2 David Bell and J.U.

Jacobs

INTRODUCTION

Zakes Mda
Ways of Writing
DAVID BELL AND J.U. JACOBS

ZAKES MDA IS RECOGNISED as an important African and significant South

African writer. Like Chinua Achebe, he has engaged with the colonial, post-
colonial and also neo-colonial history of his country. As in the case of Wole
Soyinka’s work, Mda’s oeuvre encompasses both drama and fiction, which
draw on Western and indigenous performance traditions. Mda’s career, like
that of Ngugi wa Thiong’o, has followed a double trajectory and he has
distinguished himself not only as a creative writer, but also as a cultural theorist
and activist. Furthermore, in common with fellow African authors, Mda has
written from a position of exile, as well as from within his native country.
In the South African context, Mda’s writings may be compared with those
of Nadine Gordimer, in so far as they depict the history of South Africa during
and after apartheid ‘from the inside’, to use Stephen Clingman’s well-known
phrase about Gordimer (1986: 1). To the extent that Mda has made his mark
as a literary and social theorist, as well as a playwright and novelist, he also
invites comparison with a writer such as André P. Brink, or, for that matter,
Njabulo S. Ndebele. The degree of self-reflexivity in Mda’s novels positions
them in the same category as the metafictional discourse of J.M. Coetzee, just
as their imaginative inventiveness is matched perhaps only in the fictional
works of Ivan Vladislavicé or Etienne van Heerden. And like Antjie Krog –
indeed, all of these contemporary South African writers – Mda is concerned
with examining the lives and experiences of ordinary people in democratic
Zakes Mda 3

South Africa, and the ways in which they are coming to terms with the apartheid
past, without their being overwhelmed by it or constrained by its categories.
Mda’s is a significant voice among the many in contemporary South Africa
that are exploiting innovative forms to explore and scrutinise a culture in
transition, voices that demand attention and critical appraisal.
For all that he shares with this company of African and South African
writers, Mda’s works are nevertheless distinguished by their striking originality,
by an experimental quality that is as varied as it is extraordinary, and that
contributes, as this collection demonstrates, to the richness of what has by
now become a major, coherent body of writing by a writer who is in mature
command of his narrative craft.
Although the eighteen essays in this volume have been organised
chronologically in terms of Mda’s prolific output of more than thirty plays
and six novels over the last three decades, there emerges an overarching critical
narrative that is suggested by the recurrent and intriguing motif of closely paired
siblings or of actual twinning in Mda’s works, especially in his novels. A
homeboy and homegirl from the same mountain village in Ways of Dying; a
brother and sister who are born in the same year to a woman who consequently
becomes known as Mother of Twins in She Plays with the Darkness; twin brothers
who are descended from ancestral twin brothers, named Twin and Twin-Twin,
in The Heart of Redness; a white man and a black man whose worlds are brought
into close and conflicting relation with each other through their common
half-sister in The Madonna of Excelsior; destructive twin children in The Whale
Caller; and two slave half-brothers to whose histories the complex commingling
of races and cultures is traced back in Cion – all these are metonymic of a
fundamental duality in Mda’s art of writing.

* * *

Since Mda’s life has been contiguous with the rise and fall of the apartheid
state and its subsequent transition to democracy – he was born in 1948, the
son of A.P. Mda, an African National Congress (ANC) and later Pan-Africanist
Congress (PAC) activist – it seems inevitable that his political persona would
develop alongside his artistic one. Throughout his career, Mda has willingly
4 David Bell and J.U. Jacobs

shared his views on literature and on political and social issues in South Africa
with a wider audience in newspaper articles, contributions to journals and in
several published interviews. Over the years, he has taken many opportunities
to underscore and elaborate on his political and social commitment in his
work. In so doing, he has provided a greater insight into the relationship he
perceives between art and politics and into the nature of and changes in his
own writing. He explained his attitude to his work and the role of the artist in
an extensive interview in 1988, before he began writing novels:

I do not believe that art necessarily distracts from social relevance. I also do
not see how social relevance makes a work inartistic . . . [T]he role that I
hope to play as an artist, and the role I hope my work plays is that of social
commentator and social commentary. I am against art for art’s sake – in
African aesthetics that is a strange concept because the artist was actually a
social commentator . . . I want [my art] to rally people to action. (Holloway
1988: 83)

These remarks introduce a strand of thought that has been a persistent feature
of Mda’s work: that the social function of his art and its obligation to provide
social commentary are grounded in an African aesthetics.
Mda clearly sees his early plays as being highly political, but in recent
interviews he has provided a context within which this political perspective is
to be judged by pointing to a symbiotic relationship between the artist and
society and arguing that the work of any artist is a response to his/her world
and the changes it undergoes (Austen 2005; Wark 2005). In this respect, Mda’s
early, anti-apartheid plays can be seen as belonging to a period in which cultural
contributions in South Africa were overtly political, driven by the need – at
times, the demand – for artists to use their work as a weapon in the struggle
against apartheid (Mbele 1989: 62–63; Kachuba 2005; Weber 2004; Austen
2005). This focus, in turn, had an influence on what was written, on the choice
of subject matter and genre (Weber 2004; Wark 2005). In this context, literature
(in particular, poetry, theatre and the short story) provided modes of
performance that had immediate impact and, as Mda argued, could provide
‘social commentary’ and ‘rally the people to action’ (Holloway 1988: 83).
Zakes Mda 5

It is this duality in Mda’s work as playwright and as an activist that David

Bell explores in Chapter 1. Bell argues that Mda’s dramaturgy underwent a
paradigmatic shift after 1990: what was formerly essentially a theatre of resistance
against apartheid became a theatre for development and a literary practice for
democracy, as realised in the plays themselves and also articulated more fully
by Mda in his book, When People Play People: Development Communication through
Theatre (1993). Bell shows how Mda not only acted as a theatre practitioner,
but also developed a theoretical framework, shaped by the ideas of Paulo Freire
and Augusto Boal, which can be applied to all of his theatre. In her discussion
of Mda’s early plays in Chapter 2, Carolyn Duggan similarly foregrounds the
social and political concerns and traces the theme of betrayal – personal, social
and political – throughout these works and analyses the ways in which Mda’s
characters become empowered in a context of poverty and struggle. From the
first play, Dead End (1979), to Joys of War (1989), Duggan outlines the ways in
which Mda mirrors the social and political context of apartheid and the struggles
of ordinary people to retain some freedom and humanity under an oppressive
regime. In the third chapter on Mda’s dramatic works in this collection, Shane
Graham argues that one of Mda’s later plays, The Bells of Amersfoort, is an
example of ‘theatre of reconciliation’ – an extension of Mda’s idea of ‘theatre
for development’ – with its emphasis on healing and nation-building through
memory and South Africans’ renegotiation of their relationship to the land.
Graham draws attention to the way in which Mda’s innovative techniques
involving space and time integrate performance and meaning, so that
performance is meaning.
With the ending of apartheid, Mda experienced a sense of liberation. No
longer under pressure to produce theatre to mobilise against an oppressive
regime, he found the time to work on long pieces of prose and moved from
being a political playwright to a critical novelist. He explained his position to
Benjamin Austen in an interview published in December 2005:

I am free now. And the end of apartheid has freed the imagination of
the artist. I tell stories now. But these stories come from an environment
that is highly politically charged . . . But my main mission is to tell a
story, rather than to propagate a political message. During apartheid,
6 David Bell and J.U. Jacobs

it was the other way around. It was part of my political commitment, I

wrote plays. I only started novels after the political changes. (Austen
2005)

Mda’s freedom has not meant a diminishing of his concern for current social
and political issues or his critical commentary – he still has a ‘political
commitment’ – but he has shifted emphasis to cope with the diverse voices
that have emerged in contemporary South Africa and which have become
represented in its fiction.
Mda’s willingness to adapt to the changes taking place in South Africa has
influenced his approach to his work. While his pre-1994 work and his
commentaries on it were characterised by a clear anti-apartheid and anti-neo-
colonial stance, in post-1994 South Africa, he sees himself as a novelist writing
works that are critical of events in South Africa, but which treat the issues in
an even-handed manner (Mbele 1989: 62–63; Kachuba 2005), as he has
explicitly illustrated in his discussions of The Madonna of Excelsior, which he
sees as ‘a balanced kind of portrayal of the situation in South Africa today’
(Kachuba 2005).

* * *

In addition to the general twinning of Mda’s political and artistic personae, as

discussed earlier, there is a further duality in his art, especially his fiction,
which combines a faithfulness to history and authenticity on the one hand,
with a markedly performative character, on the other hand.
The underlying factual basis of Mda’s work was made apparent even in an
early interview concerning his plays where he pointed out that the prison
labour on farms referred to in Dark Voices Ring was based on information he
had acquired through the press, in particular Henry Nxumalo’s investigations
published in Drum in the 1950s (Holloway 1988: 84). This desire to be factually
accurate is especially apparent in Mda’s novels. The deaths in Ways of Dying,
for instance, had been reported in The Sunday Times and City Press newspapers
at the time that he was writing the novel (Naidoo 1997: 253; Bell 2004).
Similarly, the nineteenth-century events depicted in The Heart of Redness are
Zakes Mda 7

closely aligned to the historical account of the Xhosa cattle killings by J.B.
Peires to ensure the authenticity of the interactions between fictional and
historical characters in the novel (Bell 2004). In the case of The Madonna of
Excelsior, once Mda had fixed on his subject, he researched the case in magazines
and newspapers in Johannesburg and Bloemfontein (Bell 2004; Kachuba 2005;
Weber 2004). At times, Mda has used his own experience to provide a
background to the characters in his novels. In She Plays with the Darkness,
Radisene is based, to some extent, on Mda’s experiences as an article clerk in
Lesotho, and Camagu in The Heart of Redness experiences the kind of reception
Mda himself met when returning to South Africa after a long period of exile
abroad (Naidoo 1997: 255; Kachuba 2005; Wark 2005; Bell 2004).
A concern for authenticity is reflected in Mda’s emphasis on the importance
of actual place in his choice of story and narrative: ‘Place is key. To me place is
not just background for my cast of characters. The place is so important that
many of my novels are suggested by the place.’ (Weber 2004) But this is a more
complex process than this quote suggests. In Ways of Dying, for example, the
main character was developed first and was then introduced, at an early stage,
into a story about the deaths taking place in South Africa in the early 1990s
(Weber 2004; Bell 2004). The Heart of Redness was inspired in part by the
place, Qolorha-by-Sea, and in part by an enthusiasm for the history associated
with the legend of Nongqawuse (Bell 2004). The Madonna of Excelsior came
about after a drive through the Free State and the memory of past events in
the small town of Excelsior in the 1970s. In addition, the naive paintings of
madonnas by Father Frans Claerhout had inspired the narrative style of the
novel (Weber 2004; Bell 2004; Kachuba 2005). Finally, The Whale Caller was
inspired by a television programme on the whale caller of Hermanus and the
great disappointment Mda experienced when he discovered that the whale
caller did not call the whales, but called people to come and see them (Kachuba
2005).
Whatever the basis of his writing, Mda has consistently drawn attention to
the creative process in and innovative nature of his work. As Mda puts it, he is
in the ‘God Business’ and can make things happen the way he wants them to,
‘however much that might contradict what you might call objective reality’
(Naidoo 1997: 250; Kachuba 2005). This attitude has its origins in his early
8 David Bell and J.U. Jacobs

work as a dramatist living in either Lesotho or the United States, where, unlike
writers in South Africa who were able to ‘get their characters and stories from
what they saw around them’, he was ‘far away from the situation itself . . .
[and] was forced to use [his] imagination’ (Naidoo 1997: 251; see also Galgut
2005). Mda has argued that this has been to his advantage, as he is now able to
use his imagination in writing novels at a time when the easy ‘slice of life’
absurdity of apartheid is no longer there to provide a source of material and
stories (Wark 2005).
Given his earlier work as a playwright, it is perhaps understandable that
there is a strong performative element in Mda’s novels, as well as a historical
dimension. Performance is most obviously foregrounded in his fictional
narratives in the form of social ceremonies or festivals – the various funeral
rituals in Ways of Dying; the customary social gatherings of the Basotho people,
with their traditional dances in She Plays with the Darkness; the Xhosa tradition
of split-tone singing in The Heart of Redness; the Ficksburg Cherry Festival in
The Madonna of Excelsior; the Kalfiefees in Hermanus when the Southern Right
Whales arrive annually to give birth in The Whale Caller; and the Court Street
Halloween parade that frames the narrative in Cion.
At a deeper narrative level, however, Mda’s fictional works are performative
in ways that go to the essence of his art and its roots in African narrative forms
and ontology. Mda has consistently drawn attention to the African origins of
his art. While in various interviews he has mentioned representatives of the
Western dramatic tradition as influences on his playwriting, he has placed
greater emphasis on the influence of Athol Fugard, Gibson Kente, Wole Soyinka
and other West African playwrights (Holloway 1988: 83; Naidoo 1997: 249;
Wark 2005). And while, as a novelist, Mda has recognised the influences of
Gabriel García Márquez and Yvonne Vera (Naidoo 1997: 250; Kachuba 2005),
he has always maintained that the distinguishing characteristics of his style – a
minimalist theatre of the absurd and magical realist elements in both his plays
and novels – have arisen from an African (and particularly South African)
narrative context and only later has he consciously become aware of and
explored the theatre of the absurd, Brechtian drama and magical realism
(Holloway 1988: 83; Naidoo 1997: 249–50; Wark 2005).
Zakes Mda 9

Mda has given increasing prominence to the importance of an African

storytelling tradition in his mode of writing. By 2005, he was making a strong
case for the African oral tradition in his work: ‘Mine also draws from that oral
tradition. It draws from it very strongly. My work will always have that
intertextuality . . . with “orature”, as it is called, in other words, oral literature’
(Kachuba 2005). In an interview in 2004, Mda also affirmed that he drew his
inspiration ‘from the African oral tradition and not only inspiration, but the
actual mode of storytelling, the participatory mode of storytelling’ (Wark 2005).
Mda thus sees his work as deriving from and as part of a dynamic, African
tradition of oral storytelling in which participatory, performative modes are
paramount.
This appreciation of the African storytelling tradition focuses on two
elements: ‘magic’, as Mda refers to Western perceptions of the irrational, and
the use of a collective/communal narrator. In this respect, Mda has referred to
his own work as drawing on ‘the sources that are having this constant
conversation between the living and the fourth dimension’, a formulation
derived from Ayi Kwei Armah who, Mda points out, was ‘referring to both the
dead and the unborn’ (Kachuba 2005). For Mda, this has certainly not been
an abstract phenomenon. In a 1997 interview, he put forward the perspective
that ‘we Africans always live with magic . . . Here in Africa there is magic
happening all the time. There are many belief systems and in fact a lot of the
things that the Western world refers to as superstition. For me such things
actually happen and I portray them as such in my writings’; and the elements
of ‘magic’ that critics comment on in She Plays with the Darkness, he considers
to be part of ‘the way people live in Lesotho’ (Naidoo 1997: 250, 254).
Mda’s complex relation to magic realism has been extensively explored.
He has pointed to the presence of this mode in his writing before he had
become aware of magic realism as a distinctive form: ‘I had not heard of magic
realism when I started writing those plays. It is something that I have always
done in my writing. I make things happen the way I want things to happen,
however much that might contradict what you might call objective reality’
(Naidoo 1997: 250). Here a natural explanation has been allied to the power
of the writer to decide over his own text. But later in the same interview, Mda
develops a more conscious argument that incorporates both a ‘natural’ African
10 David Bell and J.U. Jacobs

origin of his style and a deliberate attempt at understanding and using the
style developed by writers such as Márquez. When asked about the magic realist
elements in his first two novels, Mda replied: ‘When I started my first novel,
Ways of Dying, I was conscious of a movement called magic realism and that I
was writing a magic realist novel. But basically, I was doing what I had done
much earlier’ (250). He later elaborates on his position by referring to his
attempts to define the term and the relationship of his work to it. Mda mentions
two key elements he discerns in magic realism: ‘the supernatural is not presented
as problematical’ and ‘an absurd metamorphosis is described as if it did not
contradict our laws of reason’ (255). Both of these elements, Mda argues, are
characteristic of his work: ‘the unreal happens as part of reality’ (255). In later
interviews, Mda has emphasised the African origins of his use of what critics
label magic realism:

I draw from the same sources as creators of magical realism . . . the

world from which my fiction draws has not got that line of demarcation
between the supernatural on one hand and what you would call objective
reality on the other hand. The two merge and live side by side. Those
who live in that world cannot separate the two. Magic is part of their
real world, their realism. (Kachuba 2005)

It is in this context of Mda’s claims that his novels are performative of an

African epistemology that Christopher Warnes’s wide-ranging, theoretical
discussion in Chapter 4 of the question of magical realism in South African
literature, and especially in Mda’s work, needs to be read. In this chapter,
which also serves to introduce the other chapters that deal with Mda’s novels,
Warnes considers the various meanings of the term ‘magic realism’ and its
manifestations in African writing, and concludes that Mda’s magic realism is
not quite of the same order, but is rather more restrained and more ironic in
nature.
The second strand of Mda’s African narrative tradition, and one which
highlights the shared nature of creative experience, is his use of a third person,
communal narrator. This, he has argued, is part of the oral tradition and in
relation to his first two novels, it comes ‘very much from orature, because the
Zakes Mda 11

story can be told in the plural form. This is how African people tell stories’
(Naidoo 1997: 254). In The Madonna of Excelsior, the communal narrator has
meant that: ‘the reader then becomes part of the community. This is something
you do find a lot in the oral tradition. We talk in terms of “we”, we the
community. The community is everywhere. Niki has been there, the lawyer
has been. We have a common story to tell. We have experienced this story
together’ (Kachuba 2005).
In their analysis in Chapter 5 of the ways in which community history and
community memory are given life and substance in Ways of Dying, Rogier
Courau and Sally-Ann Murray argue that the performance of funeral rites,
combined with Toloki’s innovative performances as a professional mourner,
provide a source of vital continuity in a complex and curious cultural dynamic.
Nokuthula Mazibuko similarly engages with the idea of community in her
discussion of Ways of Dying in Chapter 6, but approaches it from a feminist
perspective, showing how Mda draws from and innovatively adapts a range of
symbolic African constructions of womanhood to present a number of
‘wayward’ women in his novel. These women, marginalised by a male-dominated
and materialist discourse, while also the custodians of creativity and healing,
are seen by the author as central to the rebuilding of a post-colonial and post-
apartheid South Africa. In Chapter 7, T. Spreelin MacDonald explores Mda’s
recurrent trope of a bonded pair of characters in relation to the African concept
of ubuntu, or humanism, in his discussion of Mda’s second novel, She Plays
with the Darkness. Twinship, MacDonald argues, is a humanistic concept, a
perception of brotherhood and sisterhood as a fundamental and inescapable
bond, which Mda shows as being ‘of continued relevance in a post-colonial age
which is otherwise fractured by identity politics’. MacDonald’s argument is
premised on the fact that Radisene and Dikosha are doubly ‘twinned’, not
only to each other, but each of them also to their community.
The critical attention paid to Mda’s third novel, The Heart of Redness,
indicates that it has achieved something of the status of a contemporary classic.
The richness and complexity of the work are evidenced by the range of
theoretical perspectives from which it has been approached by the authors of
the six chapters dealing with this text. In Chapter 8, Mike Kissack and Michael
Titlestad provide a compelling analysis of the protagonist, Camagu, in terms
12 David Bell and J.U. Jacobs

of what Edward Said refers to as the ‘secular intellectual’, a figure through

whom Mda can explore and mediate the complexities of the post-apartheid
social revolution, enacting through the persona of Camagu his own engagement
in debates about traditional African values and social development. Hilary P.
Dannenberg shows in Chapter 9 how The Heart of Redness dramatises culture
as a complex and dynamic process, and she demonstrates how in the course of
the narrative, interactive processes are played out, whereby cultures coming
into contact with other hegemonic cultures undergo change and cultural
hybridisation results. In Chapter 10, Gail Fincham juxtaposes The Heart of
Redness with Joseph Conrad’s novella, Heart of Darkness, establishing an
intertextual dialogue between the works. She compares and contrasts the ways
in which Mda deconstructs the tropes of empire from a post-colonial perspective
with Conrad’s insights into the processes and consequences of colonial
domination.
If the previous three chapters demonstrate how the narrative of The Heart
of Redness enacts debates about social revolution and development, cultural
hybridisation, and colonialism and post-colonialism, Harry Sewlall’s approach
to the novel from an ecocritical perspective in Chapter 11 shows how Mda’s
text performs and preserves in its magical way the worldview of the amaXhosa
in which humans interact symbiotically with animals, and animals exist in an
interpersonal relationship with humans. Meg Samuelson provides a feminist
reading of The Heart of Redness that is both appreciative and corrective in
Chapter 12. Focusing on Nongqawuse’s story and the Xhosa cattle killings,
Samuelson offers not only a fine assessment of the success of the novel in
providing a counterpoint to the linear model of history and in challenging
development ideologies, she also points to a significant difference between
what the novel professes and what it performs in terms of its gendered
conception of authorship, as well as in its conception and presentation of
female characters. Finally, in Chapter 13, Grant Farred subjects The Heart of
Redness to a philosophical critique in terms of the concept of the theocratic,
which, according to Farred, is also the space of the politically dissensual. In his
analysis of Nongqawuse’s prophecy and its acceptance and dismissal by the
Believers and the Non-Believers as represented in the novel, Farred exposes
what he sees as the inability of Mda’s novel to understand and appreciate the
Zakes Mda 13

extent of the complexity of the discourse of Christianity and its dialogical

relationship to the prophetic tradition.
In Chapter 14, the first of the three chapters dealing with The Madonna of
Excelsior, J.U. Jacobs also takes the dual nature of Mda’s fictional discourse as
a point of departure. In an analysis of the newspaper reports on which Mda
based his narrative, he shows, on the one hand, Mda’s fidelity to his historical
sources; on the other hand, in an analysis of Mda’s ecphrasis, Jacobs also shows
the performative character of Mda’s text, in so far as it creates an African
narrative equivalent of the expressionist paintings of the Flemish priest Father
Frans Claerhout. In Chapter 15, Ralph Goodman discusses a different kind
of performativity in Mda’s narrative: he explores how the novel satirically
exposes apartheid and its notorious Immorality Act and ‘sets in motion a process
of open-ended dialogue between the indignant patriarchalism of the South
African state towards the existence of so-called mixed-race people on the one
hand, and the subversive delight in creolisation taken by so many post-colonial
texts on the other’. In his discussion in Chapter 16 of how Mda narrates
transformative possibilities in The Madonna of Excelsior, N.S. Zulu focuses on
the nature and operation of the communal narrative voice, which, he concludes,
is omniscient, complex and multiple, self-mocking, ironic and satirical, one
that subverts notions of racial and political homogeneity and dismantles past
social and ideological categories.
Mda’s fifth novel, The Whale Caller distinguishes itself from his previous
novels by addressing more fully ecological issues and the relationship of humans
to animals, in this case, the Southern Right Whale. In Chapter 17, Wendy
Woodward provides an extensively theorised, comparative ecocritical reading
of Mda’s novel and Jane Rosenthal’s Souvenir. Both works represent, Woodward
argues, a major development away from post-apartheid literature in that they
foreground, in the context of the global ecological predicament, the interactions
and interconnections between humans and ‘earth-others’, and between human
culture and the material environment. Woodward’s chapter opens the field of
critical studies on Mda to a wider field of comparative readings and
contemporary concerns for humankind’s future on this planet.
In conclusion, in Chapter 18, J.U. Jacobs and David Bell return to Mda’s
characteristic discursive doubling of history and performance in his sixth and
14 David Bell and J.U. Jacobs

most recent novel, Cion, where his art of fiction can be seen to have come full
circle. As in Mda’s previous novels, Cion engages with various forms of artistic
expression as metaphors for different ways of writing, the most important
being the ever-developing performances of Toloki, his professional mourner
from Ways of Dying, who is made to accompany Mda to Athens, Ohio. The
novel also explores the art of quilt-making as a parallel to the art of writing by
drawing attention to its metaphors of meaning and important traditions, while
demonstrating a concern that these traditions should not inhibit genuine
imaginative creativity. Cion self-reflexively performs and flaunts its fictionality
to an unprecedented degree, as well as the relative status of its author and its
protagonist. Whereas in earlier novels, Mda experiments with various ways of
writing fiction, Cion is his most overtly metafictional novel to date, and it returns
him to the roots of his writing. The novel concludes with Toloki’s realisation
that Greek tragedy developed out of ritual mourning, and that out of this
ancient dramatic tradition developed also Mda’s own theatre pieces and his
works of fiction – and that, as a professional mourner, Toloki has his being at
the very beginnings and also at the self-reflexive conclusion of a long history of
very many ways of writing.
This first collection of critical essays on Zakes Mda addresses the extensive
body of his drama and fiction from the earliest plays in the 1970s to the most
recent novel in 2007. The wide critical range of the essays presented here
reinforces the impression of Mda as an innovative and important writer whose
use of creative skills draws attention to the plight of underprivileged people in
South Africa and elsewhere. The content of the volume is intended to provide
challenging reading to anyone with an interest in South African writing and it
is hoped it will stimulate further research on Zakes Mda.

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Bell, David. 2004. Conversation with Zakes Mda. Market Theatre, Johannesburg. 16 July.
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Clingman, Stephen R. 1986. The Novels of Nadine Gordimer: History from the Inside. Johannesburg:
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