Depictions of Black Defiance and Sovereign African Personhood in SEK Mqhayi’s U-Don Jadu

Abstract

ABSTRACT SEK Mqhayi’s novel u-Don Jadu has most commonly been characterised as a novel depicting an idealistic aspiration for social equality between Black and white in South Africa. In the novel, the protagonist Dondolo kaJadu, narrates a series of antagonistic incidents and encounters along his journey through small town South Africa as a Black man in the early half of twentieth century. The novel sets out a kind of imagined world in which Mqhayi’s vision of modernity and equality is laid out. In this paper we argue that Mqhayi’s use of isiXhosa idiomatic expression deliberately cultivates a grammar of Black African defiance within protagonist Don Jadu whose journey reveals the horrors of Black subjection to the colonial racial hierarchy of the time. Mqhayi illustrates the pervasive cruelty and moral absurdity of white supremacy. Alongside the intense depictions of white domination, Mqhayi explores the patheticness of enshackled Black subjects, devoid of personal autonomy and inevitably criminalised under colonial-apartheid rule. In this milieu Don Jadu, the protagonist, is constructed as a contrarian and defiant figure seeking Black sovereignty and political autonomy. We argue that u-Don Jadu portrays a radical view of sovereign African personhood that holds its own alongside whites.