Zakes Mda

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Zakes Mda (born October 6, 1948 in Herschel , Cape Province ; actually Zanemvula Kizito Gatyeni Mda ) is a South African author and playwright .

Life

childhood and education

Mda is the son of anti-apartheid activist and co-founder and president of the ANC Youth League , Ashby Peter Solomzi Mda . His mother, Nompumelelo Rose Mda, was a nurse. His full name is Zanemvula Kizito Gatyeni Mda. In his native language isiXhosa, this means something like “The one who came with the rain” or “The rainbringer”. He spent most of his childhood and youth in Soweto near Johannesburg . At the age of 13 he published his first short story in isiXhosa. After his father was imprisoned, the family had to leave South Africa in the 1960s. In Lesotho , Zakes Mda attended Peka High School in Peka and worked as a bank clerk.

Professional background

In 1983 Mda emigrated to the USA for political reasons . At Ohio University , he studied drama and mass communication , completing these studies with an MA . After returning to Lesotho, from 1985 to 1992 he worked for the television station there and as an English lecturer at the National University of Lesotho . There he headed the Theater-For-Development Project . During this time he also founded and directed the Marotholi Traveling Theater, in which students performed in front of villagers to encourage them to help themselves. In 1990 he received his doctorate on his theater work in Lesotho at the University of Cape Town . In 1991 he received a professorship in the English department at the National University of Lesotho. From 1991 to 1994 he taught as a lecturer at various universities in the USA. In 1995 he returned to South Africa and initially worked as a professor of drama at the University of the Witwatersrand . Since then he has been working as a freelance writer.

Mda made a major contribution to the development of South African theater in the 1970s and 1980s, both as a scientist and as a playwright. Only in the 1990s did Mda turn more and more to the novel form . In addition to writing, he also works as a dramaturge at the Market Theater in Johannesburg and as a painter, composer and filmmaker and heads the Southern African Multimedia AIDS Trust in Sophiatown , Johannesburg. He commutes between Johannesburg and Ohio , where he teaches as a lecturer.

Awards

  • 1978: Amstel Playwright of the Year Award for We Shall Sing for the Fatherland
  • 1979: Amstel Merit Award for The Hill
  • 1984: Christina Crawford Award of the American Theater Association for The Road
  • 1996: Olive Schreiner Prize for Drama for The Nun's Romantic Story
  • 1997: Olive Schreiner Prize and M-Net Book Prize for Ways of Dying
  • 2001: Commonwealth Writer's Prize (Africa Region) for The Heart of Redness
  • 2001: Sunday Times Fiction Award for The Heart of Redness
  • 2003: Hurston / Wright Legacy Award for The Heart of Redness .
  • 2014: Order of Ikhamanga in silver
  • 2017: Barry Ronge Fiction Prize for Little Suns

Works (selection)

  • Dark voices ring . In: Sketch (theater magazine). Johannesburg 1979.
  • Alpheus Mosenye (ed.): Bits of debris. The poetry of Zakes Mda . Thapama Books, Maseru, Lesotho 1986.
  • When people play people. Development communication through theater . Zed Books, London 1993, ISBN 1-85649-200-1 (also dissertation 1993).
  • We shall sing for the fatherland & other plays . Ravan Press, Johannesburg 1993, ISBN 0-86975-441-6 .
  • Broken dreams . 1995.
  • She plays with the darkness. A novel . Vivlia Publications, Florida Hills, Fl. 1995, ISBN 1-874-86891-3 .
  • The nun's romantic story. Tragedy . 1996.
  • Thanks auntie. A play for children . 1997.
  • Let us play. Tragedy . Vivlia Publications, Florida Hills, Fl. 1998, ISBN 1-86867-126-7 .
  • Melville 67. A novella for youth . 1998.
  • Fools, bells and the habit of eating. Satires . University Press, Johannesburg 2002, ISBN 1-86814-377-5 (Contents: The mother of all eating - You fool, how can the sky fall? - The bells of Amersfoort ).
  • The heart of redness. A novel . Picador Books, New York 2002, ISBN 0-312-42174-5 .
  • Ways of dying. A novel . Picador Books, New York 2002, ISBN 0-312-42091-9 .
  • The madonna of excelsior. Novel.
  • The whale caller. Novel.
    • The whale caller. German by Peter Torberg. Unionsverlag, Zurich 2006, ISBN 3-293-00364-8 .
  • Sometimes there is a void. Memoirs of an outsider. Macmillan, 2012, ISBN 978-1429949934 (autobiography).
  • The Zulus of New York. Penguin, 2019, ISBN 978-14-1521015-4 .

literature

  • Holger Ehling, Peter Ripken (Hrsg.): The literature of black Africa. A lexicon of the authors (Beck'sche Reihe; 1233). Beck, Munich 1997, ISBN 3-406-42033-8 .
  • Julie Wark: Who is Zakes Mda? [Interview]

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Zakes Mda: Sometimes there is a void. Memoirs of an outsider. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York 2012, ISBN 9781429949934 . Excerpts from books.google.de
  2. ↑ Elvira Ganter, Don Edkins: Marotholi: theater for another development. Village Technology Information Service, Maseru 1988, p. 3.
  3. ↑ List of recipients of the order 2014 (English), accessed on December 27, 2015
personal data
SURNAME Mda, Zakes
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Mda, Zanemvula Kizito Gatyeni (real name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION South African author and playwright
DATE OF BIRTH October 6, 1948
PLACE OF BIRTH Herschel , Cape Colony