Wednesday, May 26, 2004
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A new novel inspired by Apartheid’s Immorality Act
JC
A review on Africana.com explains that Zakes Mda’s new novel, The Madonna of Excelsior, was based on true events during the early 1970s in
Like Mda's earlier work, this is a character-driven tale across rough political terrain. Under apartheid, the infamous Immorality Act forbade interracial sex. The book begins in what Mda describes as "the Golden Age of Immorality in the Free State. It had always been popular even before laws were enacted in Parliament to curb it." On any given day, you could find a couple somewhere being brought up on charges.
In the tiny rural town of Excelsior, just eighty-nine kilometers from the Lesotho border, an orgy of nineteen black women and white men was busted in the early '70s. The "coloured" (mixed-race) babies resulting from the orgy were used as evidence in court, one of the white participants shot himself, and the international press had a field day before the regime decided that the case was too embarrassing to fully proceed.
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