Class politics in Mda’s Ways of dying

Abstract

Zakes Mda’s analysis and exposé of nationalist politics in “Ways of dying” reveal that the unitary vision that characterised the national liberation discourse suppressed some dissonances, contradictions and disunity around the question of class. Mda probes the ironies and contradictions of the liberation struggle and by so doing questions the meaning of freedom for the ordinary South Africans. He then scrutinises the role of the colonised and oppressed in delaying their own total liberation due to the camouflaged interests and motives of the nationalists that were not in the nation’s interest. His analysis of the class silences in his critique of the liberation struggle brings to attention concerns of the masses that had been marginalised in the liberation struggle. To their disappointment, after sacrificing and fighting for national liberation, the masses now realise that the postapartheid state is far from being what they hoped for. Their plight is exacerbated by the fact that they are still as oppressed as they had been prior to independence but now the oppressors are also some of their former comrades in the struggle.