Beyond the 'A' Word.

Zakes Mda won't talk about apartheid. The word appears neither in his acclaimed new novel, "The Heart of Redness," nor in his 1995 debut work, "Ways of Dying." Mda, who has won every major literary prize in South Africa--most recently, the prestigious Commonwealth Writers Prize for "Redness"--only glancingly alludes to what was for 40 years the overwhelming subject of South African literature. Characters refer to obscure past "sufferings" or to "oppression," and then quickly change the subject.

That's not to say that Mda is not interested in politics. "I criticize everybody," he says gleefully from his home in Johannesburg. "I'm quite outspoken about anything I see that's wrong with this country." In "The Heart of Redness," this list includes political patronage, corruption, widening class divisions, the dissolution of traditional cultures, globalization, poverty, land sustainability and development. But not-- most emphatically not--the racial fallout from apartheid. "Ultimately I'm just too taken with the number of stories that haven't been told," he says.

Mda's rise is indicative of a new direction in South African literature. While well-known white authors like J. M. Coetzee and Nadine Gordimer are still producing eloquent literature, there's a hunger in the marketplace for new voices--especially black voices. A flood of young black writers has emerged in the past seven years, all eager to talk about what's going on in South Africa besides racial strife. Phaswane Mpe, 32, writes about xenophobia and AIDS in "Welcome to Our Hillbrow," his novel about a notorious inner-city district of Johannesburg. Twenty-eight-year-old K. Sello Duiker's latest novel, "The Quiet Violence of Dreams," focuses on sexual identity and mental illness. Both writers cite Mda, at 54 the oldest of the "new" writers, as an influence. "He represents an important literary bridge between 'struggle-fiction' and what comes next," says Duiker. What does come next? "We're still working on it," he says.

In the process, authors like Mda are experimenting widely with literary techniques. In "Ways of Dying" he flirts with magic realism, which infuses African oral tradition. "Magic realism is found in most traditional cultures, where what happened may not have any objective reality," he says. "Plus it works ...