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HomeShop at BookSurgePolitical SciencePolitical ProcessLeadershipThe Roaring Lion and Wedding Bells: in the Hearts of Tigers & Leopards |
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Roaring Lion and Wedding Bells.... Mar 07, 2008
By Azaria Mbatha
"Shangriena, S."
Epinions Reviews
"The Roaring Lion and Wedding Bells
By Azaria Mbatha
In the preface to The Roaring Lion and Wedding Bells, author Azaria Mbatha describes how the material in the novel has been constructed:
"This is a novel, and to construe it as anything else would be of course a gaffe. ...
The settings, the characters, and most of the incidents are fictional. Nevertheless,
I offer all incidents in the chapters on South African colonial biography reform
policies from my own research. ... All the stories come momentarily after one
another, and it is my hope that the reader will find the red line of every story and
its meaning as it comes in the book..."
"All the stories come momentarily" is to say that The Roaring Lion and Wedding Bells is not constructed as a traditional plot-grounded novel but as something much more rare and difficult to pull off: a philosophical novel in which the plot "incidents" serve more to underscore the author's polemic. Even in the dialogue, the characters of this novel are engaged in philosophical categories of thought, thus putting The Roaring Lion and Wedding Bells squarely in the tradition of the great philosophical novels Candide and Samuel Johnson's Rasselas.
At the same time, and specifically, Mbatha's novel is about British colonial oppression in South Africa, in which the "plot"--if it may be called that, strictly speaking--involves the struggle of the characters to wrap their minds, philosophically, around the effects of colonialism and the oppression of peoples (classes, races, and sexes) while at the same time constructing a valid response that fights oppression without resorting to violence or becoming the evil one is attempting to eradicate.
Not surprisingly, the title functions symbolically, where "the roaring lion" is colonialism and oppression and "wedding bells" is freedom--in the form of marriage and love. Early on Mbatha considers the oppression of women in society as it relates to marriage customs; for example, of a woman taking the man's surname upon marriage, and then connects the oppression of women in South Africa to the philosophical ideas of Mary Wollstonecraft and John Stuart Mill. The novel, appropriately, ends with two images: the independence of South Africa from British rule and a marriage.
In The Roaring Lion and Wedding Bells Mbatha has taken two distinct genres of fiction--the philosophical novel and the novel of colonial oppression--and combined them into a compelling read. While pondering the effects of oppression and the basis of human freedom, it rises well above the ordinary and is certainly worth the intellectual effort required to read it. "
Epinions Reviews
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