As Zakes Mda's fifth novel opens, the seaside village of Hermanus is overrun with whale-watchers--foreign tourists determined to see whales in their natural habitat. But when the tourists have gone home, the whale caller lingers at the shoreline, wooing a whale he has named Sharisha with cries fr...
"A generous, patient, wry and intelligent voice...[that] suggests not just a writer who can seduce us through beautiful language and unfailing humor. We also encounter a writer who has the power to shock and frighten us, to astound and anger and unsettle us...In short, his is a voice for which on...
I have another new favorite South African novel. This one blew me away. Zakes Mda’s novel Ways of Dying is set in the early 1990s–if I had to guess, it would be 1990-1991: between the time Nelson Mandela was released from prison and when he was elected president (1994) and apartheid officially be...
A Picador Paperback OriginalThe hero of Zakes Mda's beloved Ways of Dying, Toloki, sets down with a family in Middle America and uncovers the story of the runaway slaves who were their ancestors.Toloki, the professional mourner, has come to live in America. Lured to Athens, Ohio, by an academic a...
"In The Heart of Redness Zakes Mda sets a story of South African village life against a notorious episode from the country's past. The result is a novel of great scope and deep human feeling, of passion and reconciliation." "As the novel opens, Camagu, who had left for America during apartheid, h...
Gugu and I. To see the Bee People in the Eastern Cape and my mother in Lesotho as usual. We are still in the Gauteng Province, driving towards the border with the Free State Province when I stop under a highway bridge to pick up a hitch-hiker. I have this dangerous habit of giving rides to people...
The latter was there specifically to act as Mhlontlo’s interpreter. The three men were on horseback, with Mhlontlo riding in the middle on Gcazimbane. They were resplendent in European pants, riding boots and white beaded blankets, and the two older men carried knobkerries while Malangana carried...
That’s what these designs tell me. The trees feature in them in many forms. Fine detail of the mottled bark in shades of brown and gray and green and red and blue. And in black and white. Cracked branches and hollow trunks twisted in agony. Roots exposed above the earth. Knees bent in prayer. Tre...
She has been gone for almost as long as the whales. Many rumours circulate, ranging from the mundane to the sublime. She stowed away in an oil tanker. She was seen at the Cape Town docks drinking with a bunch of Mediterranean seafaring types who took a fancy to her and persuaded her to sail the w...