It deals with the difficult choice a disempowered and divided community in an amaXhosa seaside village, the birthplace of a legendary prophetess, Nongqawuse, has to make in order to adapt to the complexity of a changing world. The Heart of Redness addresses post - colonial issues of ambivalence, empowerment, and epistemology. It is a historical, satirical and ecological novel and, like many South African novels published after the demise of apartheid and in the aftermath of the Truth and Reconcilation Commission (hereafter TRC) hearings, it delves into the colonial past of the country and examines it in the light of contemporary issues. The Heart of Redness is a richly textured novel intertwining two narrative strands over a period of almost one hundred and fifty years. It won two literary awards: The Commonwealth Writers Prize (Africa), and the Sunday Times Fiction award. This noted, this study will make a significant contribution to the rehabilitation of African traditions as it unravels the foundations and gatekeepers of modernity at the expense of African tradition.1 The Heart of Redness, published in 2000, is Zakes Mda’s second novel after Ways of Dying (1995). The paper concludes that to reesseentialise African traditions, the remnants of colonialism should be successfully uprooted. The findings from the study divulge the clash between African tradition and modernity has resulted in the erosion of many African traditional systems notwithstanding the dethronement of the colonial administration that empowered modernity at the expense of African traditional systems. This noted, the paper has utilised a qualitative research method and a textual analysis to critically scrutinise the impacts of the clash between tradition and modernity through the lens of the literary text, Heart of Redness (2000) by Zakes Mda. Most believers of African tradition are very conventional, counterattacking the effects of modernity signalled by the colonial period, including the arrival of Christianity and Western teachings. In Africa, modernity has not only influenced personal characteristics but also social, cultural, religious and the operation of establishments. Therefore, the paper’s key objective is to delineate the degree of social impairment in the present-day Africa engendered by the interface between tradition and modernity. The utmost global portent that distresses human social life is the impact of modernity.

Modernity has reached Africa and, thus, the African tradition cannot remain intact. Although most African writers deal with it, relatively few have attempted to depict how tradition and modernity may both benefit African societies. The interface between African tradition and modernity is one of the concerns of spirited debates in the post-colonial period.

The heart of redness by zakes mda