FACULTY OF HUMANITIES, SOCIAL SCIENCES AND LAW

DEPARTMENT OF ARTS
ENGLISH UNIT
INTIAL: Z
SURNAME: JORDAN
STUDENT NO: 217281796
MODULE: PROSE FICTION IN ENGLISH
MODULE CODE: ELS 22M
LECTURER: DR MANNING
TASK: ASSIGNMENT
DUE DATE: 10/10/2017
THE MADONNA OF EXCELSIOR

In his novel The Madonna of Excelsior, based on an event that occurred in Excelsior
in South Africa in 1971, Zakes Mda begins in the middle of the plot, then returns to
the past to explain how the significant event occurred. He devotes his first short
chapter to a meeting between Niki, with her blue-eyed child, Popi, and Father Frans
Claerhout, a priest who paints native women amid the South African landscape.

Niki is one of the Excelsior 19 and the “Madonna of Excelsior, a beautiful black
woman who is raped by one white farmer and becomes the lover of another,
producing a son (Viliki) and a daughter (Popi), the latter looking almost like a white
womans baby but then burdened with a discolored skin caused by Niki’s desperate
attempts to brown the infant over of a fire, to protect her from racist insults. Each
one of these principal characters is weighed down by baggage intimately linked with
race.

By starting with the past, when Niki is a teenager capable of sexual relations, Mda
implies that Niki's life begins when she is treated as sexual property by the Afrikaner
men. Her first sexual experience occurs when Johannes Smit, known to Niki's friends
as “Hairy Buttocks” and “Limp Stick,” finally succeeds in raping her. Smit will
continue to lust after Niki. She cannot forget the trauma of being raped by white
men.

At a cherry festival Smit makes a pass at Niki, but Stephanus Cronje helps her
escape from Smit and then has sex with her. The relationship, which seems
consensual, actually is not, given their unequal status, and it is hardly unique, as
four other mixed-race couples join them at a barn where there is a sexual orgy
(perhaps to his credit, Cronje does not share Niki with the other men). Ultimately,
twelve pregnant black women and their Afrikaner partners are charged with
breaking the Immorality Act.

Niki marries Pule, who works in the distant South African coal mines, and has his
son, Viliki. Pule sends her money, but his prolonged absences leave her alone and
vulnerable. She feels that she is being raped by the eyes of the Afrikaners and is
subjected to a strip search when she is suspected of stealing goods from her
employer.

Viliki is forever scarred by his father’s abandonment and takes to underground

political groups to deliver his version of a new South Africa where equality between
its citizens would be the rule of law. When he becomes a teenager, Viliki joins the
Movement, an underground group working to end apartheid in South Africa. He rises
to prominence in the Movement, but refuses to tell Niki and Popi about what he does
for them. Niki worries continually about his safety and has the recurring fear that her
children will be taken away from her.

While Niki is the focus of the first half of the novel, it is Popi who is the main
character of the second half, though Niki does remain the moral center of the story.
Popi is the one who visibly carries the biggest burden. Her mixed race status is the
target of endless taunts growing up, and she can never fit in anywhere. Popi grows
into a beautiful young woman, but she cannot shake a deep sense of shame in her
identity as a coloured person, one rejected by blacks and whites alike.

Mda has done a wonderful job in drawing out detailed character studies for all the
town’s residents, including the white Afrikaners. To his credit, the whites are not
portrayed as all evil all the time but as human beings who cannot comprehend
sometimes quite how to abandon decades of mental racial conditioning. When the
end of apartheid finally seems near, both Popi and Viliki are elected as council
members to the local government. Sadly, there are divisions and then there are
divisions. The blacks cannot maintain a united front, and a powerful local black
leader accuses Viliki of abandoning his origins and of selling out to the white
Afrikaner. The new South Africa, we realize, is more complicated than we could
imagine. Eventually they quit politics and their own private things

The black Viliki and the coloured Popi both struggle with their own racial identities
in a changing country, and finally figure out a way to be comfortable simply being
themselves. Niki, their long-suffering mother, makes her own peace with the events
of the past as she sees both the good and the bad that have flowed from her
actions.