Deconstructing Empire in Joseph Conrad and Zakes Mda

Abstract

Summary The publication of Zakes Mda's The Heart of Redness in 2000, almost a century after Conrad's Heart of Darkness, is not only redolent of its precursor in a titular sense, but also in its contingent and contiguous themes. Viewed from a postcolonial/postmodem perspective, both texts may be regarded as subversive offerings which disrupt colonial configurations of subjectivity. The degree to which Conrad and Mda succeed in deconstructing empire depends on the conditions of the historical production of their respective texts. Located within a modernist sensibility, Heart of Darkness, lacking the deictic in Mda's title, captures a historical moment of existential crisis in a manner that is simultaneously disruptive of colonial subjectivity and complicit with it, although in a characteristically ambiguous and inconclusive way. Set in the next millennium, The Heart of Redness continues the task of destabilising empire begun by Conrad, but this time through a revisionist reading of history, combining elements of realism with magic. Whilst Mda's deconstruction of Western colonialism is unambiguous owing to the writer's positioning in a postapartheid South Africa, his novel sardonically problematises another brand of colonialism, that of the enriched elite in government structures.