Zakes Mda

Zanemvula Kizito Gatyeni "Zakes" Mda (born 1948) is a South African novelist, poet and playwright.

Quotes

Ways of Dying (1995)

• It is not different, really, here in the city. Just like back in the village, we live our lives together as one. We know everything about everybody. We even know things that happen when we are not there; things that happen behind people’s closed doors deep in the middle of the night. We are the all-seeing eye of the village gossip. When in our orature the storyteller begins the story, ‘They say it once happened…’ we are the ‘they’. No individual owns any story. The community is the owner of the story, and it can tell it the way it deems it fit.
  • Page 12.

• We go for what we call a joll. All it means is that we engage in an orgy of drinking, raping, and stabbing one another with knives and shooting one another with guns.
  • Page 20.

• You have always been good at creating beautiful things with your hands.
  • Page 67.

• We are like two hands that wash each other.
  • Page 69.

• By the time he has finished, every inch of the walls is covered with bright pictures – a wallpaper of sheer luxury.
  • Page 111.

• In those days, they did not allow people of his colour onto any of the beaches of the city, so he could not carry out his ablutions there, as he does today.
  • Page 112.

• Funerals were held only on Saturday and Sunday mornings those days, because death was not as prevalent then as it is at present.
  • Page 136.

• Hymns flow into one another in unplanned but pleasant segues.
  • Page 136.

• It is strange how things don’t change in these shanty towns or squatter camps or informal settlements or whatever you choose to call them.
  • Page 138.

• You see, they say they are fighting for freedom, yet they are no different from the tribal chief and his followers. They commit atrocities as well.
  • Page 167.

• Men, on the other hand, tend to cloud their heads with pettiness and vain pride. They sit all day and dispense wide-ranging philosophies on how things should be. With great authority in their voices, they come up with wise theories on how to put the world right. Then at night they demand to be given food, as if the food just walked into the house on its own. *When they believe all the children are asleep, they want to be pleasured. The next day they wake up and continue with their empty theories.
  • Page 176.

• When they believe all the children are asleep, they want to be pleasured. The next day they wake up and continue with their empty theories.
  • Page 176.

The Heart of Redness (2000)

• Bhonco is different from the other Unbelievers in his family, for Unbelievers are reputed to be such somber people that they do not believe even in those things that can bring happiness to their lives. They spend most of their time moaning about past injustices and bleeding for the world that would have been had the folly of belief not seized the nation a century and a half ago and spun it around until it was in a woozy stupor that is felt to this day.”
  • Chapter 1, Page 3

• The Cult of the Unbelievers began with Twin-Twin. Bhonco Ximiya’s ancestor, in the days of the Prophetess Nongqawuse almost one hundred and fifty years ago. The revered Twin-Twin had elevated unbelieving to the heights of religion.”
  • Chapter 1, Page 5.

• Yes, Bhonco carries the scars that were inflicted on his great-grandfather, Twin-Twin, by men who flogged him after he had been identified as a wizard by Prophet Mlanjeni, the Man of the River. Every first boy-child in subsequent generations of Twin-Twin’s tree is born with the scars.”
  • Chapter 1, Page 13.

• • The beautiful men and women in glass displays did not like the Camagus of this world. They were a threat to their luxury German sedans, housing allowances, and expense accounts.
  • Page 30

• Camagu has no heart to tell her that Athens is a college town that is even smaller than the nearby town of Butterworth*.
  • page 65

• The villagers will actually lose more than they will gain from the few jobs that will be created. Very little of the money that is made here will circulate in the village.
  • page 238-9.

The Whale Caller (2005)

• The boats are now restored to their former glory as a reminder of a bygone era and bygone manual practices so that present and future generations can see how fishermen of the old endured the stormy seas in small open boats powered by their own muscles.
  • Page 2.

• Conversely, Noria’s memory of the village is the pale herd boys, with mucus hang- ing from the nostrils, looking after cattle whose ribs you could count, on barren hills with sparse grass and shrups. The lean cattle and barren hills are partly result of overgrazing, which is in turn due to shortage of land for black people.
  • page 23.

• They do not like to be called squatters. How can we be squatters on our land, in our own country? Squatters are those who came from across the sea to steal our land
  • Page 42.

• For instance, when the Whale Caller wants to consummate relationship with his wife, images of whale interfere at the moment of ex- citement and he goes limp
  • Page 74.

• He has neither touched a whale nor even Sharisha, except with his spirit - with his horn. He knows absolutely that this boat-based whale watching will be abused
  • Pages 118-19.

• They rig Sharisha with dynamite. [...] the emergency workers place more than five hundred kilograms of dynamite in all the strategie places, especially close to Sharisha's head.
  Like a high priest in a ritual sacrifice a man stands over a contraption that is connected to the whale with a long red cable. With all due solemnity he triggers the explosives. Sharisha goes up in a gigantic baU of smoke and flame. [...] [The Whale Caller] is looking intently at the red, yellow and white flames as Sharisha rises in the sky. It is like Guy Fawkes fireworks
  • Page 205.

• Yet there is nothing that rises, phoenix-like, out of the ashes. All the Whale Caller can do at the scene of the explosion is sit "silent and still as blubber rains on him. Until he is completely larded with it"
  • Page 205

• Lunga Tubu's voice coming from the waves, singing a Pavarotti song," he muses wistfully that "maybe one day Pavarotti will adopt him"
  • Page 210.