History and the Problem of Dead Identity: Theorising the Revival of Zulu’s Extinct Culture in Zakes Mda’s the Zulus of New York

Abstract

This article attempts to explore history as a medium of reviving South African extinct identity in Zakes Mda’s The Zulus of New York. The study theorises the impetus of rejuvenating such identity based on Mda’s description of the Zulu’s potential to perform their native socio-cultural traditions despite the colonial hegemony which limits their power to maintain their identity. It argues that this literary tendency is largely rooted in the peculiar theoretical discourse on South African subaltern and internally colonised identity vis-à-vis the West, namely the USA and Britain; a notion that tends to perpetuate Zulu’s native and pre-colonial vernacular discourses. Within this narrative, the Zulu’s nativism and the South African ethnicity are regarded as non-colonial powers since the indigenous tribes allegedly suffered under Western ruling nationalities in the annexed territories. Therefore, the study discovers the problematic implications of such an exclusive focus on the postcolonial perspective; and it questions the theoretical conception of subordination as an ‘internal colony’, which is decolonised by the Zulu. The study proposes arguments for the consideration of American and British domination as variant models of Western hegemony, and it emphasises the need for examining Zuluophone cultures when theorising Zulu postcolonial identity. It demonstrates how the Zulu minority may wage this metapolitical resistance using individual rights to challenge Western hegemony as an illiberal entity, and thus Zulu de-constitutes colonialism to restore indigenous demotic and territorial boundaries. Thus, indigenous Zulu people resist by seeking to constitutionally entrench their identity as the rightful ‘subject of justice.