Sensitivity is a baggage that comes with being an artist. It is because of the very sensitivity that as an artist you observe and give us insight to things that other people take for granted. The more sensitive you are, the greater an artist you become. It comes with the job. And I suspect it makes one a better human being. Not necessarily a stronger human being but a better one; a more compassionate and caring one.
zakes mda
email correspondence
From The Market Theatre Laboratory: Firstly let us congratulate you on your recent achievement of winning the Johnnie Walker Celebrating Strides Award.
It has been particular joy for us since we have always thought highly of you, firstly as a writer but also a philanthropist of note. Over the years you have shown your generosity by donating your time to our institution, the Market Theatre Foundation, but it is for your work at the Laboratory that I admire you most.
Your play that you donated to the Laboratory, Broken Dreams, was seen by over one million children over five provinces and this proved to us that with dedication and commitment we can make a huge difference in the lives of ordinary South Africans. It inspired many children to talk openly about the cycle of abuse that has been a cancer to our society, especially since the demise of apartheid.
It was therefore a pleasant surprise that upon winning the Johnnie Walker Award you donated part of your prize to the Laboratory. On behalf of the Market Theatre Laboratory and the entire community- based arts programme we are most humbled by your gesture and are thankful to you and your family for continuously seeing value in our institution.
Your donation has helped us establish a writing programme which will recognise community-based emerging writers and will be aptly named “The Zakes Mda Emerging Writers Fund”. We hope we can continue raising funds to supplement your donation. As the Lab, we believe we should begin celebrating our home-grown programme that aims to celebrate local artistic talent and pay respect to a name as precious as yours in this era of pop culture and Mxit.
We send our heartfelt congratulations and wish you the best of luck for all your future endeavours.
The Market Theatre Laboratory
Christina Kennedy
Grahamstown — A literary work worth its salt can be transplanted into any era and still work. If the themes remain relevant, it matters little when and where the action takes place.
This is why the stage adaptation of Zakes Mda’s And the Girls in Their Sunday Dresses, directed by Princess Mhlongo, goes down a treat - it could be set today, or 15 years ago, or 30 years ago, and it remains entertaining, challenging and invigorating.
Mda published this novel in 1993, but one wouldn’t know it, looking at the two characters and the situations they face while waiting in a queue to buy cheap rice.
You see, this is protest theatre in a sense, but it is not overt in its politics - rather, it encourages us, through finely balanced dramatic and comic moments, to consider how to react to the human dilemmas facing us all.
Be it under apartheid, during the pre-democracy euphoria, or today, most people have experienced abuse of some variety.
Our two female protagonists - “the Woman” (Lesego Motsepe) and “the Lady” (Hlengiwe Lushaba) - have both been trodden on by men.
But “men” in this sense can be construed not as an anti-male diatribe but as referring to the system in general.
Riches to rags In And the Girls Motsepe plays a very different character to her role as spoilt urban princess Letti Matabane in Isidingo.
Here, she is a simple domestic worker, but is nobody’s fool and her demure, “frumpy” appearance belies a feisty temperament.
Lushaba is a treat as “the Lady”, a brassy, blowsy prostitute.
Resigned to accepting her lot passively, she takes a chair with her wherever she goes, so she can “relax while waiting for something to happen”.
As in Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, the process of waiting turns out to be more significant than the anticipated result of the waiting.
The two women discover they have more in common than initially meets the eye and, through sharing their respective stories and heartbreaks, they resolve to renounce their victimhood, stop waiting and seize control of their circumstances.
“You don’t wait for the revolution; you make it happen,” says the Woman.
The play has evolved and improved since opening at the State Theatre some months ago, and the two actresses have grown into their roles.
They charm and cajole the audience and have them eating out of their hands in this sparkling play.
Tuesday, February 3, Alden Friends of the Libraries Room, 7-9 p.m.
Zakes Mda, Cion author and Ohio University English Department Professor of Creative Writing, will read from his book and answer audience questions about the story, its history, its symbolism, and its meaning.
check out the cion blog here
By Raphael Mokoena
8/10/08
The literary scene in South Africa this week has been largely dominated by the literary “brickbats” between two of the country’s greatest academics and writers, Stephen Gray and Zakes Mda. Mr. Gray published a piece in a national newspaper (Mail and Guardian) where he criticised a number of aspects of Mr. Mda’s writing. The latter responded vigorously – both of them rather strongly picking on each other with more than a hint of personal attacks.
The furore awakened what many black African people in the literary business have known for years. The genre of literary criticism does not sit too well with most of our writers, and in the end it becomes difficult to separate authentic literary criticism from personal attacks. Over the decades as African literature grew by leaps and bounds, friendships between writers had been ruptured, with resentment in the air all because of “literary criticism”
Writer and cultural activist, Aryan Kaganof has referred to “mean spiritedness” (accusing Stephen Gray of this). But the history of literary criticism over the years and centuries shows that in so many cases critics can easily be accused of this, even if this might not be their intention. Often literary criticism goes too far and it does seem as if the pertinent critic has something against the writer being “attacked”.
A case in point was the way James Joyce’s immortal masterpiece, Ulysses, was greeted by some top critics after the book was first published. The great Virginia Woolf remarked on it thus: “Ulysses is the work of a queasy undergraduate scratching his pimples”; DH Lawrence, top writer commented: “The last part of Ulysses is the most indecent, dirtiest, most obscene thing ever written. It is filthy”; literary critic, Edmund Goose said: “The author (of Ulysses) is a charlatan…the book is an anarchical production, infamous in taste, in style, everything”
As regards the “tiff” between Stephen Gray and Zakes Mda, both of them remain formidable literary activists and writers. I can not agree with the suggestion that a literary figure can only be judged on their prolificacy and having books on the shelf almost on a yearly basis. Whether Chinua Achebe published any more novels after his classic Things fall apart came out fifty years ago, he would always be revered for his pioneering masterpiece (indeed, Achebe has not published any new novel for over 20 years). Stephen Gray is ensconced as a very important critic and imaginative writer whose works have been published world-wide, with many different editions.
On his own part, despite the fact that Zakes Mda began publishing novels less than fifteen years ago, he has already proved that he’s at the top of his craft, and he has quickly joined the elite of the all time great novelists in the continent. Works of his like Heart of Redness, Madonna of Excelsior, Ways of Dying belong to the top drawer. Of course he is also a veritable academic too. He and Stephen Gray know only too well that the genre of literary criticism is often an acerbic one. But one always regrets seeing personal attacks between illustrious people (in this case, wordsmiths.)
Mr. Mokoena, a literary activist, lives in Qwaqwa.
this article first appeared on raselebeli khotseng’s black african literature blog
After Stephen Gray savaged me in the pages of the Mail & Guardian a few weeks ago, I immediately responded, thanks to the new age of blogs where no one can now act as the gatekeeper of ideas.
I would like to share my response with the readers of the M&G in this expanded and revamped version of what appeared in the blogosphere.
It is interesting that Gray bases his jibes and snide remarks on an article in Research in African Literatures by one Offenberger, which has been totally discredited by such literary scholars as Byron Caminero-Santangelo (author of an excellent book titled African Fiction and Joseph Conrad: Reading Postcolonial Intertextuality, published by the State University of New York Press in 2005), who calls Offenberger’s article “critical absurdity”.
Caminero-Santangelo points to its lack of analysis of the fictional material and its relationship with the historical intertext, and also its lack of theoretical reflection. That is why not a single newspaper here in the United States has picked up that story — everyone regards it as a nonsensical issue.
And that is why the academy here has not bothered with this matter, despite the fact that the academy in the United States regards plagiarism as a serious offence and people lose jobs because of it.
But here I am, still working as a scholar who is highly respected by his peers. The reason is simply that my peers know enough about intertextuality to conclude that the charges of plagiarism are baseless. They find this whole debate silly, and they are wondering why I am wasting my time responding to it. I don’t normally respond to critics, I tell them, and I would not be responding to Gray if it were not for the tone of his scurrilous charges, not so much against my work, but against me as a person.
The Heart of Redness was first published in 2000. If Gray is such a great scholar, one wonders why he didn’t discover this “cribbing” — as he so cutely calls it — all these years. Why is he now riding on the tailcoats of this so-called historian — who is in fact a student at Yale University and will only be regarded as a historian by his peers when he has published work of substance.
I see strong signs of dishonesty on Gray’s part because soon after this novel was published, the same Gray himself hailed it as a work of international standard and a “peak moment” in local publishing when it was shortlisted for the Sanlam Literary Prize. Where were the split infinitives and bad tense then? Come on, Gray!
keep reading this article in today’s mail&guardian
I promise this is the last contribution I will make on this debate. I am just glad that the academy here in the USA, where I work understands intertextuality very well, and how it functions. That segment of the academy that has studied my work understands that my fiction was informed by the story of the cattle-killing as INTERPRETED BY JEFF PEIRES. The story of Nongqawuse is a well-known one; as children we actually grew up with it. Our language is replete with proverbs based on that story and we sang songs about her. But I never thought of using the Nongqawuse story in any fiction until Peires wrote his The Dead Will Arise. It was Peires rendition of that story that inspired my fiction, and I had to make that obvious in my fiction. Peires’ phraseology is therefore DELIBERATELY used in my fiction as an intertextual devise - a conversation between The Dead will Arise and The Heart of Redness. And indeed if you consult such search engines as GoogleScholar you will find that quite a few papers have been written on the intertextuality between the two texts. For instance, Sara Colombana of the University of Padua in Italy wrote her thesis on it. She even had a whole list similar to Offenberger’s but at not stage did she use the word “plagiarism” in her work because she has a clear understanding of what intertextuality is in literary fiction and how it functions. So, what to some of you is a new discovery of this “great plagiarism” has been thoroughly studied since, at least, 2002. The academy here, at least those members in the English Departments who are versed with postmodern modes of creating fiction, understand intertexaulity. They understand that the process and methods of creating postmodern fiction are different from those of writing academic texts. Different rules apply. That is why you don’t see anyone from an English Department here taking me to task or punishing me for “plagiarism” - and remember that the academy takes plagiarism very seriously and people lose their jobs because of it. And yet I am still here, operating as a respected scholar in my field. It is not for nothing that great scholars of intertextuality such as Byron Caminero-Santangelo have vigorously defended me in this matter. Finally allow me to quote some comments made to me by a South African philosopher, Aryan Kaganof: ‘what nobody has mentioned in any of these debates: was james joyce a plagiarist? was t.s. eliot a plagiarist? was william shakespeare a plagiarist? whole PARAGRAPHS in their fictions are taken from the king james bible, and from each other sans any risible “footnotes”. the whole idea of putting footnotes in a text belongs to the realm of ludicrous noddy academia. the greatest philosopher of all, nietzsche rarely, almost never used footnotes. and indeed, he also lifted sentences WHOLESALE from schopenhauer, and from the new testament, and from kant, without mentioning where he lifted them from - HE WAS TESTING HIS AUDIENCE, expecting us to read on our toes, to “get” the lifts, as he would have “gotten” the lifts that joyce, as a matter of course, did in his fictions. it was considered a sign of one’s culture, that the well-read reader would recognize and wryly chuckle at the intertextualities, that resonated because the reader “got it”. so how come when you do the same, with a single literary source that you actually credit, is this plagiarism? are you not allowed access to this trope of high literary culture because you are a “local”, and does gray perhaps mean something else when he writes “local”, is that not perhaps what the underlying issue is in all of this????’ I rest my case.
zakes mda
The following is a response that I wrote after Stephen Gray mauled me in the pages of the The Mail and Guardian. The editors of that newspaper decided not to publish it.
I read Mr Gray’s article on me personally and on my work with amusement. It is interesting that he is basing his jibes and snide remarks on an article in Research in African Literatures that has been totally discredited by such scholars as Byron Caminero-Santangelo (author of an excellent book titled African Fiction and Joseph Conrad: Reading Postcolonial Intertextuality, published by the State University of New York Press in 2005) who calls the article “critical absurdity”. He points out to its lack of analysis of the fictional material and its relationship with the historical intertext, and also its lack of theoretical reflection.. That is why not a single newspaper here in the USA has picked up that story - everyone regards it as a nonsensical issue.
The Heart of Redness was first published in 2000. If Mr Gray is such a great scholar one wonders why he didn’t discover this “cribbing” all these years. Why is he now riding on the tailcoats of this so-called historian - who is in fact a student at Yale University and will only be regarded as a historian by his peers when he has published works of substance.
Mr Gray’s article distinguishes itself by its arrogance; for instance calling the language of my people, the amaXhosa, “tribal jargon”, exactly what an old colonial would indigenous languages, and claiming that my book or my theatre practice conned audiences into social development, without producing a shred of evidence to that effect. He also lies unabashedly when he says that both Jeff Peires and I have asserted that “fiction writers are traditionally irresponsible.” None of us ever made such a ridiculous claim. Another lie is that I have billed myself as an “internationally acclaimed playwright, novelist, painter and academic without qualms.” He cannot quote a single piece of my own writing where I call myself internationally acclaimed. The media and blurb writers have billed me as such, and rightly so. There are no “qualms” about that because it is the truth. There would be qualms if they were to bill Mr Gray as an “internationally acclaimed poet and novelist” because he has no such international recognition. At best he is a local hero, but I suspect only to fellow colonials.
One thing that Mr Gray should bear in mind is that I am a novelist not a historian. When I choose to write a historical novel I have to get my material from historians - both of historical record and of the oral history. For The Heart of Redness I chose the work of Jeff Peires, which I duly acknowledged in all the editions and translations of the novel. Gray’s complaint that I used a single source is not valid. I was writing a novel - a work of fiction - not an academic paper or a history textbook. The two sources that I used - namely Jeff Peires and the oral tradition - were adequate for the purposes of my fiction. When he writes his own historical novel he may use as many sources as he pleases. It is his choice. The last time I checked there were no regulations as to how many sources a writer of fiction should consult.
Mr Gray seems to suggest that I should have used footnotes in every page the material from The Dead Will Arise was used. Well, that’s not the kind of novel I chose to write I chose to write. I hate footnotes in a novel. In any event the historian whose work I used is happy with the manner I credited him.
Mr Gray is so hermeneutically challenged that he is unable to understand a novel that breaks the conventions of the English literature that was taught him when he was at school eons ago. If he had asked those who have the savvy before he embarrassed himself they would have told him that the use of tense in The Heart of Redness follows a simple logic: the historical past is narrated in the past tense and the contemporary and the contemporary events in the present tense. There! They would have also told him that the novel subverts standard English and uses the kind of language that is transliterated from the isiXhosa idiom. It is a new world Mr Gray, a world that has moved far beyond the literary canons into which you were socialized.
Jeff Peires wrote to me recently, unsolicited, expressing his dismay that Research in African Literatures has published such an unfounded allegation about me, and reiterating that he sees no plagiarism in The Heart of Redness. In the same letter he thanked me for my “generous acknowledgement” of his book in my novel. Now, if the guy from whom I am supposed to have “cribbed” says this, what is the motive of people like Mr Gray and The Mail and Guardian to insist otherwise, and of libeling me in this manner?
And finally, I must point out that as a successful writer (and yes, I say this without any qualms) you learn soon enough that not everyone will love your work. There are those who will go crazy over it and shower you with letters of praise. But there will be others who will be lukewarm about it, or even hate it with a passion. You take that in your stride and continue to produce your art the best way you can. When you attain an international stature - as I have (yes, I am saying it now Mr Gray), with works translated into 19 languages, including Catalan, Korean and Serbian in addition to the mainstream French, German and Italian - you also learn that there will be minor writers and shallow scholars who will try to build their reputations by destroying yours. Some will be driven by sheer envy, especially those aging ones who have spent years trying to establish a credible writing career but have little to show for it. The lack of substance, the sneering tone, and the personal nature of their attacks will tell you that the green-eyed monster is indeed at play here. You nevertheless brush that like dandruff off your shoulders because you know that there are a hundred positive reviews of your work for every negative one. And the sales speak to the fact that the world at large has embraced you.
Zakes Mda
Professor of Creative Writing and World Literature,
English Department,
360 Ellis Hall,
Ohio University,
Athens Ohio 45701.
Phone: 740-589-5725
In his article “Copy rites and wrongs” published in the Mail & Guardian of 26 September 2008 Stephen Gray takes it upon himself to “pass judgement” upon “a local literary icon” Zakes Mda who is found guilty by Gray of “the most spectacular instance of (crossing) the fine line between creativity and cribbing in South African literature”.
The 1375 word article is an irresponsible hatchet job with many factual inaccuracies as well as some low-grade petty bitchiness about incorrect tense changes and split infinitives - the kind of tetchy criticism one would expect from a provincial schoolmaster in the colonial period when it was still-fashionable for so-called white folks to speak with those risible accents that emulated “the Queen’s English” in such toe-curling fashion.
Well and good, Stephen Gray is entitled to his opinions but the real question that arises is why has the Mail & Guardian decided to publish this exercise in vitriol? It was in July of this year that The Weekender broke the story (on its front page nogal) of Andrew Offenburger’s essay purporting to “out” Zakes Mda’s supposed purloining of Professor Jeff Peires’ original research for his book The Dead Will Arise for use in Zakes’ multi-award winning novel The Heart of Redness.
On July 21 Ben Williams’ excellent book.co.za website took the story further and on 22 July he published both Zakes Mda’s response to the allegations of plagiarism as well as, importantly, Jeff Peires’ dismayed reaction to the charges levelled against his friend and colleague Professor Zakes Mda. A reading of both of these documents puts the allegations into perspective. Storm in a teacup. Andrew Offenburger was clearly hoping to build an academic reputation over the back of a globally respected man of letters (not merely a “locally” respected icon).
Why then has the Mail & Guardian seen fit to rake up the coals two months later? Has any new material come to light? No. Is there new evidence that should be taken into consideration? No. In fact Stephen Gray has used the Offenburger allegations as an opportunity to deliver a salvo of ad hominem shots to Zakes Mda in a poisonous diatribe that includes the notions of “fakes and phoneys”, “con audiences” and “scam artist” all used in connection with Zakes.
Gray takes parsimonious umbrage at Mda being described on his book sleeves as “the internationally acclaimed playwright, novelist, painter and academic”. “..without a qualm..” as Gray puts it. But it’s all true. Why should Zakes have qualms about describing himself thus? Even if it was he who described himself so. And it probably wasn’t, that is how his publishers describe him, how the media describe him.
Gray’s article puts not one shred of new evidence onto the cutting block. It isn’t an autopsy leading to significant new results. It’s simply a cut, paste and slice-job of what readers of The Weekender and Book.co.za already know. With one grievous distinction. Gray entirely disregards Jeff Peires’ rejection of the plagiarism charges.
Gray writes “Being generous-spirited, and not inclined to elevate his own reputation by joining any mudslinging, he has decided not to pursue the matter.” This sentence disingenuously tries to refocus Peires’ outright rejection of the charges as if he was merely doing so in order not to make a fuss. This is a sentence reminiscent of the famous “prima facie” case against Zuma which found him guilty without having to take him to court.
Stephen Gray, the author of Hottentot Venus, has revealed himself to be an odiously mean-spirited literary mudslinger. By publishing “Copy rites and wrongs” the Mail & Guardian have done Professor Zakes Mda a great wrong. Apologies are in order to set things right.
Aryan Kaganof
see also book.co.za
Zakes Mda
When J.M. Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarians was published in 1980, it marked a literary paradigm shift. Until then conventional wisdom dictated that South African novels could bear witness to the truth of apartheid only through realism. Whereas South African dramatists had developed over several decades a highly stylized and experimental theater that drew from both African performance modes and European models, fiction writers stubbornly stuck to a faithful reproduction of South African experience. Reflecting realist aesthetic commitments, and ignoring the mix of experimentalism and political engagement in South African theater, they held that art was not for its own sake, but a weapon in the struggle for freedom and human betterment.
Then came Coetzee.
Waiting for the Barbarians upset the expectations of many readers and critics who had grown accustomed to documentary representations of South Africa from the country’s interpreters. The novel was seen as the height of self-indulgence: life under apartheid demanded that writers create a translucent window through which the outside world could see authentic oppression. Some critics claimed that Coetzee’s use of allegory was an escape from South African reality because the novel, set in a nameless empire and lacking specificity of locale and period, was susceptible to an ahistorical and apolitical reading. The question of the author’s political commitment was raised not only in response to this novel but all his subsequent ones. Even Nobel laureate Nadine Gordimer weighed in that Coetzee’s work, and indeed Coetzee himself, abhorred all political and revolutionary solutions. While acknowledging that Coetzee’s work was magnificent, and commending his superb and fearless creative energy, she rapped him on the knuckles for a mode of storytelling that kept him aloof from the grubby and tragic events of South Africa.
What others saw as a failure to represent lived experience appeared to me—I was then living in exile—as a refreshing way to re-imagine South Africa and transcend the repetition of the horrors reported every day in newspapers. Waiting for the Barbarians addressed the brutality of colonialism in a timeless manner and extended the borders of “empire” far beyond those of South Africa: to the rest of Africa, Asia, Europe, Australasia, and the Americas. Springing from the particular circumstances of South Africa, it spoke to a universe in which the state became increasingly terroristic in its defense of imperial values. The timelessness was rendered all the more striking to me when one of my students at Ohio University asked if the novel was written after 9/11. When I asked her to explain her question, she listed a number of events in the novel that had direct parallels to what, in her view, was happening in the United States: the increasing defensiveness and paranoia of an all-powerful empire, the state of alert and panic, civic freedoms curtailed in order to deal with the terrorism of the barbarians who come at night and create havoc, the lack of due process for those suspected of being barbarians, dissenting citizens assailed as unpatriotic. Coetzee writes of “patriotic bloodlust.”
***
I left South Africa in 1963 to join my father who had escaped from jail that year and crossed the river to the neighboring British colony of Basutoland. There, he lived as a refugee while working as an attorney. Over the years I became increasingly frustrated with writing about a South Africa that was becoming a distant memory. I could no longer benefit from the wealth of stories that were created by the absurdity of the apartheid system.
The inxile writers—those who operated from within South Africa, yet were figuratively exiled from the mainstream of South African life because of apartheid marginalization—only had to take a slice of life as it unfolded in the streets where children were dying from police bullets; in the bedrooms where police flashlights were shining into people eyes at midnight searching for those engaged in illicit interracial sex; at the workplace where qualified blacks were lorded over by less qualified whites and demeaned through racial slurs; in the suburban kitchens where black maids and nannies pined for children they had brought to this world but had not seen for months or years while they raised the white children of their “madams”; or in prison where black men served time for failing to carry their identity documents with them, or being in an urban area in defiance of laws that confined them to the labor reserves euphemistically called “homelands.”
This “reportage fiction” required very little imaginative intervention because the apartheid system itself crafted the most wonderfully absurd narratives. They were all there for the taking by the inxile. As an exiled writer, I envied them greatly because they were living within these narratives and could therefore capture the evolving nuances of the language of the streets as it adapted to changing situations.
Realism could no longer serve me. I would still write works set in South Africa, and they would still be political works because I did not think it possible to write an apolitical story about South Africa, a highly politicized society where apartheid’s attempts at social engineering touched every aspect of life. Even a love story could not avoid politics because apartheid governed the private areas of a person’s life. It determined whom you could or could not love subject to dire punishment, where you could live, what jobs you could do, all depending on a hierarchy of complexion that was established by the state as a matter of political expediency.
To be sure, I had already been using allegorical and other stylized modes in my theater because they enabled me to draw from ancient sources or oral literature in my interrogation of contemporary society. Waiting for the Barbarians awakened me to new possibilities for writing fiction. Here was a first among South African authors: a writer with an imagination that creates worlds rooted in immediate reality while also transcending it.
But there was something else that I saw in Coetzee, something more than his capacity to write beyond the immediate context. Although during those revolutionary times I was riled, like many others, by what I considered a misrepresentation of the extra-textual reality that informed Coetzee’s fiction—in the novel the barbarians have no voice, everything we know about them is mediated through the old-fashioned paternalistic liberal perspective of the protagonist or the highly jaundiced and jingoistic perspective of the antagonist; the barbarian’s guerrilla offensive is ineffectual and it is only through the agency of a natural disaster (the water turns salty), rather than of revolutionary action by the oppressed themselves, that the oppressor is driven away—I was fascinated by Coetzee’s close attention to characterization.
For many black South African writers, the only literary models were the nineteenth-century realists. Theirs was the only literature in English to which we were exposed by the educational system. Whereas in drama, for some reason, we did explore modernists like T.S. Eliot and George Bernard Shaw, and naturalists like Ibsen and Strindberg (in addition to the ubiquitous Elizabethan bard), in fiction the only writers that were extensively prescribed were George Eliot (particularly Silas Marner), Charles Dickens, and the Brontë sisters. That is why we wrote, as critic Lewis Nkosi once noted, as if the modernists and postmodernists never lived.
Nineteenth-century realism was defined by its mix of an omniscient narrator and close attention to characterization. In our contemporary fiction we retained the omniscient narrator because it gave us the storyteller’s freedom to render opinions and judgment and summarize at will, as stories in the oral tradition are wont to do. But our fiction was sustained by big dramatic moments of oppression, with scant attention to characterization and psychology. Yes, the actions of our characters may have been motivated, but rarely were these motivations dynamic. The black characters were oppressed and driven by the quest for freedom; the white characters were oppressors and driven by the quest to oppress. With a few exceptions, the motivations were imposed externally by the apartheid system.
I was later to learn that motivation alone does not make a believable character. There is something beyond motivation that provides characters their emotional and intellectual depth.
In 1984 my play, The Road, won the Christina Crawford Award of what was then called the American Theater Association and was read on stage at the Hilton Hotel in San Francisco. Theater educators and scouts gathered and offered their critiques. I was taken aback by one particular comment: according to one critic, the Afrikaner character was a thorough scoundrel without a single redeeming feature.
In the play a black laborer traveling the length of the district repairing farming equipment for Afrikaner farmers encounters an Afrikaner farmer who runs out of gas on his way to enjoy the nightlife of Maseru, Lesotho, with its casinos and strip clubs, all of which were forbidden in Calvinist South Africa. Soon a conflict over the shade of a tree develops between the two. The laborer then learns that while he drudged in the farms for his family back in Lesotho, the Afrikaner regularly slept with the laborer’s wife, who was supplementing the family income as a prostitute. The laborer is shocked to learn that his wife is a prostitute and that she and the Afrikaner regularly engaged in bestiality with the laborer’s pet dog. The Afrikaner turns out to be a pathetic whimpering fool who nevertheless dispossesses the laborer of everything he owns at gunpoint.
The play is highly allegorical, for allegory is the mode of oral literature and folklore in that part of the world. South African theater was allegorical long before Coetzee. Its humor was in its absurdity, which was largely the absurdity of the Afrikaner character and everything he stood for. So, what more did the San Francisco critic want from it? What redeeming attribute could an Afrikaner character possibly have, especially after oppressing me for more than three hundred years?
It was only later when I attended William Miller’s screenwriting class at Ohio University that I realized I had failed to explain this character. And I was hardly the first black South African writer to err in this regard. Since the motivations that we created for these Afrikaner characters were structural and institutional, we failed to explore the complex psychology that influenced an entire life course. Everything was laid out for us, like parts of a formula; there was no ambiguity. Everything fit with the model of an Afrikaner that had been established in our collective imagination; nothing more existed. I had, therefore, deprived the San Francisco critic of the pleasure of projecting his own feelings on the character’s motivations.
A friend of mine, the German filmmaker Pierre Hoffman, once told me that during apartheid he and his fellow European storytellers envied us because we had everything laid out for us in black and white, with a clear line of demarcation between heroes (black) and villains (white). Their confrontation was ready-made, already scripted by the state as its various agents (our characters) worked hard to enforce institutionalized racism. Hoffman’s was really a snide remark on our narrative strategies. Everything was indeed black and white: we ignored the grey areas, even though life taught us that they did exist.
Of course in the experience of a liberated South Africa we have come to appreciate the grey areas. Some of our politicians who were once larger-than-life heroes of the liberation struggle have turned out to be the worst villains—moral degenerates, rapists, and embezzlers. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission hearings demonstrated that even some of those Afrikaners who were known to us as the most heartless agents of the apartheid state possessed redeeming qualities. We began to understand what drove the particular Afrikaner to torture and murder black youths when other Afrikaners did not, what made him a tool of the state’s violence when his neighbor was not. For the first time we had some idea of the motivational dynamics that drove these individuals, though we still found their behavior inexcusable and reprehensible.
Miller talked of justification: characters should not be formulaically drawn as “good” or “bad” but as persons who are understandable in light of their experiences. He said, “Once we understand someone’s past and see what has made him who he is, we see how what he does is psychologically—although not necessarily morally—justified.”
This statement encouraged me to develop my portrayal of my Afrikaner characters. I had to extend myself to understand the Afrikaner, to put myself in his place, and when I did, I found the humanity in him. For too long the brutality of the system that he had codified into law (racial discrimination, “color bar” as it was called, was first introduced by the British) had made it impossible for us to imagine the humanity of the Afrikaner.
The pursuit of psychological justification helped me create more effective villains. Evil, caprice, and a lunacy imposed by circumstance were no longer enough to explain the oppressor. He now became a complex individual acting out of the totality of his being.
It was not difficult to find humanity in those I found politically or morally reprehensible. When we black children of South Africa were growing up, we were taught by our parents, but especially by our grandparents, that we were not fully human until someone made us human. Humanity, our elders believed, was not something you were born with. Rather, it was endowed by other people. You were therefore a person because of other people. They called this philosophy ubuntu in the Nguni languages and botho in the Sotho languages. And how do others endow you with humanity? By giving you bounties of compassion and generosity. (I have since added tolerance to this list, but I do not remember our elders mentioning that particular virtue.) When you thanked someone who had been compassionate and generous to you, you uttered the words: “You have made me into a person.” As a beneficiary of ubuntu you had to make others into people, too, by showering them with compassion and generosity. Through deeds of compassion and generosity you could attain a high level of humanity, a level that enabled you to show ubuntu even to the enemy.
“You are not a person,” was an accusation often heard directed at the inconsiderate, mean-spirited, and stingy. Responsible parents instilled the values of ubuntu in their children, but many of us discarded them and replaced them with anger when we were faced with a world that had no place for compassion and generosity, or when we got “civilized” and adopted the Western value of individualism. Alternatively, we practiced selective ubuntu, making into persons only those we liked and confining the rest into the realms of nonpersonhood.
Ubuntu has always been the principle that guided my creativity, and it functioned in tandem with Miller’s justification. I have long sought to treat my fictional characters with compassion and generosity, even those who are selfish or in some way villainous. I have adopted a voice that does not judge them. I leave the judging to the readers or the audience. In my playwriting days I had never thought of extending that ubuntu to my Afrikaner characters. Having to justify them forced me to show ubuntu to them as well. Compassion and justification work in tandem: once you get to know a character, you understand the reason for his actions and are therefore able to justify him.
***
I began this essay with Coetzee because his work influenced my decision to write novels after twenty years of plays. I was a writer-in-residence at the Durham Cathedral in the United Kingdom when Age of Iron was published in 1990. It was quite a departure from Coetzee’s previous novels: less allegorical, more lyrical, less stark—more figurative language than we had seen before in his work. And for the first time in his fiction we heard black voices that were both articulate and diverse. At last Friday speaks! (Friday was his tongueless character in the highly intertextual and metafictional novel Foe.)
In Age of Iron I was drawn to a character named Vercueil. I found nothing remarkable about him except for the fact that he had quite a rich odor. Just the fact of the smell fascinated me. I said to myself: “If Coetzee can create such a stinking character, so can I.” And I did. But mine had to stink for different reasons. Through a process of justification Toloki, my stinking character, became a professional mourner, and later featured in my first novel, Ways of Dying. I must add that I did not find much justification for Vercueil. But that was fine because he was a mere device to help us understand the protagonist—Mrs. Curren—who was thoroughly justified.
Thanks to Coetzee I had written my first novel, and thanks to Miller’s insistence on justification I had come up with a professional mourner, an angel of death who has served me well in my latest novel, Cion.
The combination of justification and ubuntu was my guiding principle when I wrote The Madonna of Excelsior. I remembered a scandal that rocked the small farming community of Excelsior in the South African province of Orange Free State in 1970. A group of Afrikaner men were found to have had sexual relations with black women, a violation of the Immorality Act, punishable by a prison sentence. These white men were all pillars of the community. Among them were provincial leaders of the ruling National Party, the very party that had introduced the Immorality Act and other stringent apartheid laws. They were business men, leading farmers, and even the pastor of the local Dutch Reformed Church—the establishment church of the Afrikaners whose doctrine was that apartheid was God’s law. Their shenanigans were exposed when the black women gave birth to a number of mixed race children. The resulting case at the local magistrate’s court caused so much embarrassment to the government that it had to be withdrawn, and that was the end of the matter.
This scandal was by no means unique to Excelsior. During those years there was one case after another of white Afrikaner men contravening the Immorality Act in order to sleep with black women. I was reminded of it when I took an aimless drive among vast tracks of sunflower farms in the Free State. I wondered what had happened to the people of Excelsior in the new nonracial, nonsexist democratic South Africa. What happened to the mixed-race children, to the black women and the white men? I went back to Excelsior to find out and was intrigued by what I discovered there.
The Madonna of Excelsior was the first (perhaps, to-date, the only) novel by a black South African writer to extensively explore Afrikaner characters beyond the stereotypes of workplace boss, policeman, soldier, magistrate, and other agents of the oppressive apartheid state. Here we saw a range of characters, the good and the bad, functioning in family and home environments, people who had hopes and fears about the future. These characters were a result of my interaction with two real-life Afrikaners of Excelsior: a man who had been the lawyer for the Afrikaner men in the Immorality Act case and a young farmer who was born much later and was full of resentment because he had to pay for the sins of his fathers through affirmative action.
These were not the first Afrikaners I had known in my life. While a young man in exile, my best friend, Ali Semmelink, was an Afrikaner who had found apartheid so abhorrent that he left South Africa to live in Lesotho, where we met. Ali came from an Afrikaner family from the Cape, and was related by marriage to Andries Treunicht, well known in South Africa as an archconservative advocate for an even more stringent enforcement of apartheid laws. Yet Ali married a black Lesotho woman and they had three wonderful biracial children who are now adults.
This friendship and the research I conducted in Excelsior provided me with a better understanding of the interiority of the Afrikaner, which informed my novel. But in creating the fictional characters of The Madonna of Excelsior it was important that I not spell out their motivations and justifications explicitly to the reader, otherwise I would have ended up with characters that were simplistic and less intriguing.
The deadpan voice that I used in the novel was a result of my engagement with the paintings of the Flemish expressionist, Frans Claerhout, who relished in painting the vast landscapes of the Free State and the forlorn figures in naïve impasto. Claerhout saved me the trouble of describing the setting. Instead, each chapter opened with a description of a painting, and the figures in the painting, through a magical realist transformation, became the characters in my story. The humor and compassion that characterized Claerhout’s paintings transferred to my fiction. Since the story flowed from the paintings themselves, the voice had to be similarly naïve. While Coetzee draws on the Western canon, I used texts from my immediate sociopolitical context. This can be seen in The Heart of Redness as well, which features strong intertextuality with Jeff Peires’s The Dead Will Arise, with its voice that comes directly from the idiom of the Xhosa language, and also with the previously unrecorded texts of the oral traditions of my mother’s people, the Cwerha Gxarha clan that descended directly from the Khoikhoi, referred to as the Hottentots by the Dutch colonists.
I have always sought African forms of affiliation whenever they served my fiction well. In The Madonna of Excelsior, the idiom is from the Sesotho language. The matter-of-fact voice was not only informed by the Flemish expressionist but also by southern African folklore. It draws deeply from the storytelling modes that I learned from my grandmother, whose stories were set in our environment and featured characters we could recognize and identify with, yet who functioned in a world that imperceptibly became magical as the story developed. In my grandmother’s stories the supernatural existed comfortably with what could be called objective reality. I took early tentative steps towards integrating my grandmother’s magic in my literary fiction, though I did not have models in my own country for this sort of thing. Later I received permission to go as crazy with magic as I wished from the work of Gabriel García Márquez, who had learnt early on how to use his grandmother’s storytelling techniques.
Márquez’s novel Of Love and Other Demons had great impact on me. Set in the lush coastal tropics of an eighteenth-century South American seaport, it is the story of an ill-fated love affair between a Roman Catholic priest and a young girl, Sierva Maria. On her twelfth birthday she is bitten by a rabid dog, is believed to be possessed by evil spirits, and is confined to a convent where she undergoes exorcism. We learn that the girl had been brought up by African slaves with a mixture of Catholicism and Yoruba beliefs while her mother indulged in substance abuse and her father, a Marquis, wandered about the countryside aimlessly.
This is a dysfunctional family, described in a deadpan manner without authorial judgment, or judgment by the other characters in the narrative world. Even when Sierva Maria’s mother buys herself a slave and makes love to him on a regular basis the Marquis pretends not to know. I continue to hear my grandmother’s deadpan storytelling technique when the Marquis falls in love with a “lunatic” from the asylum and wants to marry her; when he is forced to marry a different woman from the nobility who stays a virgin for years because he doesn’t want to have children with her; and when, on the way from the funeral of the same woman after she has been struck by lightning, a storm of little paper birds falls like snow on the orange trees.
What I adore in this novel is that Márquez pushes realism to hyper-realistic extremes. He narrates magical happenings—just as my grandmother did—in a realist’s matter-of-fact narrative voice, and I, as a reader, never doubt the veracity of the events. Yet this is a highly socially and politically motivated fiction.
The book succeeds above all because of its deadpan, non-judgmental voice. It is the voice that I have tried to achieve in The Madonna of Excelsior and in all my other novels. That voice and the aspiration to justification are responsible for the portrayal of “the enemy” with empathy: as human.
this essay first appeared on the bostonreview
A RESPONSE
by Zakes Mda
The Heart of Redness is a work of fiction and not a history textbook. Historical record is only utilized in the novel to serve my fiction – to give it context, for instance. In the historical segments the fiction centers on the patriarch Xikixa, his sons Twin and Twin-Twin, and his daughter-in-law Qukezwa. All these are fictional characters created from my imagination. But the world they inhabit comes directly from historical record (Jeff Peires’ The Dead Will Arise) and from the oral tradition. For instance when my characters migrate as a result of the lungsickness they are led to new pastures by the stars known as the Seven Sisters, they pray for guidance to Tsiqua and his son Heitsi Eibib and they perform their rituals on the cairns that they occasionally find on the crossroads. This journey is not informed by historical record but by the oral tradition of my mother’s people, the Cwerhas of the Gxarha sub-clan, descendant from the Khoikhoi people. But when my fictional characters interact with historical characters such as Mlanjeni, Mhlakaza and Nongqawuse the events surrounding these characters come directly from Peires’ book. That is why I have credited Peires in all editions and translations of The Heart of Redness as the sole source for all my material that comes from historical record. However he is not the source for the oral tradition from which I draw. Peires does not deal with Khoikhoi cosmology in his book. Nor does he mention King Sarhili’s nature reserve. My source for this was the trader Rufus Hulley who is also credited in my book.
It is not an accident that Peires is my sole source of historical record. His book had all the information I needed for the context for my fiction. There was therefore no need for me to replicate his work by going back to his primary sources. Peires had done all the research for me, and for anyone else who wanted to use his book, in a most meticulous manner. My intention in the novel was never to interrogate Peires and his interpretation of the Cattle Killing; it was never to “challenge or revolutionize” (I think I have “revolutionized” enough with my fictional character Camagu, the Aristocrats of the Revolution, and the saving of Qolorha-by-Sea from environmental rape). I was quite satisfied with Peires’ version of events not because it presented the sole “truth”, but because it served my fiction effectively. I was not creating a scholarly work but a work of fiction. I could have easily consulted other historians who have written on the subject as well, but Peires’ work spoke to me because it had the necessary ontological elements in it, and captured the myths and beliefs as I remembered them growing up among the amaXhosa people. One of the strategies of my fiction is the portrayal of local beliefs and myths as part of objective reality. Faris (1995) has observed that “in magical realist narrative, ancient systems of beliefs and local lore often underlie the text.” (p.182) I may add that they are often depicted in a deadpan manner, as if they do not contradict our laws of reason. That is why my Nongqawuse flies with the crows from a river to a distant pool (oral tradition) and Mlanjeni lights his pipe with the rays of the sun and dances until his sweat causes rain to fall (also from the oral tradition, but recorded in Peires).
The distinction between The Heart of Redness and the other Nongqawuse narratives that the author cites is that in my novel Nongqawuse is not the central figure but the backdrop. My story is not about her, but about my principal fictional characters, both in the past and the present, whose lives were affected by her prophecies. If Nongwawuse had been the central character then I would have felt the need to “challenge” and “revolutionize.” Under the circumstances if I had done that she would have assumed center-stage and would have hijacked the story from Camagu, Qukezwa, John Dalton, Zim and Bhonco in the present, and from Twin, Twin-Twin, Qukezwa, John Dalton and Xikixa in the past. Nongqawuse is only important in my novel in so far as her prophecies influence my characters for better or for worse. To portray this influence it was necessary to present the context of those prophecies, and the most effective way to do that was through intertextuality with Peires’ work. Contrary to what the author claims in his/her article I do not attempt to offer an “interpretation of the Xhosa Cattle killing” in my novel. I use Peires’ interpretation lock stock and barrel. I do proffer some interpretation of the circumstances and environment of my fictional characters though. I however leave most of the interpreting to you, the reader and the critic. Mine is to tell the story, using any effective tool at my disposal.
To assert, as the author of the article does, that The Heart of Redness is formed by The Dead Will Arise is to state the obvious; more so if you look at the historical segments of the novel. Indeed if Jeff Peires had not been engaged as my consultant when I was commissioned to write the Nongqawuse episode of the TV series Saints Sinners and Settlers, if he had not arranged my trip to the Eastern Cape and my meeting with Rufus Hulley (this is not a “minimal” role), and if he had not written The Dead Will Arise, we would not be discussing The Heart of Redness today but a different novel wholly set in the present following Camagu’s misadventures with the Aristocrats of the Revolution.
Should I then designate Peires as the co-author of The Heart of Redness? That is an absurdity. If I had used original material from Peires that had not been published elsewhere, and that had been written by him to suit the needs of The Heart of Redness, then of course he would be co-author of my book. But I used material from his book, of which he is credited as sole author, and I duly acknowledge him as the sole source of the historical aspects of my novel. That should do it, don’t you think?
Even if the author of the article does not think so, Peires certainly does. If he wanted to be designated co-author of The Heart of Redness he would have said so. He is an intelligent man – a great South African scholar, a developmental activist and a political leader. He would know immediately if he had been plagiarized and he would not cower in some corner and shut up about it. Instead, as the author of the article grudgingly admits, Peires has expressed how honored he feels that I have relied on his work in this manner. In fact The Heart of Redness gave The Dead Will Arise a new lease of life, and exposed it to new readers who would not otherwise read a history text.
One thing very strange about this article is that its author claims that I am likely to be haunted by the findings of some historians that Mhlakaza was not Wilhelm Goliath after all. I knew of this debate long before I wrote The Heart of Redness, so nothing will haunt me here. I chose Peires’ version because it is the more romantic of the interpretations and therefore serves my fiction best. If historical accuracy (which I still consider important) was paramount to everything else then my Nongqawuse would not be flying with the Nomyayi bird (the crow) to Gobe and the magical moments of Mlanjeni and Nxele would have been expressed as mere belief instead of fact; there would have been a clear line of demarcation between the supernatural and empirical reality; we would not even have seen the miracles at the Gxarha River actually happening as they would have been portrayed as people’s delusions and superstitions.
The author of the article is complaining that a reader of The Heart of Redness who has not read The Dead Will Arise will think that I have a great grasp of history. That reader will be correct. I do have a great grasp of history. And guess where I get this wonderful grasp? From Jeff Peires, of course! From the time he was my consultant, to reading his books and other academic articles, I couldn’t help but have a great grasp of history. But let’s not forget that my grasp also comes from the oral traditions of my people, hence the magic in my history!
The author’s list of all the phrases, sentences and passages paraphrased (or “borrowed” to use his/her term) from The Dead Will Arise is impressive but it is not original. It is very similar to the list compiled by Colombana (2004) in her examination of intertextuality between The Heart of Redness and three other texts, including The Dead Will Arise. One major difference is that Colombana reaches a more intelligent conclusion. She writes: “After these observations one may assert that, all in all, Mda’s work is not very creative because it seems to consist in a sort of ‘copy and paste’ from Peires’ book. But this is not true. The creativity of Mda’s work has to be seen in the continuous twinning that Mda is able to do between the past narrative and the present one. The latter depends completely on what happened in the past and cannot be read without reference to it.” (p.93 )
The author of the article further says that I use Peires’ “material sequentially and chronologically, making the task of identifying borrowed passages an easy one.” Well, the task was easy because I was not trying to hide these “borrowed passages”. For intertextuality to function successfully it is important that those readers who are familiar with the original text should be able to identify its influences as it interplays with the new text. Where I felt that Peires’ phraseology was so apt that it served my fiction effectively I used that phraseology and built on it a new fictional world for my characters. I also used his phraseology (which is largely the phraseology of some of Peires’ primary sources and transliterations from isiXhosa) to pay homage to my historical source. This was a conscious and overt decision on my part – to reproduce history as recorded by Jeff Peires in order to give context to my own invented world. That is what intertextuality is all about. At no point did I ever claim that I use intertextuality to “disengage colonial dualism” or even to be subversive. Once more, I use it to give my storytelling a credible context!
And by the way, intertextuality is not peculiar to post-colonial African literature. It is an international post-modern phenomenon. It is even found in music in the form of “sampling” and in art in collages composed of images borrowed from other creators. In The Heart of Redness I go beyond the practitioners of sampling and collaging because I credit the originator of the historical narrative that has influenced my novel so profoundly.
Plagiarism, on the other hand, is theft. A plagiarist passes someone else’s work as his own without crediting the owner and with the intention to deceive. The author admits in his article that I do credit Jeff Peires in my “Dedication”, yet s/he proceeds to libel me as a plagiarist. A major weakness of his/her case is that the concepts are not defined at all. We therefore never get to know what his/her understanding of them is. At one point the crime of which s/he accuses me is termed “intertextuality”, and then “borrowing”, “excessive intertexuality”, and finally “plagiarism”. There is even “acknowledged theft” somewhere (What on earth is it? I never acknowledged stealing anything from anybody.) All these are used interchangeably throughout the text, and we never get to understand at what point, for instance, intertextuality becomes excessive, who sets these boundaries and how the excessiveness is measured. His/her graph, giving some semblance of empiricism, does not really do the trick! For instance the percentage that he claims comprises Peires’ work also contains the actions of my fictional characters, and a number of fictional events that are driven both by historical characters (Peires’ - though he didn’t invent them) and by fictional characters invented by me. How is the author of the article going to empirically separate these in order to have an accurate measure of “excessive intertextuality”?
Colombana, Sara. The Heart of Redness by Zakes Mda. (Thesis for Laurea in Lingue e Letterature Straniere, University of Padua, Italy, 2004)
Faris, Wendy B. “Scheherazade’s Children: Magical Realism and Post-Modern Fiction” in Magical Realism: Theory, History, Community (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1995)
By Jennifer Krisch
Zakes Mda is having a very good year.
Already an internationally acclaimed, award-winning author for his previous works, Mda is gaining even more global attention for his latest novel, “Cion.” The book, which has been widely reviewed, was nominated for an NAACP Image Award and the 2008 Commonwealth Writer’s Prize for the Best Book in the Africa region.
At Ohio University, “Cion” has been selected for the Common Reading Project and will be read by incoming freshmen next year.
Here, Ohio Today asks Mda a few fun questions about what makes an author tick.
Which of your novels is your favorite?
Besides the latest, it would be “The Whale Caller.” And it is the only one that has never won an award and I think it is my best one, my best work.
How long did it take to write?
Six months.
Which of your novels do you think would make the best movie?
All of them.
What are you currently reading?
“Uselessly: A Very Funny Book About Me, My Dad, the Devil and God” by Aryan Kaganof. I am reading “No Country for Old Men” by Cormac McCarthy, only because it was a best-seller and I am trying to get the sensibility of American readers. What makes a best-seller? And “A Song Yet Sung” by James McBride, because it was highly recommended by The New York Times and it is about slavery and touches on issues I touched on in “Cion.”
What one book to you recommend all of your students read?
We just talk about books we love generally. There is no single book.
When not writing, what is your favorite pastime?
I always write. But when I am not writing? I am painting. I am a painter. And I compose music. And I play the flute.
Jennifer Krisch is a media specialist for University Communications and Marketing.
Posted 05-16-2008
this article first appeared on ohio today
www.africana.com
May 25, 2004
When Zakes Mda was just thirteen, he published his first short story in his mother tongue, Xhosa. Soon afterward his family fled South Africa in exile to Lesotho, and he began writing in English. After penning some thirty plays in as many years, he started to write enormously popular novels about the politics of race, sex, and place after the collapse of apartheid. During the first decade of his country’s democracy, Mda won all the major literary prizes there, such as the M-Net and CNA awards. Two of his novels, The Madonna of Excelsior and She Plays With the Darkness, have just been released in the United States.
Africana.com met with Mda recently at Ohio University in Athens — he earned a degree there in the early ’70s — where he is teaching creative writing and African literature for the year.
You had a long career as a successful playwright. What motivated your change to fiction?
I’ve always wanted to write a novel. But I never thought that it was possible for me to write sustained prose. I’m really a dialogue man.
I completed my PhD at the University of Cape Town where I wrote a thesis. I said, yeah, maybe, I can write sustained prose. Then I bought a computer for the first time. I had never used a computer before. I wrote longhand and gave it to a typist or typed it myself with my two fingers. I was a visiting residence fellow at Yale at the time and I bought this old IBM computer from a student. And I thought, well, now that I had a computer, what would I do with it? I thought well, I might as well write a novel.
It happened on Christmas day in 1992, when my wife had gone to church. I was at home with my little boy, who was four months old at the time. I sat at the computer and I was just playing around with things trying to figure out how it worked. And the first lines that I typed were, ‘There are many ways of dying.’ This was just, you know, practicing how to use the darn thing. And I was struck by these lines. I thought, well, let me proceed. Let me just go on. Then I continued to write. By the time my wife came back from church, I had one page — one whole page — of what later became my novel, Ways of Dying. That’s how it came into being, you see.
Another factor, that of course on looking back, I now realize that — ah! — the end of apartheid played a role also in that transition.
How so?
You see, during apartheid we really didn’t have the luxury to sit down and focus on one piece of work that would take months and months on end to complete. Novel writing is a very solitary activity. It demands patience and all that. During apartheid, generally, with black writers, we focused on short stories. We focused on plays, and on poems. You see, those are much more immediate. You write a poem because you are going to perform it that afternoon at a funeral or at a street rally.
Our poetry is performance poetry, it’s not poetry that you write just to read. It is not art for its own sake. You write a play because there are issues that must be put on the table. Our work was highly political and it was used as a weapon against apartheid, as a weapon for destroying apartheid.
So during this period of transition things were more relaxed. There were no longer any demands on us — demands that were imposed by ourselves, you know, as oppressed citizens of South Africa — there were no longer those demands that were imposed on ourselves for those immediate works. We could afford now to sit back and write our novels. Today, for the first time in the history of literature in South Africa, you will find more novels than ever before. We’ve never had a period as we’re having now.
Do you prefer the process of writing novels?
The experience itself of writing a novel was so enjoyable that I decided that this would be the main thing that I focus on. I enjoyed the process itself of interacting with my characters, but I never really enjoyed writing when I was focused on plays. Writing was an agony, you know, the process itself. Of course there would be that joy with the fulfillment of the finished product. But with novels, the joy begins with the very first word. You know, I actually look forward to waking up in the morning and sitting at the computer to interact with my characters. And just having a ball. Yes.
The character that I used in that novel [Ways of Dying] was a character that I’d created a year before. When I was creating this character there was no story for that character. I don’t create a character because there is a story. I create a character because I think it would be interesting to have a person like that, you see. I take time, brick by brick, to build a character, down to the smallest detail. Some of these things you’ll never see in the novel itself.
In addition to the focus on characters in your novels, there’s also a very solid grounding in the physical space.
Place is key. To me place is not just background for my cast of characters. The place in fact is so important that many of my novels are suggested by the place. I ask, what kind of character would be in a place like this? And what would they be doing here? What happens is determined by who that character is and what that place is all about.
So with The Madonna of Excelsior, was it the physical town Excelsior that inspired the novel? Or did you create the character Popi first?
This is the only novel where a memory of the events was the starting point. This is how it happened. I love to drive around in South Africa. It’s open country there, and I enjoy the freedom. Sometimes I just get into my car and I just drive. Without any destination. I just go. But usually, the car takes me to the province of the Free State. I drive through the Free State and then I go toward some of the small towns there. The sky is so big, that’s what affected me the most. The big sky you see.
This is an interesting area. It was a very racist province during the days of apartheid. You have your Afrikaners, you have your black people — Basotho people, in some regions the Batswana people. Various cultures. They interact in these very racist towns.
I said to myself, this is an interesting place for a novel. I asked myself, but what would this novel be about? Then I remembered the events of this trial, a scandal, the talk of the day.
These Afrikaners were sleeping around with black women. Stories like that were everyday stories. Every day there would be a trial somewhere in South Africa that a white man was sleeping with a black woman, either by consent or by force or coercion. But what was unique was that it was a whole gang, and then many black women had children as a result. And then there was this trial that was embarrassing the government. And then some of the men tried to kill themselves. It was a scandal to the extent that the government had to put pressure on the prosecutors to withdraw the case. That also became another scandal, you see that.
I only went there [to Excelsior] when I knew the story I wanted to write. But the place actually did suggest the story as well. Not Excelsior itself per se, but the Free State and the other small towns in it, Excelsior being one of them. They all look the same.
During the trial, some of the women had babies. My main interest in the story was, what happened to those children? What are they doing today in the new South Africa? And when I went there of course, people didn’t want to talk about this.
Fortunately I went to a bar. Somebody said there was a man there who might have information. As we were discussing this, there were some black guys drinking bottles there on the floor. One of them stood up and said, ‘Hey, I can help you. In fact, my mother was one of those women. I have a sister as a result of these events.’ He took me around. They are my very close friends now.
Is he similar in character to Viliki in the book, or do they just share the life experience of having a sister borne from this affair?
Well, I stole many things from his life. The politics that I’m talking about in that book are the politics of Excelsior. But then of course I add my own magic. His mother is not a beekeeper; she’s just an ordinary woman living in a shack somewhere. It’s just an ordinary South African life. They can be very dull sometimes. I recreated them.
Of course, he goes around Excelsior now calling himself Viliki — boasting that it was him in the book!
You’ve been very successful as a novelist, but you’ve decided to take this post teaching university students for a year.
I do enjoy the very act of teaching. Even when I was working as a full-time writer in South Africa, I was a drama teacher at the Market Theatre in Johannesburg. I held regular workshops for young writers there. It is that whole idea of exchanging ideas with the younger generation that I find fascinating. It’s a symbiotic relationship, you gain a lot.
For seven years, I was not teaching, I was a full-time writer and it was wonderful time. Why have I come now to punish myself and make my writing suffer? I ask myself that sometimes.
The creative writing courses, like the one you’re teaching to undergrads, are offered in most English programs here. They’re still not common in South Africa, are they?
When I was back in South Africa in December, I was talking with my good friend Nadine Gordimer. She said to me, ‘I’m surprised that you’re teaching such a course. Because you and I know that writing cannot be taught.’
We didn’t go to formal writing programs, as they do now. In America today it’s been years since such programs have been offered. In fact, you’d be hard put to find a contemporary writer who hasn’t taught.
Do you believe in this American pedagogy? Can you teach somebody to write?
You can’t teach talent — but perhaps you can teach the craft, techniques. But I read, I learned how to write from what I read.
Which books did you learn the most from?
When I was a kid I read comic books. DC comics, Marvel. Not so much the superheroes, though I read these too. Richie Rich, Spooky, Little Lotta, Casper the Friendly Ghost. It’s from these comic books that I got a sense of narrative.
I still read comics, now mostly European ones. I have a whole collection [he raises his hand to his torso to indicate a tall stack] of Asterix. One of the pair, the writer, died. The artist continues, he tries to create stories. They look the same, but now the stories are lousy.
this interview first appeared here
great book!
I have been planning to write to you for quite some time now, since I finished reading your book some months back. I enjoyed Uselessly. This book is not just funny. It is also poignant and wise; smartly oxymoronic and brilliantly moronic! Best of all, it is iconoclastic, not only in content but in form. I truly love this book!
order your copy here
South Africans now see that the support lavished on Mugabe contributed to Zimbabwe’s collapse
Zakes Mda
Saturday June 21 2008
The Guardian
In Johannesburg, Robert Mugabe was given a rousing welcome by Africans from across the continent. As he addressed the 2002 World Summit on Sustainable Development, we ululated and sang his praises, and after his brief speech we gave him a standing ovation. He spoke of the wonderful work he had achieved in Zimbabwe with his “agrarian reforms” in a country where 70% of prime land had been owned by just 4,000 white farmers.
Here was an African leader who was prepared to redress the injustices of the past by giving land back to its rightful indigenous owners. Here was a government doing what our own was afraid to: dealing with the problems of inequitable distribution through one short, swift surgical action. Here was a black man giving the former colonial masters the finger. We went into frenzied applause when he thundered: “So, Blair, keep your England and let me keep my Zimbabwe!”
It did not matter to us that the process was not done in a way that respected the rule of law, or that the so-called agrarian reforms were an election ploy to win votes from a peasantry that had been marginalised since 1980. We condemned our South African newspapers as lackeys of the west when they reported in the previous two years that the “war veterans” (most of whom had never fought any war) murdered black workers as well as white farmers when they occupied white-owned farms in the Mugabe-sponsored violence and mayhem. We dismissed as mere western propaganda reports that began to filter into the country that the farms - confiscated not only from whites but from those black farmers who were deemed to be supporters of the opposition - were in fact redistributed to leaders of the ruling Zanu-PF party.
In any case, most of us did not read newspapers, which had exposed Mugabe from the beginning, but got our news from the South African Broadcasting Corporation, which did not dare be critical of Zimbabwe and even banned independent commentators who were deemed to be anti-Zanu-PF - including the South African president’s brother, Moeletsi Mbeki.
Our unwavering support for Mugabe continued over the years, despite outrageous acts of violence against his own people, such as Operation Murambatsvina (Sweep Away the Filth) when he destroyed more than 700,000 homes in urban areas deemed to be opposition strongholds. We were encouraged by the line our government was taking. Our president, Thabo Mbeki, was the official mediator between Zanu-PF and the opposition Movement for Democratic Change, and he was engaged in what was euphemistically called “quiet diplomacy”.
We understood that Mbeki could not be neutral because Zanu-PF was a fraternal organisation. It had been our ally during the struggle, and as South Africans we were well known for being loyal to those who took our side - hence our continued close friendship with Fidel Castro and Muammar Gadafy, despite protestations from America. We were proud of our independent foreign policy. Despite the “mediator” title, we never expected Mbeki to be an honest broker. We were not about to desert Mugabe in his time of need; “quiet diplomacy” was another name for “complicity”.
But last December a new leadership took over the ANC. The new party leader, Jacob Zuma, attained his position through the support of the trade union movement and the South African Communist Party, both of which had been vocal in condemning Mugabe’s actions as soon as the “war veterans” began their farm invasions. And for the first time we heard the ANC publicly condemning Mugabe for trying to hijack the electoral process, even as a lame-duck Mbeki continued to defend Mugabe in international forums and to declare that there was no crisis.
Two weeks ago I was in Johannesburg talking to reporters who have been covering the xenophobic anti-Zimbabwean attacks of the past few months. It became clear to me that the support that Mugabe used to enjoy among black South Africans is beginning to wane. For the first time our people are beginning to talk openly about the South African government’s complicity in the total collapse of Zimbabwe. They are beginning to say South Africa should bear some of the blame for the millions of Zimbabweans who have had to flee state violence only to compete for scarce resources in the poor townships of South Africa.
Yes, the jokes about “those millionaire Zimbos” - an allusion to the fact that a million in Zimbabwe adds up to less than one US dollar - still abound. But there is growing recognition that the chickens are coming home to roost, as thousands more continue to cross the border in search of a better life and are welcomed with hate attacks.
· Zakes Mda, a South African writer, is the author of Cion zmda@mweb.co.zay
To see this story with its related links on the guardian.co.uk site, go to http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/jun/21/southafrica.zimbabwe
