An Interview with Zakes Mda

Zakes Mda, Elly Williams

The Missouri Review, Volume 28, Number 2, Fall 2005, pp. 62-79 (Article)

Published by University of Missouri

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/mis.2006.0034

For additional information about this article

https://muse.jhu.edu/article/192619

Access provided by Australian National University (5 Jul 2018 23:54 GMT)

 Z
An
Interview
with

akes
M 62
da
T H E M I S S O U R I R E V I E W / FA L L 2 0 0 5

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 ( interview )

Elly Williams is the author of the novel This

Never Happened, an adjunct instructor at

Johns Hopkins, where she received her

M.A. in writing, a faculty member for the

Sewanee Young Writers’ Conference and a

Ph.D. student in English at Ohio University.

She has published an interview with Ann

Hood in Five Points and a short story in the

anthology Of Grace and Gravity. She is at

Elly Williams
work on a new novel.

Z
anemvula Kizito Gatyeni Mda, better known as Zakes Mda, is an

internationally acclaimed South African poet, playwright, novelist

and painter. Born in 1948 in the Eastern Cape, Mda spent his early

childhood in Soweto. By 1977 his poetry was being regularly published, and in

1978 his play We Shall Sing for the Fatherland won the first Amstel Playwright of

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 the Year Award. The following year he won the same honor for his play The Hill. In

1983 Mda graduated from Ohio University with an M.F.A. in theater and an M.A.

in telecommunications. Mda has since taught at the University of Lesotho and

been awarded a Ph.D. by the University of Cape Town.

Mda’s first novel, Ways of Dying (1995), won the M-net Book Prize. The

Heart of Redness (2002) won the prestigious Hurston/Wright Legacy Award and

the Commonwealth Writers Prize for the Africa Region. His novel The Madonna

of Excelsior (2004) was selected as one of the Top Ten South African Books

Published in the Decade of Democracy. Farrar, Straus, and Giroux will publish his

new novel, The Whale Caller, in October 2005. Mda is currently a full professor at

Ohio University. This interview was conducted in the spring of 2004.

I N T E R V I E W E R : You are a black South African who grew up during apartheid.

In J. M. Coetzee’s memoir, Boyhood: Scenes from a Provincial Life, we learn
of his growing awareness of apartheid and himself as an Afrikaner. He reflects on
who he is and why he writes as he does. Your experience of apartheid must be very
different from Coetzee’s. What was your childhood in Soweto like?

M D A : Yes, it will be different in many respects. I grew up in Johannesburg in

a township known as Soweto, which was an urban environment. Soweto was
a black township because according to apartheid laws even residential areas
were separated. Black and white.
Soweto is a number of suburbs. It means South Western Townships. It’s
a sprawling area of about a million people. My own suburb in Soweto was
Orlando East. I went to school there. My mother was a nurse, and my father
was a primary school teacher. Later, my father left our suburb and went to the

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 Eastern Cape to study law. My mother and brothers and I moved to another
suburb called Dobsinville, where my mother continued working as a nurse
at a clinic. It was in Dobsinville that I became a juvenile delinquent, joining
street gangs, giving my mother lots of problems at a time when my father was
away studying law, serving his articles. That’s what it’s called in South Africa
when you have completed your law degree and are working as an apprentice
with a practicing lawyer before you can practice as a lawyer on your own. He
was serving his articles in the Eastern Cape, which is a different province,
more than a thousand miles away from Johannesburg. As a gangster, that’s
when I actually earnestly became an artist as well. I had already been writing
since the time I was six years old. When not fighting in the street, I would be
somewhere painting pictures, writing poems, playing truant from school. My
parents decided to save me from gangsterism by taking me to a rural area in
the Eastern Cape, which is where my father originally came from. I lived with
my grandmother. I continued to write. I wrote in my own indigenous African
language, Xhosa. When my father completed his law studies, we moved to
a small town in the Eastern Cape called Sterkspruit, where I completed my
primary education. Soon thereafter my father was arrested because he was
a political activist in the underground political movement fighting against
apartheid. He escaped and went into exile in a neighboring country called
Lesotho, which was then a British colony. A year later I joined him, so I also
became a refugee, initially not because of my own political activities but to be
with him. My family joined us later, and we were in exile ever since. My father
died in exile in 1993. I only went back to South Africa in 1994 after our first
democratic elections.

I N T E R V I E W E R : Gabriel García Márquez has just published Living to Tell the

Tale, a memoir. As a young man he wanted only to be a writer. He says that a
journey to the family’s ancestral home “sealed his fate” by awakening his taste
for recounting the “earthly paradise of desolution and nostalgia” that he carried
within himself. Do you have journeys—metaphorical or literal—that “sealed your
fate” as a writer?

MDA: Not that I can recall, no. But like him, I have always wanted to be a
writer. Still, I never thought that I would be a full-time writer or earn my
living from writing. As a little boy, I wanted to be a doctor because that was
one of the few things one was allowed to be under apartheid. Later, I wanted
to be a lawyer. Why? Because everybody is a lawyer in my family. My father

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 was a lawyer, my brothers are lawyers. In fact, I went to study law, too. I
thought that writing and painting and music were hobbies, as they were
with my father and mother. But it was when I was serving my articles for a
lawyer in Lesotho that my paintings began to get some attention, and then
my plays won awards in South Africa. I dropped out of law and focused
more upon the arts. My parents were very much concerned—not that I
wanted to be a writer; I mean, they were happy with that because they were
writers themselves—but they wanted me to be like them and have another
profession to fall back on. But I continued to focus more on painting and
writing and theater and music as well. I was winning awards for my plays and
earning some money from the theater, so the call of the theater became very
strong. But you must remember, I was in exile at the time in Lesotho, which
is an impoverished country without any professional theater. My plays had to
be performed in South Africa, which has a very rich theater tradition. But in
South Africa there was apartheid. Sometimes my plays would be banned, as
was the case with a lot of other writers working in South Africa at the time.

I N T E R V I E W E R : Your literary work is political in the sense that it explores both

the old and the new South Africa from various vantage points, both bitter and
humorous. How do you see politics being a part of a writer’s work?

M D A : In my view every work of art makes a political statement, even if the

artist does not intend so. It may not be overtly political, but if it is set in the
real world that we know, it is going to touch on politics. It will be informed by
the political environment. It will respond to situations that may not be overtly
political but that emanate from or are generated by political hegemonies.
In South Africa, a society that was characterized by racial oppression and
economic exploitation, the dominant discourse in society was apartheid, and,
as you know, artists get their material from society; if the dominant discourse
in society is politics, then the work will reflect that. Apartheid was a political
system that touched on every aspect of the people’s lives. It was a form of social
engineering where the government controlled everything that a person could
or could not do. Laws regulated where you should live as a black person and
as a white person, as an Indian person or as a so-called colored person. Those
groups could not meet and live together. Laws determined whom you could
love and whom you should not love, whom you could sleep with and whom
you should not sleep with. It wasn’t possible to write any work that would not
have to do with politics. That’s why you find politics not only in my work but

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 also in South African work in general—Coetzee, Nadine Gordimer, Wally
Serote, André Brink and Mandla Langa. You see that? So, even if you wanted
to write a simple love story, you couldn’t in all honesty without touching on
politics because politics regulated even that private area of a person’s life. In
the postapartheid situation, politics is still the predominant discourse of the
society. But now, of course, our young writers write about many other issues
that are not overtly political. I stress that, in my view, there is no work that is
not political. Even when it goes out of its way not to be political, that in itself
is a political statement.

INTERVIEWER: Let’s shift gears to the craft of fiction. John Fowles, author of
The French Lieutenant’s Woman, has said “his character refuses to allow him
his creator’s liberty, and that he is morally as well as aesthetically bound to obey
her.” You’ve said that such thinking is ridiculous, that you are the author and you
are in control. Would you elaborate?

M D A : First of all, let me say that I no longer think such notions are ridiculous,
although I don’t subscribe to them. I now can see how it is possible for a
character to take over and tell the story. If it happens with me at all it is
at a subconscious level, before I put the story down on paper. My writing
process is quite different from the writers I know. Long before I start writing,
I know who my characters are, and I know, in fact, where my story is going
and what it is about and what the characters will end up doing. You see, my
stories, or maybe I should say most of them, emanate from place. Setting is
very important for me, and most of my stories are suggested by that setting.
The next thing that I do is to place characters in that setting. I take a very
long time to build a character without any story at all. Sometimes I take up
to a year just building one character. During that year, I’m writing another

LO N G B E F O R E I S TA R T W R I T I N G , I K N O W W H O M Y C H A R AC T E R S

A R E , A N D I K N O W, I N FAC T, W H E R E M Y S TO R Y I S G O I N G A N D W H AT

I T I S A B O U T A N D W H AT T H E C H A R AC T E R S W I L L E N D U P D O I N G .

YO U S E E , M Y S TO R I E S ,... M O S T O F T H E M , E M A N AT E F R O M P L AC E .

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 novel because it is when I am in the process of writing one novel that I’m
creating characters for the next novel. Ideas come in bits and pieces. Maybe
I’m walking the street and something strikes me—ah, that’s the kind of hat
my character would wear. Or another day I see someone walking and realize
that’s the way my character would walk. Detail is crucial, right up to the most
insignificant thing about a character. And then when I have the place and the
character, the story will emerge from the interaction of those characters and
the place. The place is important in my fiction because it becomes part of
the story. It’s not just there as background. Sometimes the place functions as
character. During the process of writing a novel, I am jotting down notes for
my next novel—mostly events that involve the characters and the place. So
when I sit down to start writing the new novel, I already have the constituent
events and some supplementary events—the beginning, the middle and
the end are all mapped out. I am in full control of the whole process. No
character is allowed to run wild and mess up my story. I am a dictator of the
world that I create. Remember that I am a self-taught writer; no one taught
me better. What works for me may not necessarily work for another writer.
My students are well aware of that because I don’t teach them formulas.

I N T E R V I E W E R : It’s been said the novel is the ultimate free literary form. You
have only started writing novels recently. What has this change in genre been like
for you?

M D A : I’ve been writing plays for thirty years. During that period, the writing
process itself was an agony. But when I started writing novels in the early
1990s, I got a different experience altogether. The writing process became
great joy. I actually enjoyed sitting down and interacting with my characters
and with the place. I realized it is precisely because of that freedom—that
for the first time in my life, I have discovered a medium that gives me total
freedom to do what I want to do.

I N T E R V I E W E R : You’re not bound by the conventions of the play?

M D A : I’m not bound by the conventions of the play, but I’m also not bound
by the established traditions of the novel. You see that? I extend those
boundaries. I stretch them. Sometimes to breaking point. Because I have
great confidence in the reader. The reader is very intelligent, and the reader is
able to deal with innovation as long as it is well handled.

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 The only reason I moved from playwriting to novel writing was a very
political one. In South Africa, as you know, we lived under a horrendous
political system. It was oppressive to the artist not only because the state
banned books but also because there was pressure on us as artists to use our
art as a weapon against apartheid. This pressure came from us—we ourselves
imposed these demands. We needed work that would directly talk to the
people—like poetry. Our poetry is not written on the page for the solitary
reader, but for performance. You go out and perform it. We needed plays
because plays are immediate. They talk directly to the audience, and they deal
with issues, and the audience responds—there is that immediate feedback.
We did not have the luxury to sit down for months on end working on one
piece of work, such as a novel. So during that period in South Africa you
didn’t see a lot of black people writing novels, but you saw them writing plays,
you saw them writing poems, you saw them writing short stories, which are
immediate genres. You see that? White writers were able to write novels.
That’s why we had Nadine Gordimer, J. M. Coetzee, André Brink—even
though they were highly involved in the political struggle themselves. They
were all involved. They’re part and parcel of that generation of freedom
fighters, in different ways and at different levels.
When apartheid came to an end, in the 1990s, it became possible for some
of us blacks to consider the novel because we were in the process of attaining
freedom. We had the freedom, the luxury, to sit down and write for months
on end. The end of apartheid also freed the imaginations of black writers.

INTERVIEWER: Andrew Horn in the Introduction to The Plays of Zakes

Mda compares the nature of your polemic plays’ critiques to Athol Fugard both in
composition and in performance. How do you respond to such a comparison?

M D A : I’ve heard that comparison before. I can only say that when I started
writing, people like Athol Fugard were also active in theater in the Eastern
Cape. It was before he became famous, I mean as famous as he is now, and I
used to have a lot of interaction with members of his theater company, and
so there might have been influences, of course. But my theater moved much
further than his because it was also influenced by the traditional performance
modes of the African theater that I integrated into the international mode that
people like Athol Fugard were using at the time. One might see some traces
of the Fugard influence but also the traces of the influences from traditional
performance mode, which is a much more culturally syncretic kind of theater.

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 My later plays became much more magical. You do not find that in Athol
Fugard. My plays became much more magical again, then—influenced by
the oral literature of South Africa. That is where the magic in my novels
comes from, too—from the magical oral traditions of the various peoples of
South Africa.

INTERVIEWER: Theorist and fiction writer Ray Federman speaks of the New
Theater, which he says received the unfortunate name of the Theater of the Absurd
in the first half of the twentieth century, a label that includes Beckett, Fugard
and Ionesco, whose purpose is to destroy those social and cultural reflexes that
keep literature blind to its own crisis. The question then for Federman becomes,
how can the writer confront the human condition? How do you see your plays
answering this question?

MDA: The Theater of the Absurd had a very big impact on us all. Fugard
himself is a product of that movement. I am a product of that movement, too,
because, you see, the writers you mentioned—Beckett and Ionesco—have
had a great impact on my own work; those are writers I’ve always loved. But
long before I’d heard of Ionesco or Beckett, I was already an absurdist. I
started writing quite early in my life, when I was still at primary school. I
only came across Beckett and Ionesco much later, when I was intentionally
educating myself. The amazing thing was that my work was also part of the
Theater of the Absurd movement without any conscious effort on my part,
without my even being aware of the movement. The absurdism came from
apartheid. I was trying to interpret a system that was absurd in itself. A lot of
things that used to happen in those days were very Kafkaesque; many people
who wrote in the realism mode interpreting that situation were grouped with
the absurdists, as part of the Theater of the Absurd. Whereas in fact it was
realism. You see that?
For Ionesco, Beckett and so on, the impulse of their work was in the
observation of the meaninglessness of life. In my theater I used the same kind
of modes, but my work was always optimistic because it showed the triumph
of the human spirit. My characters are triumphant. Even in a work that is a
tragedy, it would be an optimistic tragedy because I was writing in a situation
whereby if I were to be talking of life being hopeless, it would go against the
very values that we stood for. We were fighting to change a political system. It
would be fatal to be an absurdist speaking in terms of hopelessness. Life must
have meaning. The underdog must triumph.

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 I N T E R V I E W E R : How did magic realism come to infuse your work?

MDA: I often hear from various critics in South Africa and elsewhere—the
United States—that my work is magic realism. I have no quarrel with that
particular label. But I’d like to mention that the sources of my magic realism—
if you can call it that—are really in the traditional literatures of the various
peoples of southern Africa. In our oral traditions, the world of the supernatural
and that of objective reality exist side by side in the same context. You do not
find a line of demarcation between what in the West is called magic and what
is empirical reality. In the olden days, the people did not have that line of
demarcation. Oral traditions were passed on from generation to generation.
But it is also still the case if you go to the remaining South African rural areas.
The majority of the population in South Africa lives in the urban areas, and
as a result, you’ll find that some of those traditions got lost a long time ago.
But if you go to the rural areas, you’ll still find these oral literatures, and you’ll
find an environment where people do not have that border between what is
magical and what might be referred to as objective reality in the way that
they go about their lives in general. I guess that is why most of my novels are
set in the rural areas and have become some sort of postmodern pastoralism.
They draw from the magic that already exists in such areas, not only in their
narratives but also in the way the people live. This is not much different from
the magic realism of other countries—except Europe, of course, where much
of their magic is invented, as in the work of Günter Grass and others who
have used this mode. This mode has flourished mostly in Latin America,
precisely because those writers live in an environment rich with the kind of
magic that I’ve described. The environments in Africa and Latin America,
insofar as the oral traditions are concerned, are very similar.
The Latin American literary boom developed as a result of the cultures

I N O U R O R A L T R A D I T I O N S , T H E W O R L D O F T H E S U P E R N AT U R A L

A N D T H AT O F O B J E C T I V E R E A L I T Y E X I S T S I D E BY S I D E .... YO U D O

N OT F I N D A L I N E O F D E M A R C AT I O N B E T W E E N W H AT I N T H E W E S T

I S C A L L E D M AG I C A N D W H AT I S E M P I R I C A L R E A L I T Y.

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 and oral traditions that exist in those countries. Many people mistakenly
think Latin American writers invented magic realism, whereas in fact they
merely popularized it—Gabriel García Márquez has often said that most
of his magic has been influenced by the stories he received from the African
slaves via his grandmother in his native Colombia but that some of it also
emanates from stories of the Native American Indians in that part of the
world. His source of magic is similar to the source of writers in Africa.

I N T E R V I E W E R : Ways of Dying is purely imaginary and took only three months

to write. The Heart of Redness, however, is historical. In terms of the writing
process, how did such different novels evolve for you?

M D A : The process is quite different in some respects. I wrote Ways of Dying

in 1992, while a research fellow at Yale, but the main idea of the novel was
born two years before that. I was in England at the time as the writer-in-
residence at the Durham Cathedral. I’d been commissioned to write a play
in celebration of the nine hundredth anniversary of that wonderful Norman
cathedral. At that time the South African writer J. M. Coetzee published a
novel called Age of Iron. A particular character highly impressed me. What
struck me about this character was the fact that he had a very rich smell. He
stunk. And I said to myself, if Coetzee can create a character who stinks like
this, so can I. So things began from that. I started creating this character. I had
to find reasons for him to stink, which became part of the story. Over a period
of about a year, I built this character brick by brick, every little detail. How he
looks. His eyebrows, his teeth, his eyes, his hat, his underwear, his build, his
gait, his fingers, his nails. That process happens while I’m working on other
things—at that time I was writing the Durham play and also another play.
And while I was writing these plays, I was building this character. Ideas would
come from time to time. I had never written a novel before, and I thought
all along that the character would be used in some future play that I was
going to write. I do that a lot. I create characters without any story for them
because I know that one day this character will come in handy. My stories are
heavily character based. They begin with a character. Like this character, who
existed for a year or so in my notebook and in my mind. I thought that one
day I would write a play that would have to do with a professional mourner
or something like that. Now, the concept of professional mourner is not part
of any culture in southern Africa, where my books are set. For a long time I
thought that I had invented that profession, but after my book was published,

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 I discovered that there are some cultures in Europe, in Spain and Italy, in
India as well, that have professional mourners, which was quite amazing.
But coming back to the process, because that is what you asked about, from
Durham, then, when I finished that assignment, I went to Yale to do some
work, and this was during the period of violent transition in South Africa. A
lot of political violence was happening—violence from the state but violence
also from the oppressed people themselves; many people were dying. At Yale
I used to see the violence on the television and read about it in the newspaper.
It struck me that I could find a use now for the character I had created in
Durham, the professional mourner. That character was for a play. I never
thought that it was possible for me to write a novel. I had been writing plays
for years. I was a dialogue person. I never thought I could write sustained
prose, be descriptive and all that. But then I bought a computer. I’d never
used a computer before. I thought to myself, now that I’ve this computer,
what do I do with it? I might as well write a novel. So on Christmas Day I
sat at the computer and fiddled around on the keyboard, and the first line
that I typed was, “There are many ways of dying.” Now, those words—I don’t
know where they came from, I was just typing—but they struck me as words
that should be in a novel. And I remembered my Durham character, the
professional mourner. I’m talking about ways of dying—of course, that’s
where my professional mourner comes in. The story developed from just
who this professional mourner is and what his job is, and the violence in
South Africa came in as well, since the novel was about that. It took me three
months to write that novel. I started on December 25 and finished it on April
Fools’ Day. And there it was—my first novel.
The Heart of Redness was quite a different kettle of fish because the idea
came when I was writing She Plays with the Darkness, my second novel. I had
returned to South Africa, and I was teaching at a university in Johannesburg.
As I was writing this novel, a television production company commissioned
me to write a television drama, set in the Eastern Cape of South Africa,
about some events that happened in the 1850s. In that area in 1852, a young
prophetess named Nongqawuse prophesied that the people should kill their
cattle and destroy their crops because on a certain date the dead would come
back from their graves; they’d come with new cattle and new crops, and, most
importantly, they would drive away the British. This was a dire period in
the history of the Eastern Cape Xhosa people in South Africa; the British
were conquering them and taking their land. So it was easy for the people
to believe these prophecies—prophecies offer redemption. But among the

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 Xhosa people there were those who did not believe the prophecies—the
Unbelievers—and they refused to slaughter their cattle. The families of the
Believers and the Unbelievers fought amongst themselves.
Now the appointed day came, but the dead did not arise, the prophecies
were not fulfilled, and many of the Xhosa people died. That was the end
of their resistance against British colonialism. The British walked in and
took their whole country. The most interesting thing—where I found the
romance—was that all these prophetesses during this period were young
women—girls, you might say. You had a whole gang of girls who were busy
doing prophecies all over the countryside, and you had all these old men
and women following these girls to death. I found that very beautiful and
very romantic. I am talking here of the images. I try to capture in my novel
the romance of religious belief, fueled by millennial young women, and the
harrowingly beautiful images of death that result from that belief.
I’d just arrived in South Africa from the United States after an exile of over
thirty years, and I am commissioned by the television people to write a script
about this prophetess. They send me to where these prophecies supposedly
happened. I find this place enchanting. I say to myself, if I lived here during
that period, I would have also believed in those prophecies. The whole place
is so magical, you can believe in any prophecy. I tell myself that this place
deserves a novel. So I wrote the script, but I continued to go back to this
region by the sea just to imbibe the ambience and to learn more about the
people in a postapartheid South Africa. Then I researched the history because
this now was going to be a history novel—although a different kind of history
novel—I look at the history, but I also look at the present, the postapartheid
South Africa, to see the effects of that history on the present people. You see
that? Half of the novel is about contemporary South Africa. So that novel
then took me much longer than the normal three months. Since I had to go
back to the place from time to time—a real place, not an imaginary place that
might be a composite of many different places in South Africa, as in Ways
of Dying—it was very important to me to be accurate when it came to the
historical aspects of the narrative. It was also important to me to interview the
present generation to discover what the attitude is about that past and also to
get the folklore that surrounds those characters. In other words, to get written
history as it exists in books and in the archives, but also history as it exists
in the imagination of the people, the oral history, which has a lot of magic
because though it has some elements of the written history, a lot of it is legend.
Then you put the two of them together, and you have a wonderful novel.

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 I N T E R V I E W E R : The Madonna of Excelsior is the story of a racial sex scandal
based on an actual event that took place in the South African town of Excelsior in
the late 1960s. You create a black heroine, Niki, and Poppi, her biracial daughter,
but you also include actual white defendants. Where do the facts end and the
fantasies begin?

MDA: What is important is that the whole novel is fiction. Fiction that
is based on fact. As with my previous novel, when it comes to the actual
historical event, I always strive to be as accurate as possible. Then I create a
whole bunch of fictional characters who interact with that history. Now, in
The Madonna of Excelsior, a group of white men were on trial for sleeping
with black women because that was against the law in South Africa—people
went to jail for that—and then there were all those babies who were born as
a result. The details of the trial, the whole proceeding, are quite accurate. But
then amongst the real-life defendants I locate my fictional characters. From
there, of course, the aftermath of the trial—the bulk of it would of course
have come from my imagination, but highly informed by what happened to
the real-life people. I do enrich it here and there; real life can be very boring.
You need to enrich it with imagination. So some of the characters that I have
in the book are real people who are alive even today—like the painter who
specialized in painting nudes, and so on. I don’t really care that much if this
is a real-life character or if it is a fictional one. The world of fiction and the
world of fact—it just boils down to one.

INTERVIEWER: In discussing The Madonna of Excelsior and the fact that

embarrassment caused the government to drop the case, you once said that the
children were grown up and the women remember. It’s a good lesson for South
Africa, at least in terms of reconciliation.

I T H O U G H T TO M YS E L F, N O W T H AT I ’ V E T H I S CO M P U T E R , W H AT D O

I DO WITH IT? I MIGHT AS WELL WRITE A NOVEL. SO ON CHRIST

M A S D AY I S AT AT T H E CO M P U T E R A N D F I D D L E D A R O U N D O N T H E

K E Y B O A R D, A N D T H E F I R S T L I N E T H AT I T Y P E D WA S , “ T H E R E A R E

M A N Y WAYS O F DY I N G .”

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 M D A : You know what? I never write with a lesson in mind. I just want to be
a storyteller. I tell a story. But the lessons will be there whether I like it or not.
The work will reflect my values, my moral opinions, and there will be readers
who learn something from that. There will be readers who share those values
and who will use the work to reinforce their own. Here in the U.S. my novels
are used in many courses other than literature, such as history, political
science and even religion. Obviously the academy here feels that there are
lessons to be learnt in my fiction, even though I never intended it to be, say, a
religious text. With a novel like Ways of Dying I have had people come to me
and say, “This novel changed my life.” Both black and white readers have told
me this, and initially I found it scary. I thought it was a great responsibility
that was being defined for the writer. I never thought a novel could change
a person’s life, and obviously I never had such intentions when I wrote it.
During the days of apartheid things were different, though. We wrote with
the intention of changing the system. We wanted to use art as a weapon. Our
work had to bring new insights on the condition of the oppressed and even
mobilize people against apartheid. We still have artists who see their role in
that light in a postapartheid South Africa—but this time their focus is on
nation building. As for me, I do not have a political agenda when I write a
novel, but invariably my work is highly political. Oh, yes, when I wrote my
plays, when I created popular theater that traveled in the oppressed areas of
southern Africa, I had a political agenda. The writer was also the teacher, and
theater was a way of creating community dialogue. Why is that not the case
with my novel writing? Because the novel is a genre of the elite in southern
Africa. Even if I wrote my novels in the indigenous languages of the region,
they would only be confined to an intellectual readership in educational
institutions. Unlike theater, they do not talk directly to the ordinary people.

I N T E R V I E W E R : Rob Amato, in his introduction to your collection of plays Fools,

Bells, and the Habit of Eating, coins the term Mdada-ism, which he defines as
“elusive black satire in the old and new South Africa.” How do you respond to this
idea of Mdada-ism?

MDA: Mdada-ism as in Dadaism—of course, he’s playing on that movement. I

don’t respond at all. I don’t respond to critics and scholars who write on my work.
I’m flattered, of course, that he’s identified a whole movement that he’s named
after me in the art of South Africa, particularly in theater. But then that’s all I
can say about that. If you asked me to define Mdada-ism, I would not know.

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 INTERVIEWER: Critics have said that for you, humor constitutes a central
narrative strategy in your rehabilitation of the traditional Xhosa worldview, which
you ground in contemporary issues of post-1994 South Africa. How do you see
your humor used as a narrative strategy?

M D A : I begin with characters and the place, or the place and the characters,
and then everything emerges as a result of those characters interacting with
that environment. I do not regard myself as a humorous person—I do
appreciate good humor when I hear it, but I don’t see myself as a source of
humor. I can’t even tell a simple joke. I always miss the punch line. So I’m
surprised that when I write there is all this humor. It just comes from who
the characters are, without any effort on my part When I write, I never say,
now I am becoming a humorist here; the character merely responds to a
particular situation. But because of who that character is, his or her response
becomes humorous. Indeed, in the novel I just finished writing, called The
Whale Caller, I tried to tone down this humor. But it’s difficult because
situations, characters, you know, interrupt, and presto! There it is. If, in my
creative writing lectures, my students were to ask me how to create humor in
their fiction, I couldn’t answer.
This is the case with many, many things insofar as my writing is concerned.
I’ve never been in a writing program, a writing workshop, a writing class.
I do many things in my narrative that I cannot explain, or at least I could
not explain until now. When I have to teach creative writing, I have to go
back and learn what it was that I’ve been doing all these years and what it is
called—the terminology—in order to teach these students. So perhaps there
are certain techniques that I’ve been using in my narratives that generate
humor and so on, that I have not been able to identify yet.

I N T E R V I E W E R : I know that you are working on a new book set in the Athens,
Ohio, area. Tell us about this new book.

M D A : Things happen in a very strange manner in my life. In the early ’80s,

I was a student at Ohio University, and I lived in Athens. Sometimes my
friend and I would drive to the outskirts of Parkersburg, and I would see
these little shacks where people live—I think you call them Hoovervilles. I
was fascinated that people lived there. I didn’t know who those people were.
But as I told you before, place is very important because I see it as a set on
the stage, and I think it would be interesting if I had this set and then things

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 happen on this set. What kind of things would happen on a set like this? I
see bits and pieces of stage sets all over as I walk around, and on some of the
stage sets then I locate characters, and then I have a story. I had wanted to
locate characters on that stage set of those Hoovervilles twenty years ago, but
I completed my studies and left Ohio. Sometimes I would remember those
Hoovervilles and wish I had written something about them. I never thought
that I would finally one day actually write something set in that area.
But in 2002 I returned to Athens to take up a post as a visiting associate
professor of African literature for one academic year. I’d been writing full-
time for seven years at that point, and I was used to that independence. My
books were being translated into many European languages, and some had
been translated into all the South African languages. I was a dramaturge at
one of the major theaters in Johannesburg. But my wife was rather keen on
my taking up this position because she wanted to come over here and do
her Ph.D. So I applied for the post and was quite happy when they invited
me over. But during that one year as a visiting associate professor, I thought
perhaps I should revive my ambition of writing a novel set in this area. Of
course most of my original Hoovervilles were gone, but I learnt more about
some interesting communities in this region—people who have been referred
to in sociological literature as triracial isolates, the WIN people, which stands
for White Indian Negro. They are descendents of whites, Indians and black
people, of intermarriages that happened two hundred years ago during the
days of slavery, especially during the days when the slaves were escaping. We
had the Underground Railroad, and we had a lot of Irish people who integrated
with the Indians and the Negroes. A whole new ethnic group evolved in
isolation, with its own culture. I found this a very fascinating situation. I
visited places like Kilvert, Ohio, where I met some wonderful people. And I
thought, yes, indeed, I want to write a novel set here. It’s going to be like The
Heart of Redness in two segments—we will shuttle between the historical
moment and the present. So that is the novel I’m now writing. I’m very slow
now because I have to teach and read students’ works and attend committee
meetings. It takes me one whole year to write just one novel, which makes me
the saddest person in the world. I am not complaining, though, because I do
enjoy academic life, especially at this university, my alma mater. I decided to
extend my stay here and take up a full-time position as a full professor. But
ultimately I will return to being a full-time writer again. While I’m here, I’m
jotting down notes for my new novel; I’ll research in earnest the Athens novel,
the Kilvert novel. It’s a wonderful, fascinating history. I’ve been wondering—

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 the people who live here in Athens, they live here with all this wealth—why
haven’t they done something about it? That’s a question I asked also in the
Eastern Cape, where I wrote The Heart of Redness. I know it’s because when
you live in an area, you take it for granted. That’s why, as a writer, you need to
learn how to rediscover the ordinary. I came as a stranger, and what was “the
ordinary” to the locals was new and unusual to me. And most importantly
it was magical, for the WIN people have a strong oral tradition, just like the
people I normally write about back home. That’s why it struck me at once
that there’s a wonderful novel here in this area. Yes, indeed.

“It’s actually an instant message

that got way out of hand.”

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