A Study of Ngugi’s Matigari and Zakes Mda’s The Heart of Redness

The study showed that African folk tradition such as myths, proverbs, legends, folklores, folktales, superstitions, reincarnations, and so forth, were extensively explored in the two texts: The study further demonstrated that the concept of intertextuality was a basis for contemporary African fictional writers to react to existing classical texts, either by deconstructing the thematic preoccupations of those texts, or by using ideas in the texts to produce something new, more informative and more entertaining. The study also indicated that the theory of poststructuralism and postcolonialism relate to intertextualism by reflecting how the purposively selected texts were no longer the sole products of their authors, but of their relationships to other precursor texts and authors. The study concluded that not only did Ngugi‟s Matigari and Mda‟s The Heart of Redness exemplify the basic concepts of the practice of intertextuality in contentemporary African writings, these novels helped to realise the significance of the poststructural theory to the study of African writings.