A tale of a desperate mother testifies to apartheid's cruelty
In Zakes Mda's graceful new novel, a desperate woman tries to conceal her infant daughter's parentage. First, she shaves the child's smooth, light hair. Then, while singing a lullaby to soothe the squirming child, she holds the baby over a pan of burning coals, trying to erase "the pinkness out of her."
"Both heat and smoke would surely brown her, and no one would say she was a light-skinned child again," Mda writes. Day after day, the mother sings and dangles her daughter, assuring the baby, who turns more red than brown, "that it was for her own good."
The mother, Niki, is black. The father is white. And in apartheid-era South Africa, that is a crime.
"The Madonna of Excelsior" recalls the infamous Immorality Act, which declared interracial sexual relationships unlawful in South Africa. Though it was repealed in 1985, for decades both blacks and whites were arrested and convicted for miscegenation. Black people usually received the harshest sentences.
Loosely based on an actual 1971 case, this novel is by turns biting and sympathetic as Mda, a native South African, deftly examines the long-term ramifications of this ludicrous law on Niki, her biracial daughter, Popi, and her black son, Viliki.
As a young woman, Niki is as "pretty as a doll," with a body blessed "with the fullness of the moon." She attracts the attention of many in Excelsior, including the white men.
Johannes Smit, a farmer, offers black girls money for sex, and at first Niki resists. But her friends convince her that "a full stomach at bedtime and new leather shoes under the bed" would be worth it. Smit rapes her, and even after she marries Pule, an intemperate gold miner, and has Viliki, the farmer continues his lustful pursuit.
Still, it is the relationship with Stephanus Cronje, the town's mayor and butcher, that irreparably alters Niki's life. Niki works in his butcher shop and also cares for his rambunctious son, Tjaart. When Stephanus's wife, Cornelia, wrongly accuses Niki of stealing meat and forces her to strip naked to prove her innocence, a mortified Niki seeks revenge by sleeping with Stephanus.
"She did not see Stephanus Cronje, owner of Excelsior Slaghuis. She did not see a boss or a lover," Mda writes. "She saw Madam Cornelia's husband. She was gobbling up Madam Cornelia's husband, with the emphasis on Madam. And she had him entirely in her power."
Of course, such power is fleeting for a black South African woman, especially after she realizes she is carrying Stephanus's child. Pule, who has been absent for a year, can't be the father, and once Popi, with her fair skin, blue eyes, and blond hair, is born, there's little doubt about the father's identity.
And so even though Niki prays for the smoke and heat to brown Popi's skin, the police drag both mother and child from their home, "not in the night, but in the glare of day when the whole world could see."
Stephanus is also arrested, and he kills himself after he is released on bail. This makes Niki's case even more sensational than those of her friends who are facing the same charges. Her ordeal sparks a nationwide frenzy, most of it among Afrikaners, who begin prosecuting and imprisoning one another with "cannibalistic zeal," Mda writes, "all because of black body parts."
Mda is sharp and unsparing in his depictions of these white men, who viewed black women as devils meant to tempt and corrupt them yet used either money or force to have sex with them.
Spanning about 30 years, this novel moves its characters -- black, white, and "coloured" -- through the personal and political upheavals of South Africa, both during and after the collapse of apartheid. Popi, as she realizes her racial heritage, becomes politicized, as does the half-brother, who becomes an outspoken activist.
Still, as with his fine earlier novels "The Heart of Redness" and "Ways of Dying," Mda refuses to undermine his nation's problems with cheap melodrama. But he doesn't shortchange the inherent horrors of apartheid, or South Africa's struggles to heal itself. 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 Madonna of Excelsior
By Zakes Mda
Farrar, Straus and Giroux,
258 pp., $23
