The Longer Walk to Freedom: South African Prophecy and Neoliberal Intervention upon ‘Tragic Africa’

Using The Heart of Redness by Zakes Mda as its focus, this chapter explores the continuities between colonial-era violence and neoliberal interventionist attempts to ‘steer’ democracy across the continent. By placing South Africa’s democratic development within a wider, ongoing narrative of decolonisation, The Heart of Redness transforms a fitful series of tragic circumstances and ‘failed’ renewals into a long, eventful, and incomplete narrative of empowerment. With a narrative focus split between an apparently unfulfilled prophecy in the colonial era and post-apartheid citizens disillusioned with the South African democratic establishment, The Heart of Redness positions failure as an essential phase of incompletion in democratic development. Ultimately, the web-like narrative structure of The Heart of Redness is read here as a multi-voiced riposte to the over-familiar narrative of linear progress that has defined ideas of Africa’s (under)development from colonialism to the present day. Democracy, development, and decolonisation may be ongoing processes across much of Africa, but such incompletion is far from tragic or symptomatic of failure.