Jeffrey Brian Peires is a South African historian at the University of Fort Hare.
His book about the Xhosa cattle-killing movement of 1856–57, The Dead Will Arise, won the Alan Paton Award in 1990.
[11][12][13] The Dead Will Arise was first published by Jonathan Ball in 1989 while Peires was lecturing at Rhodes University in Grahamstown[5] and won the Alan Paton Award for non-fiction in 1990.
The book also provided much of the textual basis for Zakes Mda's acclaimed novel The Heart of Redness, to the extent that portions of Peires's text are reproduced verbatim in the novel.
In 2008, Andrew Offenburger, a historian at Yale University, alleged that Mda's reliance on Peires's research amounted to "masquerading plagiarism as intertextuality".
[19] In an open letter in the Mail & Guardian, Mda wrote:You only have to go to a search engine such as Google Scholar to realise that many academic papers have been written on this novel since 2002 and some of them make a thorough study of the intertextual relationship between The Heart of Redness and Jeff Peires's The Dead Will Arise.