (though disguised) isolation, contradictory social functions. In his eccentric black costume, Toloki demonstrates at once the creativity and dignity of the impoverished black underclass (the capacity to create aesthetically in the face of material deprivation) as well as the purely decorative role he fulfills when he mourns on demand. Professional mourning does not require its practitioner to understand the pain, the sense of loss, and the anguish experienced by the “genuine” mourners. Unlike the “amateurs,” the Professional simply performs the act of bereavement, without being in any way an empathetic participant in the funeral ceremony: it is the Professional Mourner's job to produce tears, not to comprehend the profundity of the loss. Toloki stands, even as the pivotal figure at the funeral, removed from the event: he is an individualist who melds a community together for a brief period, but his singular alterity is never in question. He acts at the funeral, producing affect, but he himself is never affected by the event, never acted upon—which is to say, even though he is surrounded by trauma, he is not really changed, transformed, or moved to rethink his removed position within the community. For all Toloki's wailing, there is a solipsism in his role in the funeral. Clad in a strange costume performing a unique task, Toloki undermines the communal element so central to the burial ceremony by drawing attention to himself. It is the “I,” the artist and creator of appropriate tragic behavior, who takes narrative precedence over the larger social (and personal) losses incurred by the other mourners.

Commenting on the significance of the shared experience at black funerals, Margaret Mervis writes in her critique of Ways of Dying, “Death lives with the black communities of the townships and the squatter camps, so that their ways of dying are intertwined with their ways of living and funerals are still important community occasions during the transitional period” (44). In Toloki's case, however, he provides an almost stereotypical instance of the tortured artist (the Professional Mourner who is, in addition to his decorating skills, also gifted at drawing with crayons), a protagonist who overshadows both the event itself and the narratives of death that are such vital sources of explication—to say nothing of the political, social, and spiritual sustenance they offer. In Mda's novel the community functions only as a backdrop, a canvas against which Toloki can work out his relationship with Noria (a figure from his rural past who has reemerged with an erotically tinged spiritual force in his urban present) and his deceased father, Jwara.

These two protagonists, the father and the sister/lover, are closely connected in Toloki's psyche; they both belong, in different ways and measures, to Toloki's past and his future. His future, Mda suggests, can only be achieved by negotiating the pain of the past; this moment, Toloki knows, is deeply bound up in his relationships with Jwara and Noria. Inspired by the schoolgirl Noria, his father, Jwara, was a village blacksmith who would occasionally “create figurines of iron and brass” (23).

Toloki's greater sensitivity, as opposed to that of his neglectful father, is displayed through the medium of his art. While the hard, unfeeling Jwara worked in iron and brass, the always malleable son prefers the softer, childlike crayons. Unlike the monochrome character of Jwara, cast as stereotypically masculinist in his inability to connect to anyone other than his muse Noria, his son has a greater, more colorful range of social expression. Both father and son, however, produce their best art in—and because of—her presence. Appropriately, it is only once Toloki decides to sell his father's art that he comes to a kind of psychological closure with Jwara. The future can then be confronted because the past has been addressed; difficulties have been negotiated, emotional debts have been settled; the past can be laid to rest in the ways that Toloki officiates at funerals. It is, however, precisely this settling of past accounts that does not take place at a national level, and it is for this reason that the deprived conditions of the black past is so persistently present, both in the (dis)guise of Zulu migrant violence and in the form of unrelenting, inescapable settlement poverty. The postapartheid nation lives, much like Toloki (except in his posthumous relationship with Jwara), at a remove from its own psyche and the complicated history which produced it.

Toloki's emotional abstinence is demonstrated most obviously in his preoccupation with his own asceticism. He is so intent on denying his own physicality that he cannot admit to an attraction to Noria because his “profession” does not countenance “love: he made up his mind a long time ago that he was not capable of such feelings. They are common feelings for common people. They are taboo in his vocation, since he has cast himself in the mould of holy men in remote mountain monasteries” (44). Unable to acknowledge his desire, to confront the ambivalence of striving for spiritual purity even as he is physically drawn to the attractive Noria, Toloki resorts to an empty denial: love and sexuality are taboo in his profession; the black male body is evacuated of its physicality because of an adherence to an ill-defined, abstract system of belief. There is something inoffensively Orientalist (insofar as Orientalism can be inoffensive) about Toloki's fascination with monks in “remote mountain monasteries”; the answer to the artist's dilemma in postapartheid South Africa, Ways of Dying suggests, can be found in the mysteries (and mysticism) of the Orient, much as the “East” fulfilled the fantasies of colonialist Occidental explorers. Toloki's attraction to these vaguely conceived “monks” reveals nothing so much as his need to find a meaningful social role for himself, one which will gainsay his homelessness, his unemployment, and the hopelessness that characterizes his life. Toloki is trying to overcome the ostracism that he experienced as a boy, when his father labeled him “ugly,” by deriving a self-worth through this imagined affiliation with the Orient.

Ways of Dying constructs a complicated oedipal scenario in which the son wants to gain the approval of the woman who was, as a young girl, his father's artistic inspiration. “[O]h, how eager he is to hear at least one word of approval from this powerful woman who killed his father,” Toloki confesses as he reflects upon the village rumor that Jwara died because his muse Noria would no longer visit his blacksmith's shed (101). Having overcome the debilitations of his relationship with Jwara (rather than the metaphoric slaying of the father), Toloki recognizes that he can only win Noria's assent by being emotionally different from his father, but artistically similar—in terms of talent, and not temperament, that is. In order to overcome that haunting rejection, Toloki has willed himself to be an adult who does not need emotional nourishment or physical intimacy because he considers it too “common.” Although Toloki's sense of spiritual superiority is false and misplaced, his desire to represent himself as “different”—from both the settlement dwellers and his father—is not. He is trying to compensate for several lacks that marked (and marred) his life by importing a persona for himself that will emphatically register his spiritual Otherness. Toloki is, more than anything, committed to orchestrating his own social and psychic redemption, compensating for the rejection he suffered as a child by winning the supposedly pure love of his father's muse. Economically impoverished but spiritually “elevated,” the son believes he has bested the father by gaining Noria's respect: unlike his father, he has survived; unlike his father, he has taken up (albeit celibate) house with Noria, and the two childhood friends from that far off village produce in their urban maturity what Shadrack describes as a “creative partnership” (189).

A vaguely Christlike figure in adopted mannerisms, Toloki is physically more akin to a latter-day Saint Christopher—he is “stockily built, and his shoulders are wide enough to comfortably bear all the woes of bereavement” (7). Toloki, however, is in charge of tears, not saving the world or bearing its multitude of sins. Abstinent, determined to maintain his spiritual cleanliness, Toloki is—unlike Saint Christopher—not overly concerned with global salvation. He is a generous protagonist (he pays Shadrack to transport material for Noria's shack from the city's docks to the settlement, and he buys paper and crayons for the squatter children), but hardly a self-sacrificing or historically conscious one. A figure who has survived apartheid without truly being affected by (much less critical of) its machinations, Toloki seems more at ease in the postapartheid moment. Toloki is a man who has correctly taken the pulse of his era. In this new dispensation the artist is ostensibly relieved of the anti-apartheid burden, and the importance of community is less pressing to him, though that is clearly not the case for Noria and her neighbors; all of this demonstrates how the opportunity to give full expression to black individuality is on the rise.

Toloki the artist represents the benign face of postapartheid society's preference for the upwardly mobile black individual rather than the demands of the township masses; he is a character obsessed with creative expression and spiritual self-improvement rather than the increasing materialism of the small, but growing, black middle class. However, like that postcolonial constituency Frantz Fanon dubbed the “national bourgeoisie” in Wretched of the Earth, Toloki is focused mainly on himself and his interests, esoteric though they be. It is for this reason that Toloki's remove from his “congregation(s)” at the funerals locates him as a mainstream postapartheid artist of the formalist variety—focused on the exceptionalism and singularity of the individual subject, preoccupied with art (and spirituality) for its own sake. He has crafted a social role, one determined by a strange admixture of economic necessity and an idiosyncratic monasticism that is decidedly different from that of the “Praise Poets”—or the imbongi, as they are colloquially known—of the 1980s. At the height of the insurrection in the mid- to late-1980s, a number of poets, such as Alfred Temba Qabula and Nise Malanga, adapted the centuries-old African tradition of “praise poetry” (usually reserved for honoring kings, chiefs, or great warriors—such as Shaka) to the landscape of a highly militant and organized South African proletariat. The imbongi produced work mainly for public performance at political rallies, community meetings, and funerals.⁴ A poet such as Qabula, arguably the leading imbongi, wrote verse to capture the experiences of the exploited factory worker, the squatters, and the township residents. In his most well-known verse, “Praise Poem to FOSATU,” Qabula writes:

Your moving forest of Africa.
When I arrived the children were crying,
These were the workers, the industrial workers

(qtd. in Chapman, “From” 36)

The imbongi's poetry was of the heroic variety, singing the praises of the Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU) or the United Democratic Front (UDF) in its struggle to overcome the apartheid regime. The Praise Poets lauded ANC icons such as the then-incarcerated Nelson Mandela and Oliver Tambo, the movement's president in exile, trade union activists, and grassroots organizers in equal measure.

While performance was a critical element for the Praise Poets, the event did not turn solely on their work. Their izibongo (praise poem) contributed to the spirit of the rally, gave the meeting a dramatic focus, or enabled the mourners to understand the sacrifices made to the struggle by the deceased; their reading, however, was in itself not the point of the event for them. In Toloki's case, however, the choreographed mourning is his only link to the funeral, it is his only reason for being there. For the Praise Poets there was a real bond between performer and audience, a sense of community and shared political vision created out of the apartheid experience. (For Qabula, a trade union activist himself, the poetry functioned as a narrative vehicle to mobilize, inform, and radicalize the workforce.) The funeral was, for Toloki's predecessors (if they can be called that) Qabula and Malanga, theirs. Unlike Toloki, the imbongi had a stake in the death (they understood its resonances, they were empathetic, they shared the grief) and in the rally or the meeting's success. The Praise Poets understood, to invoke Homer's provocative inquiry, “what good can come of grief”; the imbongi recognized how “praises proved and continue to provide a focus of communal identity and solidarity” (Chapman 35). In Ways of Dying this relationship between ideological proximity and psychic investment does not exist; there is nothing but the most spurious connection between Toloki and the mourners. Funerals enable Toloki to earn a living and to live out his Orientalist fantasy. Toloki's self-imposed solitude means that he always constitutes, apart from some moments with Noria, a community of one. (Inverting Karl Marx's famous dictum, Toloki shows how “religion is the opiate” of the individual who wants to distinguish himself from the masses.) Toloki does not understand that mourning is founded upon the public recognition of absence: the end of a life and its impact upon the survivors. It also signals, in this instance, the end of a political era, the transition from black (mainly working-class) oppositionality to the orchestrated absence of that constituency from public view. The now unseen and invalidated struggles of the black underclass, instead of being implicitly mourned, are what should be revitalized by a radical literature in a moment when an oppositional politics (which is to say, one that is critical of the ANC government) is so difficult to sustain. As the now-unemployed shop steward Qabula reflects in “It Has Been Such a Long Road,” a recent poem about his ex-colleagues (or “comrades”) in the struggle:

It has been a long road here
With me, marking the same rhythms
everyday
Gentlemen, pass me by
Ladies, pass me by

(115)

The bard of the 1980s oral poets, the voice of the decade's literary resistance, has remained constant, “marking the same rhythm,” but his one-time allies have been transformed into “gentlemen” and “ladies” who easily “pass him by.” Qabula has been succeeded by Toloki—individual idiosyncrasy has triumphed over the politics of commitment.

For the Praise Poets the struggle of the 1980s was a very different ideological moment, an era when South African politics was decidedly unambiguous, the disenfranchised black masses against the white apartheid regime, Qabula's “worker's” against the white bosses, an epoch in which the society was highly and insistently politicized. Set in a more ambivalent moment, Ways of Dying is no less preoccupied with politics or aware of historical inequity, but it lacks the radical, transformative vision of the earlier mode. (The role of the artist, however, has been substantively transformed.) Jan Gorak's remark about Mda's theatrical predilections—“Mda's plays never subscribe to […] the vision of revolution that will transform utterly the lives of those audacious enough to prosecute it”—makes clear that even when the South African dramatist changes literary genres his work is averse, and sometimes even strongly opposed, to a “vision of revolution” and ideological “commitment.” Mda's work is given to taking the idiosyncratic view of politics as spectacle, not as a vehicle of social transformation; the theatre of the absurd is transformed in Ways of Dying into the novel of the abstinent.

The Praise Poets, on the other hand, openly championed a communal cause. They advocated the complete reorganization of their society, and often the triumph and ascendance of the proletariat. Through their verse the imbongi were fighting for, inter alia, the unification of the entire black community, the eradication of racism, the release of political prisoners, and the redistribution of the nation's wealth.⁵ However much Toloki is committed to the settlement's struggle, his vision—and even Noria's, to a significant extent—is clearly limited, in no small measure because of the rise to power of the “gentlemen” and “ladies.” The road traveled, the struggles of the past, has been narratively superceded, rendering the cause of the Praise Poets anachronistic. Toloki's political scope is so impaired that the novel demonstrates how difficult it is for the Professional Mourner to see the funeral orations as an articulation of black public resistance, even when he is familiar with these events. It is only through Noria's prodding and “conscientization” that he comes to conceive of the squatters' fight against the hostel dwellers and their own organizations' complicity (in the violence committed against settlement residents) as a legitimate battle for political rights. By acting as the literary voice of black opposition and aspiration (the latter is almost always contained in the former), the Praise Poets were educating the black populace at these various gatherings. Toloki, on the other hand, is educated—if not politicized or moved to activism—through his relationship to Noria. In the postapartheid moment, the self-styled artist can be blithely oblivious to or retreat from politics even when he is in its midst; in the apartheid moment such disengagement was unimaginable.

The postapartheid moment, Ways of Dying implies, signals the end of a need for a radical politics. None of the crucial issues—why the violence is contained to the black ghetto, why it is still permitted (we know who spawned and sponsored it), and what its implications are for the black underclass in the postapartheid society—are interrogated. The very fact, it would seem, that the squatters' “enemy” is black ethnicity of the Zulu hostel dweller variety insulates the postapartheid ANC government, the one-time champion of Noria and her community, from criticism or responsibility for the condition of the settlement residents. In this instance, a regressive ethnicity works to the advantage of the postapartheid government because the Zulu antagonists can easily be vilified and identified as the problem—not as symptomatic of other (continuing) structural inequities or ideological concerns. Ethnicity provides a ready explanation, a rationalization for the conditions of settlement life that requires no further public engagement or state intervention; nor does it, Mda implies, need any societal redress.

Through privileging the experience (the spiritual experiment, if you will) and narrative of its singular protagonist, Ways of Dying deliberately constricts the ideological focus. The postapartheid state is so entirely absent in this novel that the issue of broader social accountability to its settlement constituency does not even arise. In Ways of Dying the local may be political, but it is a politics that is only locally resonant. The encompassing vision, the expansive sense of politics (“An Injury to One Is an Injury to All,” as the COSATU motto proclaims) has been sacrificed. “The struggle,” that grand narrative and rallying cry of the 1980s, has been abandoned, replaced by Toloki's elliptical search for “spirituality.”

The redemption of the eccentric individual takes precedence over the community's struggle for material uplift. The political has not, in this ideological substitution, been evacuated so much as it has been undermined: the local struggle has been severed from its national context, reduced to the microcosmic, out of the national purview (such as the death of Noria's son, which the leadership is determined to keep away from the “newspaper people”), rendered visible but not equal to the shamanistic (162). The title of Mda's novel signifies multivalently. In its most “personal instantiation,” the Professional Mourner's asceticism does not only represent his abstinence but also a “way of dying”—a symbolic rejection, “burial,” and denial of the old Toloki through his reincarnation as the orchestrator of grief at settlement funerals. However, Mda's focus on the metaphoric death of the oedipally-immobilized son (and the birth of the monkish artist) relegates the actual deaths of the settlement dwellers to narrative insignificance. Ways of Dying configures these deaths as allegories of its main protagonist's psychological state rather than the differentiated, distinct substances of a community's loss; the funerals do not signify ideologically beyond their poetic resonance for Toloki's psychic condition. The Professional Mourner refracts the communal loss and absorbs it as an emblem of his own spiritual metamorphosis.

The title also marks the slow, uneven dying of the apartheid structure, the difficult process of black (re)generation, the literal deaths of settlement dwellers. Most importantly, Mda's novel may be said to enunciate the death of radical politics, of the commitment to transforming and materially improving the lives of the black underclass. That is the death this novel heralds but does not—or will not—acknowledge. Noria's adept verbal play with the novel's title, “[O]ur ways of dying are our ways of living. Or should I say our ways of living are our ways of dying?” speaks of the settlement community's resilience, but it does not recognize how its political commitments are increasingly isolated, how its modes of struggle are dying in postapartheid South Africa (89). In significant ways, Toloki's narrative prominence is afforded him because his emergent individualism equips him to officiate at the funeral of a radical postapartheid politics. Settlement dwellers will continue to die, but their deaths will register with increasing insignificance on the ideological radar and television screens of the postapartheid state. The new, as Antonio Gramsci's famous enunciation about the interregnum goes, might not be fully born, but the old has certainly been ushered out—never to return, all overseen by a character in ludicrous garb.

A GENDERED STRUGGLE

Unlike the aloof Toloki, Noria is a protagonist who, after undergoing a major transformation from sexually promiscuous young woman to abstinent widow and mother, understands the community and its workings. However, like Toloki, Noria has herself taken a vow of celibacy: “when she learnt of the death of her son […] she lost all interest in men, and her body had not, to this very day, touched that of a man. The cruelty of the world killed not only her uplifting laughter, but all human desires of the flesh” (139). Because Noria shares with Toloki a purity obtained through loss, pain, and rejection, it is appropriate that Toloki comes to comprehend the social import of the events in which he is participating through his association with her. In an instructive conversation between Noria and Shadrack (one of her suitors) about the violence perpetrated by the amagoduka, migrant workers “whose roots are in the rural areas and who return there after their contracts in the city are finished” (49), the Professional Mourner's political ignorance is revealed: Toloki is out of his depth in this discussion. “He knows there is a war in the land, and has mourned at many of the funerals of war casualties. But Noria seems to know more details about this whole matter than he thought possible. She talks with authority, and the man under the van [Shadrack] seems to take her views seriously” (49). Paradoxically, the Professional Mourner who benefits from death understands neither its causes nor its consequences. However, Noria's familiarity with politics, not just the affairs of the settlement, signals a crucial element of Mda's novel. As Mervis argues, “Just as Noria has evolved into a proud individual who values her independence, life is changing for all the women in the transitional period in South Africa as they move from the old deference towards a new authority” (54). As important as the current and future roles of women in the postapartheid states will be, Ways of Dying has a keen sense of a black feminist past. Noria the urban activist is the daughter of “That Mountain Woman,” an interloper from another village who had “no respect for our ways, and talked with men anyhow she liked” (29). However, the main difference between the aggressive, “disrespectful” Mountain Woman—where the imposing physicality of the metaphor used to describe the woman betrays the male fear of being dominated—and her daughter is their mode of politics: the mother works through offense and transgression, the daughter through cooperation, an astute reading of the black male psychic landscape, and a conversion of black men that is inflected by the power of seduction. (Toloki and Shadrack are, in their different ways, attracted to Noria. Patriarchy is often, as Noria shows, vulnerable to desire—spoken, as in Shadrack's case, or unspoken and almost spiritually unspeakable, as with Toloki.)

Toloki's relationship with Noria is, as has been shown, produced out of an admixture of desire, denial, and the imagined dictates of an invented spirituality. In the patriarchal culture of the township (and the movement), Toloki's naivete creates the space for a feminist activism: Toloki learns of politics—it would be overstating the case to say that he fully comprehends historical events or acquires a politics—from Noria. As she introduces him to the underclass community, he comes to appreciate that the “salvation of the settlement lies in the hands of the women” (165). There is, because of her political authority, a deference to Noria on Toloki's part—a status confirmed for him, albeit in an obliquely patriarchal fashion, by Shadrack's “taking her views seriously” (49) In this instance the politically unlettered man accepts the woman's credentials because another (worldly wise) man respects her opinions.

Toloki and Shadrack, however, are the exceptional male figures, protagonists who respect female political leadership because their views are informed and affected—to different degrees—by their relationship (or the desire for a relationship, on the latter's part) with Noria. As she herself is quick to point out to Toloki, there is as much of a “glass ceiling” in politics for South African women as there is for, say, American women in business: “All over the country, in what politicians call grassroots communities, women take the lead. But very few women reach executive level. Or even the regional or branch committee levels. I don't know why it is like this, Toloki” (165). Contrary to Mervis's claim about the expansion of women's political horizons, the structural non-recognition of women renders the postapartheid state indistinct from its predecessor. Much like in the anti-apartheid struggle, the patriarchal system ghettoizes women's ambitions by restricting their influence to those arenas—the settlements, euphemistically referred to here as the “grassroots communities”—where the most labor is required and the least reward is offered. The ceiling for female advancement, in the postapartheid case, is both significantly lower—women need not aspire beyond branch level—and of a baser material—the tin roof of a shack rather than the glass of the corporate office.

However, female disenfranchisement extends beyond a circumscription on women's ambition. It includes a male-imposed silence on matters of personal and political consequence, demonstrated in Ways of Dying when Noria is silenced in the aftermath of her son's gruesome “necklacing.” The five-year-old Vutha is killed when an automobile tire is hung around his neck, soaked in gasoline (“petrol” in the South African parlance), and set alight. Accused of providing information about the settlement community's political plans to the hostel (and hostile) migrants by the Young Tigers, a group of young activists who protect the squatters from the amagoduka, the young Vutha is sentenced to die in a kangaroo court. Vutha's is a more reprehensible and cowardly murder because the Young Tigers make another five-year-old, his playmate Danisa, set the young boy and his friend alight: “They put a tire around Vutha's small neck, and around his friend's. They filled both tires with petrol. Then they gave boxes of matches to Danisa and to a boy roughly the same age” (177). Confronted with this awful specter and convinced of her son's innocence, Noria takes her complaints to the community leadership who side with the (mostly male) Young Tigers and demand from her “that she should not condemn the perpetrators in any public forum, as this would give ammunition to the enemy” (166). Caught between powerfully conflicting loyalties, to the community and to the memory of her son, and afraid that she will victimized by the Young Tigers if she breaks her silence (her shack was burned down as a warning to her), Noria reluctantly agrees to abide by this decision. She promises to “fight to the end to see that justice is done” but it seems like a battle she is unlikely to win.

The violence of the Young Tigers and the public support they receive from the political leadership reveal to Noria how the structure of the “people's movement”—in whose cause she has so diligently labored—resembles that of their opponents: “You see, they say they are fighting for freedom, yet they are no different from the tribal chief and his followers. They commit atrocities as well” (167). That the “atrocities” committed against Vutha are of a particularly heinous nature emphasizes both how endemic violence is to a political struggle and how easy it is for patriarchal organizations to silence the voices of women (a voice that belongs, ironically in this case, to the activist mother of the victim). Because women's power is contained, they are powerless to protect even their children—they are denied even their capacity to nurture, that quality presumed innate to women in patriarchal discourse.

In its most pointed critique of the postapartheid condition, Ways of Dying shows how resilient patriarchal authority is: Noria is compelled to hold her tongue because the men in power decree it. The end of the racism of the apartheid era has not meant the end of the patriarchy; the race of the men in political control has changed, but the ideology of female subservience has not. Toloki and Shadrack are feminist aberrations, men who respect women's rights to public voice and to increased authority. But to the postapartheid patriarchy, Vutha's “guilt” and his death matter less than the public display of (female) subjugation to authority. Noria must be kept in line by disenfranchising her: she is the activist who is not allowed to act on her own behalf, rendered inefficacious by her political allies, not her enemies. Noria is positioned, through this disempowerment, as the anti-Winnie Mandela figure. Unlike the ex-Mrs. Mandela, who was acquitted on charges of murdering a young township activist who belonged to her football club, Noria has no direct access to even mid-level party bureaucrats. Neither Vutha nor his mother enjoys the privilege or prestige of Winnie Mandela, the “Mother of the Nation” who is widely believed to have participated in violence against pre-adolescent liberation fighters. Regardless of her indiscretions, the “Mother of the Nation” can be repeatedly recuperated, while all the mother of an unjustly necklaced boy can expect is to be silenced. Without Mrs. Mandela's special status, the young settlement dweller and his mother are simply the casualties of their own anonymity and organizational indifference, victims of both internecine strife and a lack of political will. The postapartheid society is founded upon democratic principles, but that has not translated into equality of status—some black mothers are more equal than others.

Noria's rights, interests, and emotional losses are deemed inconsequential in comparison to the public costs of breaking ranks. The movement, Mrs. Mandela's violations aside, must be seen as beyond reproach even when it is not; the death of a five-year-old is implicitly sanctioned because to address it publicly would be to admit tacitly that the postapartheid government has the same propensity for violence as the apartheid regime. It is because of an uncritical notion of party loyalty that the atrocities of the Young Tigers can be pardoned, but Noria's critique—or worse, her public indictment—of the movement she fought for cannot be tolerated. In his discussion of gender, Mda's work is at its most reflective and critically incisive. It demonstrates that the greatest threat to feminist activists and grassroots organizers (to say nothing of the settlement community itself) emanates not from the hostel dwellers, but from within—or more precisely phrased, from the upper levels—of the movement itself.

BOGUS ENEMY

Mda's capacity for interrogating the postapartheid state is uneven and even retrograde in those moments when Ways of Dying misidentifies the real object of critique. Instead of subjecting the failures, the excesses, and the successes of the postapartheid state to scrutiny, he offers an ideological dialectic that is—if not outmoded—politically anachronistic. When Ways of Dying was published in 1995, it was clear that the political dynamic had changed—or was, at the very least, in the process of doing so. Black South Africa was moving from ethnic-based strife between Zulus and Xhosas (to describe this conflict metonymically) to a struggle between the black underclass and the black bourgeoisie, the latter aided (if not created) by local white and multinational capital. Incapable of taking, or reluctant to take, the postapartheid government to task for the appalling condition of life in the settlements and the townships, Ways of Dying resorts to a notion of internecine violence—hostel dwellers versus settlement residents—to explain the material deprivations and insecurities that constitute life for Noria and her neighbors.

That the amagoduka belong to a specific ethnic community is, of course, not coincidental because it reveals the novel's ideological affiliations. The political leader of the hostel dwellers is described as insistently xenophobic and “anti-nationalist”: “Whereas other leaders are trying very hard to build one free and united nation out of various ethnic groups and races, he thinks he will reach a position of national importance by exploiting ethnicity, and by telling people of his ethnic group that if they don't fight they will be overwhelmed by other groups which are bent on dominating them, or even exterminating them” (48). The narrow-minded and bigoted leader being pilloried here is, of course, a dead ringer for Mangosuthu Buthulezi of the Inkatha Federal Party (IFP), an organization that has long championed the cause of the Zulu community.⁶ For much of the 1980s the most aggressive and recalcitrant hostel dwellers were Zulus, a community that took its ethnic identity more seriously and utilized it more self-consciously than any other disenfranchised South African constituency.

Although they comprise the largest single ethnic community in South African (some seven million out of a population of forty million), the Inkatha-identified Zulus understand themselves as being anti-hegemonic: they are against the ANC, the nation's dominant political movement with the longest anticolonialist and anti-apartheid history in black South Africa. From its deep roots in the Xhosa community, the ANC has long since transformed itself into the ruling political organization through building coalitions across ethnic and racial boundaries. Modeling itself as a postethnic (and increasingly, though with questionable success, as a postracial) movement and as the champion of the black underclass regardless of tribal affiliation, the ANC has been able to appeal to the township and settlement dwellers in an expansive, politically progressive fashion. Under the apartheid regime, the ANC argued that blacks constituted a single nation, divided only by the racism of NP laws; on the cusp of the postapartheid dispensation, the ANC avers, the larger black community is being threatened by a destructive and intolerant Zulu xenophobia.

Impoverished, itinerant, unemployed (and often unemployable, much as Toloki is), with poor living conditions, “migrants” from an assortment of ethnic backgrounds, the settlement dwellers are bound by their various (and shared) disenfranchisements, not by their tribal identity. The Zulu hostel residents, on the other hand, are employed, housed (if not spaciously then at least adequately in their “tribally” defined compounds), and in possession of a shared ethnic identity. The amagoduka's sense of political affinity is intensified by their physical proximity and their alienation—enforced, imagined, or real—from the settlements. For much of the 1980s the tensions between these two communities played themselves out with bloody consequences the mainly in the Johannesburg area, the primary location for the mining compounds.

In addition to demonizing the IFP leader Buthulezi, the novel also caricatures the contemporary expression of Zulu cultural identity. While Zulus celebrate their descent from Shaka, one of the continent's most astute political and military leaders, Mda belittles that proud martial history by characterizing the Zulus as

[a] chosen people with a history of greatness in warfare and conquest. They have internalised the version of their own identity that depicts them as having inherent aggression. When they attack the residents of squatter camps and townships or commuters on the trains, they see themselves in the image of great warriors of the past, of whom they are descendants. Indeed the tribal chief, in his rousing speeches has charged them with what he calls a history of responsibility to their warrior ancestors.

(48)

The violence committed by the Zulu hostel residents is, needless to say, unacceptable and fuels a sense of identity that is especially explosive in a society as divided as South Africa. Intent on maintaining a powerful political profile in a moment when ethnicity is becoming an increasingly inefficacious (which is not to say that it does not have strategic uses or cannot be invoked as a mobilizing, essentialist discourse), fearful of being dominated, the IFP employs a rhetoric that reaches back into a glorious past to find a new sense of purpose and prominence in the present. The consequences of this recidivism, what Michael Chapman describes as the “contemporaneous marshalings of the Zulu heroic memory” (34), is dangerous, but it is no less retrograde than Ways of Dying's reluctance to recognize that Inkatha is not the primary enemy.

For this reason, there is a striking incommensurability and an underlying tension between the particularity of the novel's purported enemy (Zulu nationalism) and the unfocused nature of the Professional Mourner's grief. In his role as self-appointed “mourner-in-chief,” Toloki releases affect in the form of an unhistoricized grief: all loss is completely divorced from the political causes and consequences of the death being mourned. Deaths caused by political violence are regrettable, not historically explicable—death is unmoored from its context, experienced only as an affect, not as an emotional response that has an ideological dimension, or even any content, for that matter. If all mothers are not equal, then death is a democratic experience in the novel. Within the landscape Mda has created in Ways of Dying, death caused by cancer is, implicitly, no more socially loaded than Vutha's necklacing: they are simply, because of the novel's reductive rendering, different “ways of dying.” Within Toloki's politically undifferentiated paradigm of grieving, the message is tautological: death is death, irrespective of its causes.

However, the rage, anger, disillusionment, and sense of political loss not expressed through staged mourning are not so much repressed or depoliticized as they are displaced onto the Zulu hostel dwellers. This is the “enemy of the (postapartheid) state,” a constituency that is discursively attacked and repeatedly vilified. Ironically, much like their antagonists the Nurses, those midwives to oppositional history, the amagoduka have no voice. However, because the Zulu migrants are caricatured and undermined, they increasingly come to resemble the funerals for which they are reputedly responsible. Like the spectacle of Toloki at work, their demonization appears staged and contrived—they are the enemy that has to be invented because the novel is so shallowly rooted in the soil of its own creation. In trying to have it both ways, to give credence to the grief and to vilify the amagoduka, Ways of Dying undoes itself because neither phenomenon has any narrative substance. Preoccupied with the staging of spectacle(s), the novel evacuates itself of historical meaning. This is a text unable to speak for the mourners, incapable of comprehending or explaining the settlement dweller's grief, too politically facile to grasp that ideological enmity is only plausible when the tale has narrative depth.

Paradoxically, the death of the settlement dwellers only impacts when the political stakes are clearly delineated, when the differences between the amagoduka and Noria's community is fully developed. Ways of Dying is, along with the demise of a radical politics, the victim of its own propensity for spectacle: in staging grief and conflict, it upstages itself. Representing the dilemmas, tensions, and demands of the postapartheid future requires a more profound familiarity with the apartheid past, a deeper grounding in the uncertainties of the present, and a more critical imagining of the future. In part because it is so taken with the performance of death, Ways of Dying is unable to fully understand how impacted, resonant, and disruptive a social process death truly is; surrounded everywhere by death, the novelist seems unable to identify the actual bodies of the corpses—the charred but eccentrically adorned body of a radical politics, a community on the defensive, a settlement where death is a fact of life, but an experience never without political consequence.

Notes

1. For a critique of this phenomenon, see, among other accounts, Lou Turner and Moe Seager.

2. Toloki's “theatricality,” his conversion of the funeral into a spectacle—and spectacular—event, derives from Mda's work as a dramatist, his primary literary field. (Mda is also a journalist and does a regular column on television for a local South African Sunday paper, The Sunday Times.) See Mda's We Shall See for the Fatherland and Other Plays, Bits of Debris, and his critical work on drama, When People Play: Development Communication through Theatre.

3. Critics such as Margaret Mervis have identified the city as Cape Town. I would argue, however, that this is not the case. Cape Town does not have a substantial migrant worker population, housed in tribalized hostels, in the way that an inland city such as Johannesburg does. Also, the racial dynamic in Cape Town is different: the major tensions there are between “coloureds” and blacks, not between Zulus and detribalized Xhosas.

4. See Ari Sitas's collection for an overview of the imbongi movement. In addition, Sitas himself is an academic and activist who has performed “praise poetry.” See also Jeff Opland.

5. In the postapartheid dispensation the poet who has kept the tradition of his 1980s predecessors such as Qabula and Malanga alive more vibrantly than any other is Lesego Rampolokeng. In Horns for Hondo (1990), Talking Rain (1993), and culminating in The Bavino Sermons (1999), Rampolokeng has been insistently critical of the ANC regime. He has committed himself to live performances, often interspersed with stinging indictments of the Mandela government. For a critical perspective on Rampolokeng's contribution to current South African poetry and cultural activism, see Kelwyn Sole and “Lesego.”

6. See Adam Ashforth for a discussion about the relationship between the cultural nationalism advocated by Buthulezi and the “black-on-black” violence that has pitted Zulu hostel residents against urban settlement dwellers.

   This essay benefited from the astute critical insights offered by Geoff Sanborn. Thanks to Shelley Arendse for providing much of the secondary material. Finally, I am grateful to Rebecca Ohm-Spencer of the Williams College library for her assistance in finding material about the Praise Poets.

Works Cited

Ashforth, Adam. “War Party: Buthulezi and Apartheid.” Transition 52 (1991): 56-69.

Chapman, Michael. “From Shaka's Court to the Trade Union Rally: Praise in a Usable Past.” Research in African Literatures 30:1 (1999): 34-43.

Gorak, Jan. Theatre Journal 41 (1989): 478-91.

“Lesego Rampolokeng: Interview.” New Coin 29.2 (1993).

Mda, Zakes. Bits of Debris. Lesotho: Thapama Books, 1986.

———. “Learning from the Ancient Wisdom of Africa: In the Creation and Distribution of Messages.” Current Writing 6.2: 139-50.

———. Ways of Dying. Cape Town: Oxford UP, 1995.

———. We Shall See for the Fatherland and Other Plays. Johannesburg: Ravan, 1980.

———. When People Play: Development Communication through Theatre. London: Zed, 1993.

Mervis, Margaret. “Fiction for Development: Zakes Mda's Ways of Dying.” Current Writing 10:1: 39-56.

Opland, Jeff. Xhosa Oral Poetry: Aspects of a Black South African Tradition. Johannesburg: Ravan, 1983.

Qabala, Alfred Temba. “It Has Been Such a Long Road.” World Literature Today. 70:1 (1996): 115.

Seager, Moe. “Part One: At the Abyss in South Africa.” Z Magazine Oct. 1991: 29-38.

Sita, Ari, ed. Black Mamba Rising: South African Worker Poets in Struggle: Alfred Temba Qabula, Mi s' Dumo Hlatswayo and Nise Malanga. Durban: Culture and Working Life Project, 1986.

Sole, Kelwyn. “Birds Taking Wings: Trends in Contemporary South African Poetry Written in English.” World Literature Today 70 (1996): 25-31.

Turner, Lou. “Southern Africa in a Crucible of Western-Backed Barbarism.” News & Letters 36.6.