A Picador Paperback Original The hero of Zakes Mda's beloved Ways of Dying, Toloki, sets down with a family in Middle America and uncovers the story of the runaway slaves who were their ancestors. Toloki, the professional mourner, has come to live in America. Lured to Athens, Ohio, by an academic at the local university, Toloki makes friends with an angry young man he meets at a Halloween parade and soon falls in love with the young man's sister. Toloki endears himself to a local quilting group and his quilting provides a portal to the past, a story of two escaped slaves seeking freedom in Ohio. Making their way north from Virginia with nothing but their mother's quilts for a map, the boys hope to find a promised land where blacks can live as free men. Their story alternates with Toloki's, as the two narratives cast a new light on America in the twenty-first century and on an undiscovered legacy of the Underground Railroad.
Winner of the M-Net Book Prize Shortlisted for the CNA and Noma Awards In Ways of Dying, Zakes Mda's acclaimed first novel, Toloki is a "professional mourner" in a vast and violent city of the new South Africa. Day after day he attends funerals in the townships, dressed with dignity in a threadbare suit, cape, and battered top hat, to comfort the grieving families of the victims of the city's crime, racial hatred, and crippling poverty. At a Christmas day funeral for a young boy Toloki is reunited with Noria, a woman from his village. Together they help each other to heal the past, and as their story interweaves with those of their acquaintances this elegant short novel provides a magical and painful picture of South Africa today. Ways of Dying was awarded South Africa's prestigious M-Net Book Prize, awarded by the TV channel M-Net to books written in one of South Africa's official languages, and was shortlisted for the Central News Agency (CNA) Award and the Noma Award, an Africa-wide prize founded by Shoichi Noma, onetime president of Kodansha International.
The Great Farini would stride on to the stage and announce, ‘Ladies and gentlemen, and now for the highlight of the day, the ferocious Zulus.’ The impresario Farini introduced Em-Pee and his troupe to his kind of show business, and now they must earn their bread. In 1885 in a bustling New York City, they are the performers who know the true Zulu dances, while all around them fraudsters perform silly jigs. Reports on the Anglo-Zulu War portrayed King Cetshwayo as infamous, and audiences in London and New York flock to see his kin. What the gawking spectators don’t know is that Em-Pee once carried nothing but his spear and shield, when he had to flee his king. But amid the city’s squalid vaudeville acts appears a vision that leaves Em-Pee breathless: in a cage in Madison Square Park is Acol, a Dinka princess on display. For Em-Pee, it is love at first sight, though Acol is not free to love anyone back.
A startling novel by the leading writer of the new South Africa In The Heart of Redness -- shortlisted for the prestigious Commonwealth Writers Prize -- Zakes Mda sets a story of South African village life against a notorious episode from the country's past. The result is a novel of great scope and deep human feeling, of passion and reconciliation. As the novel opens Camugu, who left for America during apartheid, has returned to Johannesburg. Disillusioned by the problems of the new democracy, he follows his "famous lust" to Qolorha on the remote Eastern Cape. There in the nineteenth century a teenage prophetess named Nonqawuse commanded the Xhosa people to kill their cattle and burn their crops, promising that once they did so the spirits of their ancestors would rise and drive the occupying English into the ocean. The failed prophecy split the Xhosa into Believers and Unbelievers, dividing brother from brother, wife from husband, with devastating consequences. One hundred fifty years later, the two groups' decendants are at odds over plans to build a vast casino and tourist resort in the village, and Camugu is soon drawn into their heritage and their future -- and into a bizarre love triangle as well. The Heart of Redness is a seamless weave of history, myth, and realist fiction. It is, arguably, the first great novel of the new South Africa -- a triumph of imaginative and historical writing.
Kristin Uys is a tough Roodepoort magistrate who lives alone with her cat. She is on a one-woman crusade to wipe out prostitution in the town for reasons that have personal significance for her. Although she is unable to convict the Visagie Brothers, Stevo and Shortie, on charges of running a brothel, she manages to nail Stevo for contempt of court and gives him a summary six-month sentence. From Diepkloof Prison, the outraged Stevo orchestrates his revenge against the magistrate, aided and abetted by his rather inept brother Shortie and his erstwhile nanny, Aunt Magda, who believes mass action will force the powers that be to release Stevo. Kristin receives menacing phone calls and her home is invaded and vandalised. Even her cat is threatened. The chief magistrate insists on assigning a bodyguard to protect her. To Kristin's consternation, security guard Don Mateza moves into her home and trails her everywhere. Nor does this suit Don's long-time girlfriend Tumi, former model and successful businesswoman, who is intent on turning Don into a Black Diamond sooner rather than later. And Don soon finds that his new assignment has unexpected complications which Tumi simply does not understand. In Black Diamond, Zakes Mda tackles every conceivable South African stereotype, skilfully (and with the lightest touch) turning them upside down and exposing their ironies, often hilariously. This is a clever, quirky novel that captures the essence of contemporary life in Gauteng and will resonate with all South Africans.
A New York Times Notable Book of the Year South African novelist and playwright Zakes Mda's remarkable life story of growing up in South Africa, Lesotho, and America, told with style and gusto. Zakes Mda is the most acclaimed South African writer of the independence era. His novels tell stories that venture far beyond the conventional narratives of a people's struggle against apartheid. In this memoir, he tells the story of a life that intersects with the political life of his country but that at its heart is the classic adventure story of an artist, lover, father, teacher, and bon vivant. Zanemvula Mda was born in 1948 into a family of lawyers and grew up in Soweto's ambitious educated black class. At age fifteen he crossed the Telle River from South Africa into Basutoland (Lesotho), exiled like his father, a "founding spirit" of the Pan Africanist Congress. Exile was hard, but it was just another chapter in Mda's coming-of-age. He served as an altar boy (and was preyed on by priests), flirted with shebeen girls, feared the racist Boers, read comic books alongside the literature of the PAC, fell for the music of Dvorák and Coltrane, wrote his first stories—and felt the void at the heart of things that makes him an outsider wherever he goes. The Soweto uprisings called him to politics; playwriting brought him back to South Africa, where he became writer in residence at the famed Market Theatre; three marriages led him hither and yon; acclaim brought him to America, where he began writing the novels that are so thick with the life of his country. In all this, Mda struggled to remain his own man, and with Sometimes There Is a Void he shows that independence opened the way for the stories of individual South Africans in all their variety.
This book is a collection of non-fiction by the prolific author Zakes Mda. It showcases his role as a public intellectual with the inclusion of public lectures, essays and media articles. Mda focuses on South Africa's history and the present, identity and belonging, the art of writing, human rights, global warming and why he is unable to keep silent on abuses of power. Some of his best-known novels include Ways of Dying (1995, MNet Book Prize); The Heart of Redness (2000, Commonwealth Writers' Prize: Africa, and Sunday Times Fiction Prize); The Madonna of Excelsior (2002, one of the Top Ten South African books published in the Decade of Democracy); The Whale Caller (2005); Cion (2007); Black Diamond (2009); The Sculptors of Mapungubwe (2013); Rachel's Blue (2014); and Little Suns (2015, Sunday Times Literary Award). Zakes Mda was born in Herschel in the Eastern Cape in 1948 and studied in South Africa, Lesotho and the United States. He wrote his first short story at the age of fifteen and has since won major South African and British literary awards for his novels and plays. His writing has been translated into twenty languages. Mda is a professor of Creative Writing at Ohio University. [Subject: Zakes Mda, Literature, Journalism, Media Studies, African Studies, Current Affairs, History, Politics, Non-Fiction]
Cupidity, corruption and conciliation are the themes of the three plays in this collection from one of South Africa’s leading writes. The Mother of all Eating, a one-hander, with its central character a corrupt Lesotho official, is a grinding satire on materialism in which the protagonist gets his come-uppance. You Fool, How Can the Sky Fall? is an unbridled study in grotesquerie, reflecting a belief, traceable throughout Mda’s work, that government by those who inherit a revolution is almost inevitably, in the first decade or two, hijacked by the smart operators. The Bells of Amersfoort, with its graphic portrayal of the isolation imposed by exile, picks up on the themes of the other two plays but adds to them the concept of ‘healing’, both of the soul and of the land, in a lyrical work which holds out more hope than do its companions in this volume. The plays are introduced by Rob Amato, who directed much of Mda’s earlier work.
A new novel by a towering presence in contemporary South African literature In 1971, nineteen citizens of Excelsior in South Africa's white-ruled Free State were charged with breaking apartheid's Immorality Act, which forbade sex between blacks and whites. Taking this case as raw material for his alchemic imagination, Zakes Mda tells the story of a family at the heart of the scandal -and of a country in which apartheid concealed interracial liaisons of every kind. Niki, the fallen madonna, transgresses boundaries for the sake of love; her choices have repercussions in the lives of her black son and mixed-race daughter, who come of age in post-apartheid South Africa, where freedom prompts them to reexamine their country's troubled history at first hand. By turns earthy, witty, and tragic, The Madonna of Excelsior is a brilliant depiction of life in South Africa and of the dramatic changes between the 1970s and the present.
There is a growing sense that existing media have failed to serve the purposes of development, and in particular have not reflected either the concerns or the needs of the rural majority in Third World countries. Theatre, however, is now being used as a way of increasing popular participation in the development process. This book examines these experiences of training extension workers in the use of theatre-for-development, and explores the author's own attempts-notably with the Marotholi Travelling Theatre in Lesotho - to develop a new model of theatrical communication.
Chronicles the author's life as an artist, family man, and teacher against a backdrop of political turbulence in South Africa, providing coverage of such topics as his childhood exile, his three marriages, and the literature that inspired his achievements.
Two very different women meet during a long wait to buy subsidized rice and discover they have more in common than their poverty; an old man and a child share a last loving waltz; a cynical, disabled gangster learns humanity from a committed social worker, and a young girl finds her missing father and her role in the political struggle. This collection of stage plays, one radio play and a cinepoem, captures the essence of Zakes Mda’s method as a dramatist- a slow but intimate process of revelation (on the part of the characters). It is an artistic cooperation of the most pleasurable kind.
‘There are many suns,’ he said. ‘Each day has its own. Some are small, some are big. I’m named after the small ones.’ It is 1903. A lame and frail Malangana – ‘Little Suns’ – searches for his beloved Mthwakazi after many lonely years spent in Lesotho. Mthwakazi was the young woman he had fallen in love with twenty years earlier, before the assassination of Hamilton Hope ripped the two of them apart. Intertwined with Malangana’s story, is the account of Hope – a colonial magistrate who, in the late nineteenth century, was undermining the local kingdoms of the eastern Cape in order to bring them under the control of the British. It was he who wanted to coerce Malangana’s king and his people, the amaMpondomise, into joining his battle – a scheme Malangana’s conscience could not allow. Zakes Mda’s fine new novel Little Suns weaves the true events surrounding the death of Magistrate Hope into a touching story of love and perseverance that can transcend exile and strife.
In a mountain village in Lesotho, the beautiful Dikosha lives for, setting herself apart from her fellow villagers. Her brother, Radisene, struggles amid political upheaval to find a life for himself. As the years pass, Radisene's fortunes rise and fall in the city, while Dikosha remains in the village, never leaving and never aging.
Two very different women meet during a long wait to buy subsidized rice and discover they have more in common than their poverty; an old man and a child share a last loving waltz; a cynical, disabled gangster learns humanity from a committed social worker, and a young girl finds her missing father and her role in the political struggle. This collection of stage plays, one radio play and a cinepoem, captures the essence of Zakes Mda’s method as a dramatist- a slow but intimate process of revelation (on the part of the characters). It is an artistic cooperation of the most pleasurable kind.
Winner of the M-Net Book Prize Shortlisted for the CNA and Noma Awards In Ways of Dying, Zakes Mda's acclaimed first novel, Toloki is a "professional mourner" in a vast and violent city of the new South Africa. Day after day he attends funerals in the townships, dressed with dignity in a threadbare suit, cape, and battered top hat, to comfort the grieving families of the victims of the city's crime, racial hatred, and crippling poverty. At a Christmas day funeral for a young boy Toloki is reunited with Noria, a woman from his village. Together they help each other to heal the past, and as their story interweaves with those of their acquaintances this elegant short novel provides a magical and painful picture of South Africa today. Ways of Dying was awarded South Africa's prestigious M-Net Book Prize, awarded by the TV channel M-Net to books written in one of South Africa's official languages, and was shortlisted for the Central News Agency (CNA) Award and the Noma Award, an Africa-wide prize founded by Shoichi Noma, onetime president of Kodansha International.
A voice for which one should feel not only affection but admiration." --The New York Times The Whale Caller, Zakes Mda's fifth novel, is his most enchanting and accessible book yet-a romantic comedy of sorts in which the changing face of post-apartheid South Africa is revealed through prodigious, lyrical storytelling. As the novel opens, the seaside village of Hermanus, on the country's west coast, is overrun with whale watchers-foreign tourists wearing floral shirts and toting expensive binoculars, determined to see whales in their natural habitat. But when the tourists have gone home, the Whale Caller lingers at the shoreline, wooing a whale he calls Sharisha with cries from a kelp horn. When Sharisha fails to appear for weeks on end, the Whale Caller frets like a jealous lover-oblivious to the fact that the town drunk, Saluni, a woman who wears a silk dress and red stiletto heels, is infatuated with him. After much ado-which Mda relates with great relish-the two misfits fall in love. But each of them is ill equipped for romance, and their on-again, off-again relationship suggests something of the fitful nature of change in post-apartheid South Africa, where just living from one day to the next can be challenge enough. Mda has spoken of the end of apartheid as a lifting of the South African novelist's burden to write on political subjects. With The Whale Caller, he has written a tender, charming novel-the work of a virtuoso among international writers.
Cupidity, corruption and conciliation are the themes of the three plays in this collection from one of South Africa’s leading writes. The Mother of all Eating, a one-hander, with its central character a corrupt Lesotho official, is a grinding satire on materialism in which the protagonist gets his come-uppance. You Fool, How Can the Sky Fall? is an unbridled study in grotesquerie, reflecting a belief, traceable throughout Mda’s work, that government by those who inherit a revolution is almost inevitably, in the first decade or two, hijacked by the smart operators. The Bells of Amersfoort, with its graphic portrayal of the isolation imposed by exile, picks up on the themes of the other two plays but adds to them the concept of ‘healing’, both of the soul and of the land, in a lyrical work which holds out more hope than do its companions in this volume. The plays are introduced by Rob Amato, who directed much of Mda’s earlier work.
A Picador Paperback Original The hero of Zakes Mda's beloved Ways of Dying, Toloki, sets down with a family in Middle America and uncovers the story of the runaway slaves who were their ancestors. Toloki, the professional mourner, has come to live in America. Lured to Athens, Ohio, by an academic at the local university, Toloki makes friends with an angry young man he meets at a Halloween parade and soon falls in love with the young man's sister. Toloki endears himself to a local quilting group and his quilting provides a portal to the past, a story of two escaped slaves seeking freedom in Ohio. Making their way north from Virginia with nothing but their mother's quilts for a map, the boys hope to find a promised land where blacks can live as free men. Their story alternates with Toloki's, as the two narratives cast a new light on America in the twenty-first century and on an undiscovered legacy of the Underground Railroad.
A voice for which one should feel not only affection but admiration." --The New York Times The Whale Caller, Zakes Mda's fifth novel, is his most enchanting and accessible book yet-a romantic comedy of sorts in which the changing face of post-apartheid South Africa is revealed through prodigious, lyrical storytelling. As the novel opens, the seaside village of Hermanus, on the country's west coast, is overrun with whale watchers-foreign tourists wearing floral shirts and toting expensive binoculars, determined to see whales in their natural habitat. But when the tourists have gone home, the Whale Caller lingers at the shoreline, wooing a whale he calls Sharisha with cries from a kelp horn. When Sharisha fails to appear for weeks on end, the Whale Caller frets like a jealous lover-oblivious to the fact that the town drunk, Saluni, a woman who wears a silk dress and red stiletto heels, is infatuated with him. After much ado-which Mda relates with great relish-the two misfits fall in love. But each of them is ill equipped for romance, and their on-again, off-again relationship suggests something of the fitful nature of change in post-apartheid South Africa, where just living from one day to the next can be challenge enough. Mda has spoken of the end of apartheid as a lifting of the South African novelist's burden to write on political subjects. With The Whale Caller, he has written a tender, charming novel-the work of a virtuoso among international writers.
A startling novel by the leading writer of the new South Africa In The Heart of Redness -- shortlisted for the prestigious Commonwealth Writers Prize -- Zakes Mda sets a story of South African village life against a notorious episode from the country's past. The result is a novel of great scope and deep human feeling, of passion and reconciliation. As the novel opens Camugu, who left for America during apartheid, has returned to Johannesburg. Disillusioned by the problems of the new democracy, he follows his "famous lust" to Qolorha on the remote Eastern Cape. There in the nineteenth century a teenage prophetess named Nonqawuse commanded the Xhosa people to kill their cattle and burn their crops, promising that once they did so the spirits of their ancestors would rise and drive the occupying English into the ocean. The failed prophecy split the Xhosa into Believers and Unbelievers, dividing brother from brother, wife from husband, with devastating consequences. One hundred fifty years later, the two groups' decendants are at odds over plans to build a vast casino and tourist resort in the village, and Camugu is soon drawn into their heritage and their future -- and into a bizarre love triangle as well. The Heart of Redness is a seamless weave of history, myth, and realist fiction. It is, arguably, the first great novel of the new South Africa -- a triumph of imaginative and historical writing.
Infused with rhythm and melody, Zakes Mda’s new novel invites you to travel from Lesotho’s Mountain Kingdom to the City of Gold through the history of famo. Famo music was born in the drinking dens of migrant mineworkers in Lesotho, where the men would sing to unwind after work, accompanied by the accordion, a drum and sometimes a bass. Meet the boy-child kheleke, a wandering musician, and his surprising sister Moliehi. Then sigh with pleasure at being reunited with Toloki, the professional mourner from Ways of Dying, and his beloved Noria. Passionate and ambitious, boy-child is a weaver of songs, and his own story is intertwined with the incredible yet true social history of the music: the Time of the Concertina and the Accordion, the wars of the famo gangs, and the battle for control of illegal mines. The end is always a journey – and what a journey this is!
An innovative play tackling the role of patriarchy in South African culture Zakes Mda's satire is a kaleidoscopic display of the extremes to which men (and by implication women) are prepared to go in terms of valuing what is 'virginal'. Mda presents us with the consequences of transgression: that which is seen as polluted and judged to be dangerous to the good health and purity of a group, a society, a culture. Taboos, superstition, customs and moral ethics become the subjects of inquiry and are, at times, subjected to ribald satire. This play cuts into a virtuoso style of theatre that can in no way be confused with the objectives and methods of conventional realism. Mda establishes a unique style and tone that is innovative, entertaining and challenging. It fuses satirical elements derived from classical poetry with a modernist sensibility that synthesises Brechtian and Absurdist features of theatricality, using characters as types and montage. Above all, in this work there is a profound exploration of what it means to operate in the politically charged landscape that defines post-apartheid South Africa with its cultural pluralities and differentials in access to resources and agency. Stylistically adventurous and unafraid to deviate from conventionally accepted norms, Mda is iconoclastic in his handling of the ways in which attitudes to power, superstition, ethics and sex are constructed. The cultural discourse of patriarchy and the 'regime of truths' regarding ideals and taboos defining female sexuality, its obligations, and its custodianship are the focus of this play.
In a mountain village in Lesotho, the beautiful Dikosha lives for, setting herself apart from her fellow villagers. Her brother, Radisene, struggles amid political upheaval to find a life for himself. As the years pass, Radisene's fortunes rise and fall in the city, while Dikosha remains in the village, never leaving and never aging.
An innovative play tackling the role of patriarchy in South African culture Zakes Mda's satire is a kaleidoscopic display of the extremes to which men (and by implication women) are prepared to go in terms of valuing what is 'virginal'. Mda presents us with the consequences of transgression: that which is seen as polluted and judged to be dangerous to the good health and purity of a group, a society, a culture. Taboos, superstition, customs and moral ethics become the subjects of inquiry and are, at times, subjected to ribald satire. This play cuts into a virtuoso style of theatre that can in no way be confused with the objectives and methods of conventional realism. Mda establishes a unique style and tone that is innovative, entertaining and challenging. It fuses satirical elements derived from classical poetry with a modernist sensibility that synthesises Brechtian and Absurdist features of theatricality, using characters as types and montage. Above all, in this work there is a profound exploration of what it means to operate in the politically charged landscape that defines post-apartheid South Africa with its cultural pluralities and differentials in access to resources and agency. Stylistically adventurous and unafraid to deviate from conventionally accepted norms, Mda is iconoclastic in his handling of the ways in which attitudes to power, superstition, ethics and sex are constructed. The cultural discourse of patriarchy and the 'regime of truths' regarding ideals and taboos defining female sexuality, its obligations, and its custodianship are the focus of this play.
What happens when a rapist fights for paternity rights over the rape-conceived child? Weaving together the personal struggles of its characters with the earth-deep worries of a small town, Rachel's Blue deftly pulls readers into a close-knit community only to show how suffocating such a community can be.
In the timeless kingdom of Mapungubwe, the royal sculptor had two sons, Chata and Rendani. As they grew, so grew their rivalry--and their extraordinary talents. But while Rendani became a master carver of the animals that run in the wild hills and lush valleys of the land, Chata learned to carve fantastic beings from his dreams, creatures never before seen on the Earth. From this natural rivalry between brothers, Zakes Mda crafts an irresistibly rich fable of love and family. What makes the better art, perfect mimicry or inspiration? Who makes the better wife, a princess or a mysterious dancer? Ageless and contemporary, deceptive in its simplicity and mythical in its scope, The Sculptors of Mapungubwe encompasses all we know of love, envy, and the artist's primal power to forge art from nature and nature into art. Mda's newest novel will only strengthen his international reputation as one of the most trenchant voices of South Africa.
Zakes Mda's work is acutely concerned with South Africa at the crossroads. Elements of history, contemporary experience and the future are combined in these plays to present a powerful dramatic statemeny.
The Whale Caller, in tattered tuxedo, spends his days on the cliffs of the small coastal town of Hermanus blowing his kelp horn to the whales that visit in the summer months. In particular, he blows for Sharisha, a southern right whale who always responds to his call.
Ways of Dying tells the story of the eccentric but dignified professional mourner, Toloki. His odyssey takes him from a rural village community to the shabby, vibrant outskirts of a contemporary South African city, where the tenderness that springs up between him and the beautiful and tragic Noria helps them to heal the past. By turns magical, brutal, and funny, this compelling work is a major new contribution to South African writing.
This will help us customize your experience to showcase the most relevant content to your age group
Please select from below
Login
Not registered?
Sign up
Already registered?
Success – Your message will goes here
We'd love to hear from you!
Thank you for visiting our website. Would you like to provide feedback on how we could improve your experience?
This site does not use any third party cookies with one exception — it uses cookies from Google to deliver its services and to analyze traffic.Learn More.