Acclaimed South African novelist and playwright Zakes Mda's Sometimes There Is a Void: Memoirs of an Outsider begins in ruins. He is visiting his family's ancestral home on Dyarhom Mountain, the setting for two years of his boyhood before his exile in Lesotho. His time there was itself a form of exile; his parents sent him to live with his grandparents after he got involved in Johannesburg's street gangs. Now every structure on his grandfather's estate is gone, and in its place on the mountain is a beekeeping collective Mda helped to found. He wanders the mountain with his wife in the opening pages of the book, pointing out the places where buildings used to stand as they come to life in his imagination and populate the now repurposed landscape.

This same imaginative exercise underpins The Sculptors of Mapungubwe, Mda's first novel since writing his memoir. It is a much more ancient past he resurrects here. The novel is set in the year 1223, in Mapungubwe (present-day South Africa's far north), a stratified land of ancient peasants, aristocrats, and Swahili traders. Rendani and Chata are sculptors raised as brothers by Zwanga, a master carver. Rendi is Zwanga's son and Chata the son of a !Kung woman who was once a servant in Zwanga's household. Both men have a talent for carving, but it is Chata who captivates Zwanga with his sculptures of many-limbed winged creatures that exist only in the spirit world his !Kung mother has taught him to navigate. Rendani's dutiful renderings of bulls fail to impress, and his bitterness over this is unassuaged even as he marries a princess, becomes the royal carver and a member of the king's household, and moves to the top of the hill where only Mapungubwe's élite live. The resulting feud between the two brothers eventually begins to involve the whole town.

A number of obvious parallels present themselves to make The Sculptors of Mapungubwe a fantastical stage for the working-out of concerns detailed in Sometimes There Is a Void, familial strife being the most apparent. Mda's own father was a famous figure in South Africa's liberation struggle, an attorney whose practice was far too principled to be lucrative. He and his son were constantly at odds, first over his insistence on disciplined austerity and political seriousness in his son, and later over Mda's failed relationships and inability to raise his own children. Mda's relationship with his siblings has hardly been better. Rendani's alienation from his family and his perpetual quest to win his father's approval is familiar and tellingly eternal, since the ancestors live on after death.

Chata resonates from a different place. He is a perpetual outsider in his own community, due both to his mother's heritage and to his propensity for traveling and living independently. No one understands his desire to take off with the Swahili traders or forgo marrying. For many years no one but Zwanga sees any worth in his sculptures. He is the creation of an exiled artist, an author who cannot be at home in his own South Africa, or in Lesotho, or in the United States.

The most sly and satisfying manifestation of Mda's inner landscape in this story is political. Sometimes There Is a Void is dominated by the shifting political allegiances of Mda's friends and family in the liberation struggle, and Mda himself is never quite comfortable with his own avowed Pan-Africanist (pac) sympathies. He has a tendency to speak frankly, to point out fault wherever he finds it, and within his own party he finds plenty to disturb him. His fellow pac exiles profess their desire for a unified Africa free from tribalism, and yet he remembers the way they would hail him in the street: "Greetings to you, African! You are the first person I have seen this whole day." The Basotho in whose nation they have all found refuge do not quite count as human. In The Sculptors of Mapungubwe we see Mda searching backwards in time, tracing the roots of this hypocritical tendency to dehumanize. The Mapungubweans apply their prejudice to those like the !Kung who hunt and gather without owning cattle or land. When Chata decides to give in to the ancestral itch for wandering that he inherited from his !Kung mother, Zwanga is horrified: "I brought you up for better things. You seem to forget that … I made you a person." When Chata is suspected of having an affair with a foreign beggar woman and they are both brought before the council of elders, the woman objects strongly to the terms in which she is described. She and her family lack land and livestock only because they lost it, not because they never had it in the first place. She is a person, however diminished, still capable of contempt for those beneath her who are not.

The PAC is not the only organization to incite Mda's criticism in his memoir. His strongest disgust is reserved for the African National Congress once they come to power in South Africa, as he sees cronyism take over in place of the democracy that has been promised. He is only one of many incapable of finding any employment with the government, as his father left the ANC and he himself is too outspoken for their taste. He has no explanation for the actions of those "who always occupied the moral high ground during the liberation struggle and who sacrificed careers and families in pursuit of justice, fairness, and equality, but whose snouts are now buried deep in the troughs of corporate crony capitalism." His desire is simply to continue to write, though it is clear he is unsure if the posture of an artist has been the correct one through his life. Apart from one half-hearted, botched assassination attempt as a teenager, he refused all calls to become a warrior. This was not the result of conviction, he tells us, but simply of not having a heart for armed resistance and killing. Part of him is ashamed of this, though his position outside the ruling party, he realizes, may be good for him as an artist.

We can see him turning this conundrum over in The Sculptors of Mapungubwe, where Rendani stops creating any art at all upon joining the royal family, despite his position as Royal Sculptor. It is only Chata whose creativity continues to rule his life, his energy untapped by ambition. The work itself is all that matters.

In The Sculptors of Mapungubwe Mda has fashioned a fascinating and beautiful narrative arena in which all these ideas can play out, though the novel suffers at times from his use of overly simplistic language and syntax. (This is a common problem with fiction set in the far-distant past, an over-compensation prompted by fear of imposing modernized thought patterns and dialogue where they don't belong.) Like Mda's impressive memoir, The Sculptors of Mapungubwe is a void-filling project, not least because it brings to life a time and place ignored by history. As a young man Mda sided with the Igbo during Nigeria's Biafran war simply because he had read Achebe. "That's the power of narrative for you," he says. "We always sympathize with those whose story we know."

Mda writes to fill the void in our collective narrative as well as the void within himself—and yet even as he does so, he acknowledges that he will never succeed. At the close of Sometimes There Is a Void, Mda mentions The Sculptors of Mapungubwe as a book yet-to-be-written, one of a list of stories rattling around in his brain that his memoir-writing is holding up. These stories seem to torment him as unsculpted images torment Chata, calling to be added to his life's effort.

The void, he says, only widens.

Catherine Hervey is a writer in Glen Ellyn, Illinois, where she lives with her husband and daughter.

Copyright © 2014 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.
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