ABSTRACT

Abstract

Zakes Mda, a South African post-apartheid writer employs twinship as a narrative strategy in the explication and rendition of his literary works. He uses this strategy to explore his sensitivity of the situations in South African new democratic society. His attempt is to explore the prevailing circumstances existing in South Africa after the demise of apartheid system of government, the institutionalized segregation policy that came into existence in 1948. He thus looks at the polarities of the exhaunt apartheid and the popular democracy with a critical insight to read the two systems, the past and the present. Mda’s use of twinship as a narrative strategy portrays a continuous relevance in the post-colonial age. He shows the relationship between the past and the present, apartheid and post-apartheid. He uses twinship to show the dichotomies of post-colonial life, highlighting the importance of human values in transforming “Post-colonial cultural identities”. In Ways of Dying and She Plays with the Darkness he adroitly employs twinship to weave in the past in the present in South Africa. His choice of characters, Toloki, Noria, and his son of immaculate conception Vutha, in Ways of Dying and She plays with the Darkness, Mda uses the characters of Radisene and Dikosha as a twining strategy to portray the social binaries and assert the role of the marginalized individual in the process of societal transformation. Radisene and Dikosha are born of the same mother the same year but not of the same father. Thus, by the circumstances of their birth, they are regarded as twins in the novel. Twinship in She Plays with the Darkness depicts Mda’s use of a potential “warp and woof’ of twinship in his fiction” (Bell and Jacobs 135). The splitting of Radisene and Dikosha marks a division within one identity, that of their family as they are their mother’s only children.

Keywords: Twinship; birth; darkness; dying.