Zakes Mda
Agent: Isobel Dixon
Assistant: Sian Ellis-Martin
Biography: Zakes Mda is the pen name of Zanemvula Kizito Gatyeni Mda. He is a South African, Lesotho and Appalachian American-African writer, painter, and music composer. He holds an MFA (Theatre) and an MA (Telecommunications) from Ohio University, and a PhD from the University of Cape Town. There have been recent successful exhibitions of his work in the US and South Africa and his paintings are bought by collectors around the world.
He has published more than twenty books, ten of which are novels and the rest collections of plays, poetry and a monograph on the theory and practice of theatre-for-development. His novel CION, set in southeast Ohio, was nominated for the NAACP Image Award. His memoir SOMETIMES THERE IS A VOID: MEMOIRS OF AN OUTSIDER was published by Farrar Straus and Giroux and was a New York Times Notable Book for 2012. He has won many prestigious literary awards in South Africa.
He divides his time between the USA and South Africa. He is Professor Emeritus of English at Ohio University, lecturer in Creative Writing at Johns Hopkins University and Extraordinary Professor of English at the University of the Western Cape. In South Africa he is a patron of the Market Theatre and director of the Southern African Multimedia AIDS Trust. He also runs a beekeeping project he established in 2000 with rural women of the Eastern Cape and is a director of NeoZane, a publishing house and animation film production company in Johannesburg.
WAYFARERS’ HYMNS
Literary, Umuzi (PRH SA), October 2021
Infused with rhythm and melody, Zakes Mda’s new novel invites you to travel from Lesotho’s Mountain Kingdom to the City of Gold through the history of famo. Famo music was born in the drinking dens of migrant mineworkers in Lesotho, where the men would sing to unwind after work, accompanied by the accordion, a drum and sometimes a bass.
Meet the boy-child Kheleke, a wandering musician, and his surprising sister Moliehi. Then sigh with pleasure at being reunited with Toloki, the professional mourner from Ways of Dying, and his beloved Noria. Passionate and ambitious, Kheleke is a weaver of songs, and his own story is intertwined with the incredible yet true social history of the music: the Time of the Concertina and the Accordion, the wars of the famo gangs, and the battle for control of illegal mines. The end is always a journey – and what a journey this is!
THE ZULUS OF NEW YORK
Literary Fiction, Umuzi, March 2019
The Great Farini would stride on to the stage and announce, ‘Ladies and gentlemen, and now for the highlight of the day, the ferocious Zulus.’
The impresario Farini introduced Em-Pee and his troupe to his kind of show business, and now they must earn their bread. In 1885 in a bustling New York City, they are the performers who know the true Zulu dances, while all around them fraudsters perform silly jigs.
Reports on the Anglo-Zulu War portrayed King Cetshwayo as infamous, and audiences in London and New York flock to see his kin. What the gawking spectators don’t know is that Em-Pee once carried nothing but his spear and shield, when he had to flee his king.
But amid the city’s squalid vaudeville acts appears a vision that leaves Em-Pee breathless: in a cage in Madison Square Park is Acol, a Dinka princess on display. For Em-Pee, it is love at first sight, though Acol is not free to love anyone back.
LITTLE SUNS
Literary fiction, 260 pages
Umuzi, November 2015
Fresh classic from master storyteller Mda, intertwining an unusual love story with little-told history. Malangana (‘Little Suns’) searches for the woman he was parted from during The Wars of Hope – the real-life 19th Century battles between Xhosa tribes and British colonial rulers after the murder of Magistrate Hamilton Hope.
SOMETIMES THERE IS A VOID
Memoir, 559 pages
Penguin (SA) - April 2011
'This is Zakes Mda's story. It must be read.' -- Maureen Isaacson, The Sunday Independent