![]() ![]() However, the Bushwoman and diviner, Mthwakazi, offers Malangana a much-needed distraction, and for a while his love for her quells the bitterness he holds in his heart. ![]() ![]() The opening of the second chapter transports the reader back twenty-three years, and we get to meet a young, energetic and curious Malangana who is also bitter with the world and his brother, the king, for letting him be whipped and imprisoned by the cruel and unforgiving colonial magistrate, Hamilton Hope. Although he meets a myriad of challenges at the outset, he remains relentless in his search for the woman he fell in love with twenty years before. The novel opens with an old and beaten Malangana, limping on his crutches, searching for his Mthwakazi by following her aura. Zakes Mda narrates the story of a love that is gained and lost in a rather pointless war, like all wars, over the span of more than twenty years (1880–1904). Mthwakazi is a woman from the abaThwa community who serves as a nurse to the queen. He is the king’s half-brother from a smaller house. Malangana is an amaMpondomise man who apart from grooming the king’s horse is also the king’s translator and adviser. It is an extraordinary tale of love between Malangana (literally translates as ‘Little Suns’) and Mthwakazi. History and love gel incredibly in Zakes Mda’s latest novel, Little Suns. It rises in the east and crawls across the sky until it hides itself behind those mountains in the west’ – Malangana ![]()
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