Actually, the issue was already a tacit burning question for politicians and scientists at the end of the 20th century. a new important fictional theme in South African literature. During the decades of transition, secrets of sexual crimes were disclosed more than ever, and it was made patent that they were intertwined with political violence. Sexual violence, in particular, has become a major concern. Twenty years after the end of Apartheid, violence is still a serious problem in South Africa, despite the prosperity and democratic stability of the state. Douglas's concepts of intrasocietal thought styles, the spirituality index and symbolic capital illuminate Mda's fictional representation of the sexual and spiritual in the context of themes of social turbulence, solidarity and transformation in his novels Ways of Dying (1995), set in the post-apartheid era, and The Heart of Redness (2000), set in the years leading up to the new millennium. Suggesting that current literary conventions may be inadequate to a postcolonial criticism that seeks to explore representations of the interrelatedness of the spiritual and the sexual, this article presents the cultural theory of social anthropologist Mary Douglas as a useful and flexible conceptual framework for literary criticism that seeks to address this complexity.
In Mda's novels the mysterious interrelatedness of the spiritual and the sexual, in which art and creativity are vital elements, functions as a catalyst in individual and collective processes towards change.
Spirituality and sexuality are key notions in the novels of Zakes Mda, one of South Africa's leading contemporary authors.
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