Summary

When Nobel Peace Prize laureate Wangari Maathai, the first African woman, and the first person ever to win the award for environmental activism, was asked by Time magazine's Stephan Faris, "What's the world's biggest challenge?", she replied: "The environment. We are sharing our resources in a very inequitable way.... And that is partly the reason why we have conflict" (Faris 2004: 4). Conflict over natural resources is very much at the centre of Mda's novel The Heart of Redness (2000). The historical past, emblematised by the cattle-killings in the Eastern Cape during the 1850s, is linked to the present through the ecological consciousness of Qukezwa, whose ...