I knew Zakes Mda made it to Ohio, where he had studied and now teaches writing. Nonetheless I was on the edge of my seat as I read the passage of his memoirs in which his journey to the United States from southern Africa was almost derailed by the racist South African government, which suspected he was plotting violence with anti-apartheid activists.
Chief among those activists was Mda’s father, who was a founding member of the ANC Youth League and a friend of Nelson Mandela. Mda vividly recreates his fear and anger under South African police questioning and later in the face of hostility from a U.S. Embassy official during a period when America was conciliatory to the apartheid regime. I felt I was being interrogated alongside him.
Mda brings to his fiction the same emotional charge that I found in his “Sometimes there is a Void: Memoirs of an Outsider.” The memoirs was among a half dozen of this prolific author's books I read during a Mda spree.
Novelists rarely want to be limited by autobiography. But real life can never be completely removed from a writer’s fiction. Mda seemed destined to be the poet, playwright and novelist that he is. When he was born in 1948, his father, then teaching English literature at a Catholic "native secondary school," named him Zanemvula, after a character in AC Jordan’s “Ingqumbo Yeminyanya,” an isiXhosa novel published in 1940 concerned with what Mda often addresses in his own work – in Mda’s words, the "Western intrusion on the culture of the amaXhosa.”
The local priest would not baptize him without a saint's name. So Mda’s father, who was a devout Catholic as well as an ardent PanAfricanist -- a complex man, certainly -- needed something alongside Zanemvula.
His father, Mda writes, “insisted he would not give me a 'white name,' so opted for Kizito, the youngest of the Ugandan Martyrs. Although Kizito had only been beatified at the time and was not yet a fully fledged saint (he has since been canonized), the priest approved.”
Mda got a third name, Gatyeni, after one of his ancestors. He was nicknamed Zakes from ZK, his first two initials. His full name is an outline of stories and histories that his father, who left teaching to become a lawyer, filled in with lectures to the young Zakes about the heritage of his Xhosa, the ethnic group into which Mandela also was born, and about the need to for Black people across Africa to determine their own futures.
Mda’s poems, plays, scripts and novels often explore the perspectives and viewpoints omitted from official accounts. In addition to historical fiction, he’s written magical realism and even a crime thriller -- 2009's “Black Diamond.”
"We always sympathize with those whose story we know,” he writes in his memoirs. “I remember as kids we watched a lot of Tarzan-type movies in Dobsonville. We always sided with the white hero against the 'savages' because we knew the white hero's story, his family background, his trials and tribulations. The white hero had history; the 'savages' did not. We didn't realize that those 'savages' were us. Narrative manipulated us against ourselves."
His novel “The Zulus of New York” is set in the late 19th and early 20th century, a period during which white Americans brought people from other countries to display at circuses and world fairs. Mda’s fictional hero tries to tell his people's story, but white audiences don't want to hear that Zulus are human. In one passage, a Zulu performer proposes to a circus impresario that he take over when a young white woman who is shot from a cannon takes her derring-do to P.T. Barnum’s circus. Her act would pay better than the minstrel show the Zulu performers are relegated to.
“”You shoot a Negro from a cannon, no one gives a hoot,” Mda’s impresario responds. “They don’t see it as anything to marvel at. He’s from a different world, some may even think a subhuman world. In their minds the Negro is made of different stuff. We need a beautiful, frail White person. A woman is much better. Or a man disguised as a woman. They are interested in her survival, so the whole performance grabs their emotions and they hold their breaths until she falls safely in the net.”
Mda’s preoccupations as a writer include peace, justice and reconciliation -- and whether the three can coexist. It’s not just themes that he returns to again and again. I was pleased to find encores in several novels by Toloki, my favorite character from my favorite of Mda's novels, and perhaps his most celebrated, 1995’s “Ways of Dying.” I read “Ways of Dying” years before my recent spree.
In novel after novel, the wise and empathetic Toloki tries to make sense of the horrific. He appears in “Ways of Dying,” set during a period of violence fomented by apartheid forces in a desperate attempt to derail the all-race elections that ended racist rule in 1994; in 2007’s “Cion,” which is about slavery’s legacy in the United States; and in 2021’s “Wayfarers’ Hymns,” which addresses the legacy of injustice in South Africa.
I learned from the memoirs that Toloki was first sketched out after Mda read a novel by another South African, JM Coetzee’s “Age of Iron.”
“In this novel I fell in love with a character called Vercueil who had the ‘stench of death.’” Mda writes. “I was fascinated just by that fact. I said to myself: if Coetzee can create a character that stinks like this, so can I. But mine, of course, had to stink for different reasons, while maintaining the important status of ‘angel of death.’ Mine would be a professional mourner.”
In “Cion,” Toloki refers to the man who invented him as a "sciolist" -- a man who pretends to know everything. Fiction writers often speak of their characters having lives of their own. Mda imbues Toloki with resentment toward the writer who presumed to create him. That brings to mind the African American sociologist W.E.B. Du Bois description of an African American sensibility he called double-consciousness: the “sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity.”
For Mda, pushing back against others’ attempts to define him creates a sense of being in exile wherever he is.
Mda writes in his fiction and nonfiction with an honesty and awareness of both human faults and strengths, allowing him to fully realize characters in nuanced situations. His prose has a musical quality that often has me turning his phrases over in my mind long after I've finished one of his books. Mda is a jazz lover, plays the flute and has composed music for some of his plays.
Some readers might find his style unadorned. Perhaps Mda would prefer “deadpan” – or no adjective at all. In his memoirs, Mda complains about an editor who inserted “enchanting” into a description in “Ways of Dying.”
“I hated that word in my book because I felt that if the situation was enchanting at all it should just enchant without instructing the reader to be enchanted. It was as if you had a magical realist situation and then you wrote ‘the characters magically floated in the air.’ That would be ridiculous. Strange and unusual events in the book should be deadpan without calling attention to themselves through silly modifiers.”
Love is another of the sometimes prickly Mda’s chief preoccupations. Many of his protagonists are men who love their own idea or ideal of a woman, not the woman herself. Mda's women, even the most wounded, have too much self respect to be caged by such controlling regard.
In “Black Diamond,” only the bodyguard turned detective at the center of the novel mistakes the strong women in it as helpless damsels. Among other Mda heroines is the young white American woman at the center of “Rachel's Blue,” which he wrote in response to a U.S. injustice that horrified him – the laws in some US states that grant rapists the paternity rights of any father.
"Writers write about life, and the human condition is the human condition in any culture or clime," Mda writes in his memoirs.
In a passage in “Blue” that would not be out of place in his novels set in South Africa, Mda writes, "people here have close knit families with bloodlines that are identifiable from their surnames.” He hears folk music in Ohio that tends “to sound like six o'clock news,” as it does in “Wayfarers’ Hymns,” whose main characters play the music known as famo, created by mineworkers in South Africa who hail from Lesotho, a kingdom surrounded by South Africa.
Mda has roots in both Lesotho and South Africa. His 2017 novel "Little Suns" is in part a fictionalized account of the death of Hamilton Hope – a colonial magistrate who, in the late 19th century was undermining the local kingdoms of the Eastern Cape region of what is now South Africa in order to bring them under the control of the British. Mhlontlo, leader of a Xhosa clan known as the Mpondomise, lures Hope to a meeting and has him killed. The British reprisals force Mhlontlo and his followers, who included Mda’s ancestors, to flee to Lesotho.
One of Mda’s grandfathers later returns to South Africa from Lesotho. In the 1960s, Mda’s father, targeted because of his opposition to apartheid, flees to Lesotho with his family, where Mda grows up with prominent anti-apartheid leaders visiting his home and even helping him with his Latin homework.
Mda these days divides his time between the United States, South Africa -- where he founded an agricultural cooperative to support his ancestral village -- and Lesotho. He seems to feel no place is home, and that it’s crucial to make a contribution to ensure welcome in every adopted country. That’s what his globe-trotting South African character Toloki does in “Wayfarers’ Hymns,” set in Lesotho, and “Cion,” set in Ohio.
“The sciolist is in the God business,” Mda writes in “Cion.” “And like all Gods he lives his life vicariously through his creations. Like all Gods he demands love from his creations. That’s why he creates them in the first place … so that they can shower him with love … so that they can worship him and praise him … so that they can bribe him with offerings. Creation is therefore a self-centered act.”
Mda as an artist and a human being battles generational trauma. But trauma is not all that the ancestors gift us. The final lines of Mda’s memoirs evoke both the tragedy and the triumph of any story – whether fiction or biography – that is fundamentally true.
"Oh, how romantic it was to be a revolutionary those days! Our prophet was Franz Fanon and jazz was the hymnal that nourished our souls. Yet there was death too. Real wars where sons and daughters of loving parents shed blood on the roadside. We were certain of victory. We were certain matundu ya uburu -- the fruits of liberation -- would be enjoyed by all in the land of equal opportunity.
"Equal opportunity?
"Father haunts me in such a way that I cannot extricate myself from his ghost. I have become him for he lives in me. He shunned the limelight and was what he called a 'backroom boy' -- a thinker behind the scenes. I am even worse in that regard; I am an ultimate outsider on the road to hermitage. Like him, I work with peasants in the villages, and despite myself I am satisfied with the little that I have, and give the rest away. We differ, though, because he was doing it for the people, as part of his commitment to the struggle. I am doing it for myself. For my own happiness.
"Yet the void widens."
It is a statement of artistic purpose. Mda creates because he yearns to fill a void, a task to which he does not feel equal. It is an acknowledgement of a vulnerability that fuels his empathetic imagination, and that makes me look forward to his next novel.
In fact, he has work in his back catalog I have not yet read. Perhaps another Mda spree is in my near future.