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The Missouri Review 28.2 (2005) 62-79


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An Interview with Zakes Mda

Elly Williams

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Zanemvula Kizito Gatyeni Mda, better known as Zakes Mda, is an internationally acclaimed South African poet, playwright, novelist and painter. Born in 1948 in the Eastern Cape, Mda spent his early childhood in Soweto. By 1977 his poetry was being regularly published, and in 1978 his play We Shall Sing for the Fatherland won the first Amstel Playwright of [End Page 63] the Year Award. The following year he won the same honor for his play The Hill. In 1983 Mda graduated from Ohio University with an M.F.A. in theater and an M.A. in telecommunications. Mda has since taught at the University of Lesotho and been awarded a Ph.D. by the University of Cape Town.

Mda's first novel, Ways of Dying (1995), won the M-net Book Prize. The Heart of Redness (2002) won the prestigious Hurston/Wright Legacy Award and the Commonwealth Writers Prize for the Africa Region. His novel The Madonna of Excelsior (2004) was selected as one of the Top Ten South African Books Published in the Decade of Democracy. Farrar, Straus, and Giroux will publish his new novel, The Whale Caller, in October 2005. Mda is currently a full professor at Ohio University. This interview was conducted in the spring of 2004.



INTERVIEWER : You are a black South African who grew up during apartheid. In J. M. Coetzee's memoir, Boyhood: Scenes from a Provincial Life, we learn of his growing awareness of apartheid and himself as an Afrikaner. He reflects on who he is and why he writes as he does. Your experience of apartheid must be very different from Coetzee's. What was your childhood in Soweto like?

MDA: Yes, it will be different in many respects. I grew up in Johannesburg in a township known as Soweto, which was an urban environment. Soweto was a black township because according to apartheid laws even residential areas were separated. Black and white.

Soweto is a number of suburbs. It means South Western Townships. It's a sprawling area of about a million people. My own suburb in Soweto was Orlando East. I went to school there. My mother was a nurse, and my father was a primary school teacher. Later, my father left our suburb and went to the [End Page 64] Eastern Cape to study law. My mother and brothers and I moved to another suburb called Dobsinville, where my mother continued working as a nurse at a clinic. It was in Dobsinville that I became a juvenile delinquent, joining street gangs, giving my mother lots of problems at a time when my father was away studying law, serving his articles. That's what it's called in South Africa when you have completed your law degree and are working as an apprentice with a practicing lawyer before you can practice as a lawyer on your own. He was serving his articles in the Eastern Cape, which is a different province, more than a thousand miles away from Johannesburg. As a gangster, that's when I actually earnestly became an artist as well. I had already been writing since the time I was six years old. When not fighting in the street, I would be somewhere painting pictures, writing poems, playing truant from school. My parents decided to save me from gangsterism by taking me to a rural area in the Eastern Cape, which is where my father originally came from. I lived with my grandmother. I continued to write. I wrote in my own indigenous African language, Xhosa. When my father completed his law studies, we moved to a small town in the Eastern Cape called Sterkspruit, where I completed my primary education. Soon thereafter my father was arrested because he was a political activist in the underground political movement fighting against apartheid. He escaped and went into exile in a neighboring country called Lesotho, which was then a British colony. A year later I joined him...

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