Shamanism: Literacies for Alternative Totalities in Zakes Mda’s Fiction

Abstract

SummaryThis article considers the theme of shamanism in those novels of Zakes Mda that trace it to the people named respectively ‘abaThwa’, ‘Khoikhoi’, ‘Barwa’, ‘San’ and ‘IXam’, as opposed to amaXhosa and Basotho who comprise this fiction’s dominant orders. The proposition is that shamanism is a discourse in which it is believed that, having entered into a trance, the performer articulates alterities and effects healing in his/her people. Notable in this examination is the fiction’s representations of the trance in terms of audience formation and how they, in turn – and well after the executor’s descent into a trance – actualise it as mediations of plights.The article proposes that understanding shamanism through Mda’s fiction calls for a foregrounding of the complex histories of cultural exchange between these indigenous people and the Bantu, and also offers an opportunity to define Africa without first having to peel off the European colonial moment. The suggestion is that, taking the subject of shamanism as the focal point, more than one scholarship on this theme needs to be deployed in order to outline the significant inflections of the emergent culture, its technologies of cognition and microphysics of power. The first section, which theorises shamanism, emphasises that Mda moulds the essence of the trance in a compass that chimes in with scientific cosmological and neuro-psychological discourses. The final part of the discussion applies this delineation to a reading of select texts of Mda.