Zakes Mda is the pen name of Zanemvula Kizito Gatyeni Mda, a novelist, poet and playwright. He was born in Herschel, Eastern Cape, South Africa, in 1948 to Rose Nompumelelo, a nurse, and Ashbey Peter Solomzi Mda, a school teacher, who later became a lawyer. His father was a founding member and later became the President of the African National Congress Youth League (ANCYL) in 1947.
Although he spent his early childhood in Soweto (where he knew political figures such as Walter and Albertina Sisulu, Oliver Tambo and Nelson Mandela) he had to finish his education in Lesotho where his father went into exile since 1963. This change of setting also meant a change of language for Mda: from isiXhosa to Sesotho. Consequently, Mda preferred to write his first plays in English. Zakes Mda has become one of South Africa’s most beloved writers. After decades as a successful playwright, he launched his career as a novelist with Ways of Dying in 1995.
Racial segregation existed in South Africa before the establishment of apartheid. Still, the formal legality of apartheid meant that prescribed race categories assigned at birth affected people’s access to education, economic opportunities, and social mobility. Under apartheid, ‘White’ South Africans, the country’s ethnic minority, enjoyed the lion’s share of political power and resources, creating a disparity between the categories of race formally recognized under the system. Because of the importance of race in South Africa under apartheid, Zakes Mda and his family received few opportunities for social or economic mobility. Still, they persevered.
His first play, We Shall Sing for the Fatherland, won the first Amstel Playwright of the Year Award in 1978, a feat he repeated the following year. He worked as a bank clerk, a teacher and in marketing before the publication of We Shall Sing for the Fatherland and Other Plays in 1980 enabled him to be admitted to the Ohio University for a three-year Master’s degree in theatre. He completed a Masters Degree in Theatre at Ohio University, after which he obtained a Master of Arts Degree in Mass Communication. By 1984 his plays were performed in the USSR, the USA, and Scotland as well as in various parts of southern Africa.
Mda then returned to Lesotho, first working with the Lesotho National Broadcasting Corporation Television Project and then as a lecturer in the Department of English at the University of Lesotho. Between 1985 and 1992 he was director of the Theatre-For-Development Project at the university and founded the Marotholi Travelling Theatre. Together with his students he travelled to villages in remote mountain regions working with local people in creating theatre around their everyday concerns. This work of writing theatre “from the inside” was the theme of his doctoral thesis, the Ph.D degree being conferred on him by the University of Cape Town in 1989. In the early nineties Mda spent much of his time overseas, he was writer-in-residence at the University of Durham (1991), research fellow at Yale University. He returned for one year to South Africa as Visiting Professor at the School of Dramatic Art at the University of the Witwatersrand. He is presently Professor of Creative Writing at Ohio University.
He has published 22 books, ten of which are novels and the rest collections of plays, poetry and a monograph on the theory and practice of theater-for-development. His plays have been awarded numerous prizes. The Plays of Zakes Mda (1990) has been translated into South Africa’s eleven official languages. Mda has won a number of awards in South Africa, the USA and Italy, including the Amstel Playwright of the Year Award, the Commonwealth Writers Prize for Africa, the M-Net Prize, the Sunday Times Literary Prize, the Zora Neale Hurston/Richard Wright Legacy Award and the American Library Association Notable Book.
His novel Cion, set in southeast Ohio, was nominated for the NAACP Image Award. His memoir titled Sometimes there is a Void: Memoirs of an Outsider was published by Penguin Books in 2011 and Farrar Straus and Giroux in 2012 and was the New York Times Notable Book for 2012. He has won the Amstel Merit Award for We Shall Sing for the Fatherland (1978), The Amstel Playwright of the Year Award for The Hill (1979), the Christina Crawford Award (of the then American Theater Association) for The Road (1984), and the Olive Schreiner Prize (Drama) of the English Academy of South Africa for The Nun’s Romantic Story (1996). He is a Patron of the Market Theatre, Johannesburg. In April 2014, the South African Government conferred the Order of Ikhamanga, in Bronze, on Zanemvula Kizito Gatyeni “Zakes” Mda, for his excellent contribution in the field of literature that has put South African stories on the world stage.
Selected Quotes from Zakes Mda
“My plays have been translated into all of the official languages of South Africa except Afrikaans.”
“Our elders say that an elephant does not find its own trunk heavy.”
“The blinded frogs will live peacefully because now they won’t be bothered by the bright rays of the sun. They won’t have to run from danger, because they won’t see it. They will therefore be safe since danger only catches those who run away from it.” – From “The Whale Caller.”
“Death lives with us everyday. Indeed our ways of dying are our ways of living. Or should I say our ways of living are our ways of dying?” ― From the “Ways of Dying.”
