The dissertation component of this Master’s degree explores the animist ethic in Zakes Mda’s The Heart of Redness; more specifically it will examine how an animist cosmology underlies many of the ethical values in the text in particular those that guide an alternative to the globalising forces of capitalism through a co-operative, eco-friendly solution. By paying attention to the features in the text that could be called animist, in other words the interaction with non-human persons including plants, animals, geological features and ancestral spirits, this dissertation argues that these features are central to the transformation of the protagonist. Camagu’s journey involves a search for belonging that leads him into a network of relationships in Qolorha-By-Sea, which he can only navigate once he enters into his role as a mediator and becomes an exponent of certain ancestral beliefs. I shall argue that this role necessitates an openness and an acceptance of the ambiguity and uncertainty of certain human and non-human relationships. This ambiguity necessarily produces an attitude of openness and awareness in the novel’s central characters that informs the novel’s ecological ethic and expands our notions of inequality to include the more-than-human. Primarily, this dissertation argues that Mda imagines a way of bringing a cultural, animist, world view into the present as a conception of inequality that extends beyond the human. In accompaniment to this dissertation is my own Speculative Fiction novel, Why The River Runs, which is also concerned with what accepting an animist worldview means for my protagonists. The novel explores the mental health struggles of the main protagonist and relates them to the alienating and harmful experience of living under capitalism while also following the second protagonist’s journey through an ancestral calling to become a traditional healer, and follows both protagonists as they navigate a post-apocalyptic scenario. My novel shares several features with Mda’s including ecological issues such as connection with the land and relationships with non-human subjects. Just as Mda does, my novel weaves together this ecological ethic with traditional belief systems and discrepant attitudes towards them. Through the protagonists’ journeys they learn the importance of engaging meaningfully with others as a way of emerging from crippling isolation and inwardness while recognising identity as a process with no certain resolution. / Dissertation (MA (Creative Writing))--University of Pretoria, 2021. / Unit for Creative Writing / MA (Creative Writing) / Unrestricted

This thesis is focused on the material known as the Mesolithic portable art. Earlier research have interpreted the material as representative art relating to ideology, mythology, prestige, ritual practices,and tribalism. Such interpretations are based on theoretical frameworks that build on hylomorphism and Cartesian metaphysics. By a change of theoretical framework, to a new animistic perspective based on a combination of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s rhizome theory, Tim Ingold’s meshwork and Giordano Bruno’s theory of bonds in general, followed by the use of ChantalConneller’s method rhizomatic chaîne opératoire, I conclude that the motifs on the tools and pendants are communications to the animated subjects that make up and inhabit the environment. Furthermore, I conclude that the binary positions of function and ritual cannot be applied when studying the formgenerating process of this material, as the tools and pendants along with their applied motifs are a result of what is in between these binary positions.