Zakes Mda on Tarzanification, Wakandasation and African storification
- Wits University
Africans need to do more to counter the Africa imagined by America, says acclaimed novelist Zakes Mda.
The multi-award winning author, scriptwriter, painter and academic delivered the keynote address at the Faculty of Humanities graduation ceremony at Wits University, where he was awarded an honorary doctorate in literature in recognition of his contribution to South Africa and the world’s cultural and literary sphere.
The Africa story told through the imaginations of others has produced potent narratives that even Africans have imbibed as truth.
Citing some of the popular fiction and comics which have spawned movies including Tarzan, Wakanda and the Lion King, Mda said “the Tarzanisation of Africa was so hegemonic that to this day Africans themselves refer to the lion as the king of the jungle. Much against their own experience of lions and their habitat.”
Lions inhabit the savanna and grasslands not the jungle as commonly understood and propagated.
Mda recounted how they, as children, cheered “the Africa of America’s imagination with great relish. In similar stories over the ages, we cheer when white hero beats to oblivion hordes of black brainless savages. We did not realise that those savages were us.”
“Storification is so powerful, it can make us enemies of our own selves without realising it.”
He appealed to graduates to do more in telling African stories that reflect authentic African realities, regardless of whether they aspire to be writers.
He expressed concern about the danger facing the current generation as they look to Hollywood for their identity and validation. “The Tarzanification of Africa has morphed into a Wakandasation,” he said, and stressed the importance of local stories in shaping identity, world perception and connections.
Although popularly known for contemporary literature, Mda has also written children’s books and his latest novel AROLA, a journey into ten ancient African civilizations is an effort correct the ‘American’ script.
“It is important to the African child, both on the continent and the diaspora, to internalise a new mindset that we have not always been slaves. Our history does not begin with slavery and colonisation.”
In conclusion, he said he hopes Witsies “will remember to restore the lion to savannas. To return the noble beast back to the plains and grasslands".
Citation: Prof. Zanemvula Kizito Gatyeni (Zakes) Mda
Born in 1948 in the Herschel District of the Eastern Cape, Zanemvula Kizito Gatyeni (Zakes) Mda grew up in Orlando and then Dobsonville, Soweto. His father was a vocal opponent of apartheid, first as a member of the African National Congress Youth League, and later as a founding member of the Pan- African Congress. In 1963, following his arrest for political activities, he and his family left South Africa to live in political exile in Lesotho.
It was when he was at Peka High School in Lesotho that the young Zakes Mda first tried his hand at playwriting. His first plays were indebted to the pathfinding works of Gibson Kente, both in their use of music and dance and their melodramatic tropes. From the 1966 production of Dead End (published only in 1978), Mda began to refine his approach to the conjunction of political and existential theatre. In 1976, he received his first degree, a Bachelor of Fine Arts from the International Academy of Arts and Letters in Zurich, Switzerland. He went on to complete an MA in Fine Arts (drama, radio and television) at Ohio University and a PhD at the University of Cape Town.
Mda’s mature plays are remarkable for their stark settings and their presentation of characters engaged in the unyielding struggle to secure the means of life and to have their humanity recognized. His best-known plays, performed in the late-1980s, are We Shall Sing of the Fatherland, The Hill, Joys of War and The Girls in Their Sunday Dresses. Each explores, in a distinct register, the limbo situation of the colonised caught between structural social violence and the individual’s endeavour to refuse its internalisation. They combine to form one of the most creative engagements with the familial, social and psychic consequences of colonial oppression and migrancy. Mda’s plays can be understood as highly significant anti-Apartheid works and an invaluable contribution to the decolonization of theatre more generally.
As a playwright-director, Mda understands community theatre as political activism. He has always advocated that drama should be understood as a social activity that is available to everyone. Most of his works foreground the actor and are not dependent on lights, costumes or sets, which has made it possible to travel to the most remote of locations without compromising the plays.
In 1991, Mda was writer-in-residence at the University of Durham, during 1992, he was a visiting research fellow in the Southern African Research Program at Yale and in the following year, he taught African literature and theatre at the University of Vermont. He returned to South Africa in 1994 to take up a visiting professorship in Dramatic Art at the University of the Witwatersrand.
Zakes Mda established his reputation as one South Africa’s preeminent novelists with the publication of both She Plays with the Darkness and Ways of Dying in 1995. As one of the first writers to face and address the complexities of the post-1990 transition, his fiction not only became the subject of widespread scholarly comment, it was also quickly taken up in secondary and tertiary institutions. Ways of Dying was awarded the M-Net Book Prize in 1997 and has been translated into twenty-one languages, the most recent being Turkish.
Since 1995, Mda has published a succession of novels that have received favourable comment and have won an array of prizes. Perhaps the most highly regarded is The Heart of Redness. Among other accolades, The Heart of Redness was awarded the Commonwealth Writer’s Prize: Africa, the Hurston- Wright Legacy Award and the Sunday Times Fiction Prize. There is undoubtedly an understanding that Mda’s plays and his novels constitute a body of work that scholars will always place at the centre of apartheid and post-apartheid literature. If we think of our literature as constituted at the intersection of social awareness and aesthetic exploration, Mda’s sustained endeavour is a lens through which we can discern its possibilities. His work has expanded our sense of what it means to be South African, how one can enter a literary dialogue with global concerns, and how ideas and insights can be translated across genres and modes of cultural practice. As the increasing number of serious studies of his work attests, we are still coming to terms with all that he has written, and we are all privileged to be making this journey.
It is therefore befitting that the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, bestow an Honorary Doctorate Degree on Zakes Mda in acknowledgment of his contribution to South Africa and the world’s cultural and literary sphere.