Zakes Mda

Zakes Mda is the pen name of Zanemvula Kizito Gatyeni Mda, a South African novelist, poet and playwright. He was born in Herschel, South Africa in 1948, and after studying and working in South Africa, Lesotho and the United Kingdom, is now a professor in the English Department at Ohio University in Athens, Ohio.

His first novel, "Ways of Dying" takes place during the transitional years that marked South Africa's transformation into a democratic nation. It follows the character of Toloki, a man who, after finding himself destitute, invents his own profession as a "Professional Mourner." He traverses the violent urban landscape of an unnamed South African city, finding an old love amidst the internecine fighting present in the townships and squatter settlements.

""The Heart of Redness", which is Mda's third novel, is a fictional narrative inspired by the real-life story of Nongqawuse, a Xhosa prophetess whose prophecies spawned a rather rigorous division in Xhosa culture between Believers and Unbelievers, resulting in the tragic Cattle Killing of 1856. In the novel, Mda continually shifts back and forth between the present day and the time of Nongqawuse to show the complex interplay between history and myth, dramatizing the uncertain future of a culture whose troubled relationship with the the colonizing force of Empire, as well as their own civil factions, threatens to extinguish their home of Qolorha-by-Sea.

List of works by author

*(1977) "New South African Writing"
*(1979) "We Shall Sing for the Fatherland"
*(1979) "Dead End"
*(1979) "Dark Voices Ring"
*(1980) "The Hill"
*(1982) "Banned: A Play for Radio"
*(1982) "Summer Fires"
*(1986) "Bits of Debris: The Poetry of Zakes Mda"
*(1988) "And the Girls in their Sunday Dresses"
*(1989) "Joys of War"
*(1990) "The Plays of Zakes Mda"
*(1991) "The Nun's Romantic Story"
*(1992) "Soho Square"
*(1993) "When People Play People"
*(1993) "And the Girls in Their Sunday Dresses: Four Works"
*(1995) "Ways of Dying"
*(1995) "She Plays with the Darkness"
*(1998) "Melville 67"
*(2000) "The Heart of Redness"
*(2002) "The Madonna of Excelsior"
*(2002) "Fools, Bells and the Importance of Eating: Three Satires"
*(2005) "The Whale Caller"
*(2007) "Cion"

Awards

*1978 - "We Shall sing for the Fatherland" received a special merit award in the first Amstel Playwright of the Year Award
*1979 - "The Hill" won an Amstel Playwright of the Year Award
*1997 - "Ways of Dying" won the M-Net Book Prize
*2001 - "The Heart of Redness" won the Commonwealth Writers Prize: Africa and the Sunday Times Fiction Award