The Madonna of Excelsior

ALSO BY ZAKES MDA

Novels
The Heart of Redness
Ways of Dying
She Plays with the Darkness
Melville 67

Plays
Joys of War
And the Girls in Their Sunday Dresses
The Nun's Romantic Story
The Road
The Hill
We Shall Sing for the Fatherland

“Jumping handily between past and present, Mda deftly renders the tensions between maintaining an indigenous culture and altering it in the name of progress.”

—Entertainment Weekly

Ways of Dying

Winner of the M-Net Award for best novel, 1997
Winner of the Olive Schreiner Prize, novels, 1997
Special mention, the CNA Award for best novel, 1996
Honorable mention, the Noma Award for best book in Africa, 1996

“Tender humor and brutal violence vie with each other in Mda's pages, as do vibrant life and sudden death. The struggle between them creates an energetic and refreshing literature for a country still coming to terms with both the new and the old.”

—The New York Times Book Review

“A rollicking, at times whimsical tour through the dying days of apartheid as witnessed by the Professional Mourner, Toloki, who wanders from township funeral to township funeral with the hapless wonder of a Chaplinesque loner.”

—The Village Voice

“Once you have finished
Ways of Dying
, you won't know whether you read the novel or dreamt it. Zakes Mda has gathered up all the human waste and political detritus of South African life and distilled it into a magic realist text of great beauty, humor, and pathos. . . . Mda's novel, with its jewel-like moments of pure imagination, its gentle upward narrative structure, and its repertoire of distinct, intricately carved characters whose lives mean much more than their deaths, bears out this paradox.”

—Sunday Independent
(South Africa)

sunlight is Mda's love of nature and of the country. It is there in all its openness and beauty, vibrancy and color, as a healing, liberating force.”

—Citizen Weekend

“A brilliantly observed study of the inner workings of small-town South Africa.”

—O, The Oprah Magazine

“By turns earthy, witty, and tragic, this energetic novel deftly handles issues of racial identity, rape, and revenge. . . . This is Mda at his best.”

—Pretoria News
(South Africa)

The Heart of Redness
A
New York Times
Notable Book
Best Book, Africa Regional Commonwealth Writers' Prize, 2001
Sunday Times
Fiction Award (South Africa), 2002
Hurston/Wright LEGACY Award for Fiction, 2003

“Brilliant . . . A new kind of novel: one that combines Gabriel García Márquez's magic realism and political astuteness with satire, social realism, and a critical reexamination of the South African past.”

—The New York Times Book Review

“A major step in the new South African novel—now a polyphony of voices, suddenly freed yet still shadowed by deep and immense riddles.”

—The Village Voice

“Quiet, subtle, and powerful . . . Mda's enormous skills as a storyteller are everywhere in evidence, making the book impossible to put down.”

—The Washington Post

“This emotionally rich novel dares to seek redemption amid desolation. In these devastated lives, Mda finds grace, tenderness, even the kind of world-weary humor that is born of hardship.”

—The Boston Globe

“A postcolonial, postapartheid revelation . . . a humorous, mythic, and complicated novel.”

—San Francisco Chronicle

ACCLAIM FOR ZAKES MDA

The Madonna of Excelsior

“A lightning flash of a novel from start to finish—inspired, revelatory, and exhilarating.”

—Time out
New York

“Graceful . . . Sharp and unsparing . . . Mda refuses to undermine his nation's problems with cheap melodrama. Yet his gift, in addition to being an extraordinary writer, is to infuse the past with meaning, to make urgent the challenges of the present, and to reveal the gentle, often stinging, human comedy in both.”

—The Boston Globe

“Black South Africa has found a strong new voice in Zakes Mda, a marvelous storyteller.”

—The Economist

“Captivating . . . In vibrant prose infused with equal parts satire and social criticism, Mda charts new emotional terrain exploring the Madonna-whore complex in a South African setting.”

—Publishers Weekly

“Resplendent images of emerging African independence . . . There's a
lot
going on here. A gorgeously colored picture of personal and cultural metamorphosis. Exhilarating stuff.”

—Kirkus Reviews
(starred review)

“Zakes Mda . . . has taken our literature to new heights.”

—Sunday Sun
(South Africa)

“A deeply positive vision for the future . . . Mda's work penetrates the mystical, the magical aspects of our lives, sometimes reshaping real events, sometimes inventing new ones. He is compelled by the need to tell a story.”

—Independent
(South Africa)

“Warm, exuberant, and . . . very funny . . . Running through the book like

Zakes Mda

Part of this novel is informed by actual events that took place in and around Excelsior, and which are in the public record. The characters are fictitious, except for the few public figures who bear their real names.

THE MADONNA OF EXCELSIOR.
Copyright © 2002 by Zakes Mda. All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. For information, address Picador, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.

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Designed by Cassandra F.Pappas

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Mda, Zakes.

The Madonna of Excelsior / Zakes Mda.

p. cm.

ISBN 0-312-42382-9

EAN 978-0312-42382-7 ISBN 0-312-42382-7

1. Apartheid—Fiction. 2. Rape victims—Fiction. 3. South Africa—Fiction. 4. Group identity—Fiction. 5. Mother and child—Fiction. 6. Racially mixed children—Fiction. I. Title.
PR9369.3.M4M33 2004
823'.914—dc21                                                          2003054728

First published by Oxford University Press Southern Africa, Cape Town

First published in the United States by Farrar, Straus and Giroux

10 9 8 7 6

On 10 May 2000, together with a phalanx of my daughters, I visited Father Frans Claerhout at his studio in Tweespruit, Free State. I had always wanted to meet him. He had mentored some artist friends of mine, James Dorothy in particular. Claerhout presented me with a book on his work written by Dirk and Dominique Schwager. But first he painted a golden bird on the black flyleaf and signed his name. I dedicate this novel to the bird
.

THE MADONNA OF
EXCELSIOR

A
THESE THINGS
flow from the sins of our mothers. The land that lies flat on its back for kilometre after relentless kilometre. The black roads that run across it in different directions, slicing through one-street platteland towns. The cosmos flowers that form a guard of honour for the lone motorist. White, pink and purple petals. The sunflower fields that stretch as far as the eye can see. The land that is awash with yellowness. And the brownness of the qokwa grass.

Colour explodes. Green, yellow, red and blue. Sleepy-eyed women are walking among sunflowers. Naked women are chasing white doves among sunflowers. True atonement of rhythm and line. A boy is riding a donkey backwards among sunflowers. The ground is red. The sky is blue. The boy is red. The faces of the women are blue. Their hats are yellow and their dresses are blue. Women are harvesting wheat. Or they are cutting the qokwa grass that grows near the fields along the road, and is used for thatching houses. Big-breasted figures tower over the reapers, their ghostly faces showing only displeasure.

People without feet and toes—all of them.

These things leap at us in broad strokes. Just as they leapt at Popi twenty-five years ago. Only then the strokes were simple and naïve. Just a black outline of figures with brown or green oil paint rubbed over them. Men in blankets and conical Basotho hats pushing a cart that is drawn by a donkey. Topless women dancing in thethana skirts. Big hands and big breasts.

That is one thing that has not changed, for Father Frans Claer-hout is still a great admirer of big hands and big breasts. He is, after all, still the same trinity: man, priest and artist. The threeness that has tamed the open skies, the vastness and the loneliness of the Free State.

Twenty-five years ago Popi peered from her mother's back at the white man as he warmly and masterfully daubed his broad strokes. At five she was precocious enough to wonder why the houses were all so skewed. And crowded together. She thought she could draw better houses. Her people, those she sketched on the sand in the backyard of her township home, were not distorted like the priest's. They were matchstick figures with big heads and spiky hair. But they were not distorted. Yet his very elongated people overwhelmed her with joy. She saw herself jumping down from her mother's back and walking into the canvas, joining the distorted people in their daily chores. They filled her with excitement in their ordinariness.

“Popi, we must go now,” her mother said.

“Awu, Niki, I am still watching,” appealed Popi. She always called her mother by the name that everyone else in the township used.