The Inward and Outward Trajectories of the Shaman's Journeys: Mediation in Ben Okri's Dangerous Love and Zakes Mda's The Sculptors of Mapungubwe

Abstract

SummaryThis article teases out a dialogue between Zakes Mda's The Sculptors of Mapungubwe (2013) and Ben Okri's Dangerous love (1988), fictions that foreground art and delineate it as a shamanic ritual site. Having provided synopses of ritual in these two novels, the discussion then goes on to remark on the concern with this key subject in these novels’ respective scholarships. Thereafter, the examination moves on to suggest that these overlapping highlight the tendency in African literatures to turn to spirituality and to the figure of the shaman during challenging political transitions. The proposal is that the shaman reconfigures memory into secular mediations of other subjects’ trauma, making these intercessions operate in mutually inclusive private and public complexities. The rest of the article considers the depictions of two such intricacies: the artist's struggle to establish a narrative of mourning in Dangerous love, and the socially oriented dance and sculpture in The Sculptors of Mapungubwe.