The Red Heart of Zakes Mda is very different from any of the other novels we were assigned to read for apartheid classes in South Africa. I had a nice love/hate relationship with the book, because it intrigued me, but I had to read it too quickly and not think I understood the true value of the book while reading it quickly. The first thing I noticed about the novel was obviously the colorful cover, but when I thought about the title long enough I noticed that it sounded vaguely familiar. I had to read Heart of Darkness while I was in high school, and only after doing a bit of research on the book on the Internet, I was able to actually correlate the title between the two. Apparently, the title Heart of Redness is actually an allusion to Heart of Darkness presenting an opposite presentation of the themes. Heart of Redness goes into the past of tribal life and opens our eyes to another side of South Africa. After reading the first page, the reader is introduced to two categories of people: believers and non-believers. Apparently, the believers valued the history of the past and carried forward the message of the teenage prophetess Nongquwase by burning the crops and killing the livestock which supposedly drove the English back into the ocean through the ancestral powers, but this causes conflict for the non-believers. who blame believers for the hunger of their people, the amaXhosa. Although this happened a long time ago, the descendants of these two groups of people split in two and in present-day South Africa, animosity still exists between them. The color red, used in the book's title, also indicates a schism between the two groups of people. So one of the groups sees the color red as signifying respect for traditional beliefs, while for the other group it means darkness, which is another allusion to the title "heart of darkness". This is a society's conflict between modern urban life, past civilization, and a cherished history. The main believer in the prophet Nongquwase is a man named Zim, and his rival in the faith is Bhonco. Naturally, there is animosity between the two men. I was confused reading the book because I expected Bhonco, who you were first introduced to, to be a main character, but apparently the first chapter dealt with a more historical perspective..