The Madonna of Excelsior

I have read this book twice because I love the story- Zakes remains one of my favorite African writers-

Fiction does not always facilitate or augment the understanding of complex realities of time and place. Zakes Mda, however, has achieved this mixture admirably in this novel of his native South Africa. The political events of pre- and post-Apartheid periods take a central place in the story. Yet he manages to avoid being overly heavy on facts and details as he builds the narrative around the impact of one specific event and its aftermath on one small community, Excelsior. He captures the essence of life under Apartheid and the difficulties awaiting all when the regime ends. Old prejudices and tensions remain and the transition to the new SA adds new challenges and conflicts, including among the black political leadership. Mda uses the 1971 case of the Excelsior 19 as the focus of the first part of his account. A group of white men and black women were charged with violation of the Immorality Act that prohibits intimate relations across race lines. The primary character is Niki, one of the Excelsior 19 women, whose life story is a symbol for this time and place. As a naïve, pretty 18 year old, she attracts the attention of a white Afrikaner who assaults her and keeps pursuing her. Escape into marriage is some protection and also results in her confidence growing. Life is good with a husband and her son, Viliki. Never questioning her role as a servant and second class citizen, a humiliating incident with her white woman boss changes all that. Her rage leads her to take revenge. Realizing her power as a black beauty and the hold it has over white Afrikaners, she applies it deliberately. The mixed-race daughter Popi is evidence of the hushed-up relationship. Despite the indisputable evidence of children like Popi, the charges against the Excelsior 19 are withdrawn. Still, those implicated and their families have to somehow work out their lives and their various relationships: within families, among neighbours, between Afrikaners, English and Blacks and Coloured. Niki and her children also suffer the consequences. As the narrative of their lives continues, the focus shifts to Popi and her extraordinary beauty. Her features increasingly reveal her parentage to everybody in the community. In the new SA she can play an important role in the community despite the continuing suspicions against mixed race people, who are "not black enough". Mda does an excellent job of bringing diverse individuals to life. We see them from different angles, we empathize with them and comprehend them as part of a larger reality being is being played out. Nothing is black and white (excuse the pun!), nobody is all "good" or all "bad". Mda acknowledges that Afrikaners maintain their dreams of returning to power and depicts realistically the political conflicts within the black leadership. He introduces two kinds of observers to the novel: Father Claerhout, the Belgian priest-artist living in the region and a knowledgeable "we" narrator. The "trinity" (man, Father,

South African writer Zakes Mda takes the notorious "Immorality Act" of South Africa's apartheid history, as well as a true event in South African history, which flowed from a violation of this law, and loosely weaves a fictionalized tale that will keep the reader turning the pages of this thematically complex book. The "Immorality Act" was legislated to prevent miscegenation and ensure the purity of the races. In 1971, in the Orange Free State of South Africa, nineteen of its citizens, both white and black, were arrested for violating this law. The fictionalization of this event serves to contrast the old Afrikaner minority dominated South Africa in which apartheid was the law, and the new South Africa in which blacks are now the ruling majority. The author takes the reader through the transition from the old to the new South Africa through the fictionalization of the then notorious violation of the "Immorality Act". Niki, one of the main protagonists, is an under-educated black woman living in white Afrikaner dominated South Africa in the township of Excelsior. She lives a life that is regulated by apartheid. She lives in substandard housing, works for Afrikaners for subsistence wages, and is at the beck and call of her employer. Moreover, she is easy prey for those Afrikaners who, despite the "Immorality Act", would forcibly subject her sexually. When her employer's wife forces her to submit to a humiliating invasion of her privacy, Niki fights back the only way she knows how, through the sexual enslavement of this woman's husband, her employer. When she, along with a number of other native black women give birth to children that are clearly of mixed racial parentage, trouble ensues, and arrests under the "Immorality Act" are made of both male Afrikaners and native black women, of whom Niki is one, causing great scandal in the township. This incident is to leave a great mark on Niki's family, as it ensures the demise of her relationship with her husband, Pule, a miner whose irregular visits home, coupled with bouts of domestic violence, contribute to their estrangement. It affects her son, Viliki, who grows up rebellious, a political activist seeking to wrest political control of South Africa from the Afrikaners. It also affects Popi, the beautiful child of her illicit tryst with her employer, who forever seems to be in denial of her mixed race heritage. The book is not only about Niki's travails in white Afrikaner dominated South Africa under apartheid, it is also about Viliki's and Popi's coming of age in a post-apartheid South Africa in transition. As the old Afrikaner rule in South Africa gives way to the new black majority rule in South Africa, one begins to realize that the issue is not so black and white. It boils down to power, who has it, and who has not. This is ultimately a story about those who are just trying to live their lives as best they can, as South Africa tries to reconcile its past with its present, while looki

In sensuous, intensely visual language, author Mda depicts the life of Niki, a black South African, showing her day-to-day struggles to survive under apartheid and raise her children, but he also depicts Fr. Frans Claerhout's idealized vision of her in his paintings--as a colorful Madonna figure, the mother of children who will eventually change the world. Niki has posed for many of Fr. Claerhout's paintings, a job which has helped her to feed her black son and her half-white daughter, even though she has often had to walk thirty-five kilometers to his studio in order to pose. Niki's story, from her teen years to old age, becomes the story of South Africa itself during the last half of the 20th century, a novel told from the perspective of a black author, and quite unlike the novels of Alan Paton, Nadine Gordimer, and J. M. Coetzee, though they cover the same time period.Excelsior, the township in which Niki lives, is almost entirely black, yet all power in government and business rests in white hands. Without resorting to melodrama or clichés, the author shows in incident after incident, how black women are regarded as chattel, regularly harassed and even raped by their white bosses, town officials, judges, and even clergymen. Yet Niki never yields to self-pity, even when she and eighteen other women and the men who have used them are put on trial for violating the Immorality Act, a violation which has produced Niki's daughter Popi. Imperfect, sometimes angry, and often calculating, Niki comes alive as a woman determined to hang on to her pride, using the only power she has, her sexual power, to control those who would control her. Vivid scenes of South African life from the 1970s to the present bring Niki and her children to life. As the children grow and become deeply involved in political movements, Mda gives us a clear-eyed picture of South Africa's transition from a restrictive, white-ruled government to a democratically elected government with room for both races. The black people here are real, not idealized, people with hopes, dreams, and strategies for survival, and they evoke enormous sympathy from the reader, especially as their personal limitations and faults become clear. Concentrating less on the national violence and battles for survival, and more on the individual conflicts of people in Excelsior, many of whom the reader has come to like and respect, he presents complex issues in a clear, uncomplicated narrative which throbs with life and offers both hope and caution for the future. Mary Whipple

The publishing of his second novel, The Madonna of Excelsior : A Novel, establishes Zakes Mda as a bright new star of international literature. This novel, like his first, deals with African society?s attempts to deal with the struggle between tradition and modernity in contemporary Africa.The basis of the novel is an actual event. In 1971 19 citizens of a village in Orange Free State were arrested for violating the Immorality Act in South Africa. Their crime? Interracial sex.The book is a fictional accounting of the subsequent lives of those caught up in this incident.The focus of the story, the ?Madonna? of the title is Popi, a young lady who represents the issue of one of these sexual encounters. She is called ?colored? by polite society and far ruder things by most others. Her life transverses the crossover from white apartheid rule to black native African rule and she fit in neither world, being ?to black for the apartheid regime and to white for the African regime?.Most of the figures in this novel emerge as people deserving, if not of sympathy, at least of understanding. It is one of the strengths of the book that Mda?s politics?if he has any?are entirely absent from the narrative. This is a book about people and their experiences, not a vehicle for political rhetoric. Not that the tragedies of the political situation in South Africa don?t emerge?they most surely do. They do so within the context of the story, however. In the end the villains in contemporary South Africa are not the apartheid enforcers who instigate the action with their contemptible raid, nor those caught up in it, or even those who discriminate against these people. The villains are those, former opposition leaders resisting the injustice and corruption of apartheid, who now are the legislators, town councilors and such, who allocate jobs, housing, favors and the like to themselves, their wives, girlfriends, family and cronies. All of those who, assuring that everything would change under a regime, instead ensured that nothing in fact would be any different for those without power.In the end this is a book about people, stuck in an uncomfortable middle, despised by the old guard in their time, despised by the new guard in the present, trying as best they can to come to terms with their pasts, present and futures. It is a singularly insightful and moving tale. The Madonna of Excelsior is one of the best books I?ve read in years. It?s definitely a ?must read? book.