Keynote Speaker Zakes Mda

Thursday, April 9, 2009
4-5:00 pm
Flohr Lecture Hall
Clark Memorial Library

Zakes Mda, Professor of English at Ohio University, received his Ph.D. from University of Cape Town in 1990. Dr. Mda is an accomplished South African novelist, playwright, and poet; his work, which reflects the tensions between African tradition and modern consumer culture, has received numerous awards.  

Dr. Mda was born Zanemvula Kizito Gatyeni Mda in Herschel, South Africa. His father was imprisoned for his anti-Apartheid activism, and the family left South Africa shortly thereafter. Dr. Mda returned to South Africa thirty-two years later and served as Professor of Drama at the University of the Witwatersrand. He continues to stage plays at the Market Theatre in Johannesburg.

Dr. Mda has published many novels, including The Madonna of Excelsior (Oxford University Press, 2002), which received the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award in 2005, The Heart of Redness (Farar, Strauss and Giroux, 2002), which was awarded the Commonwealth Writers Prize and the Sunday Times Fiction Prize. One of his latest works, Cion (2007), is a narrative about Toloki, the hero from his previous novel Ways of Dying (Picador, 2002) whose interaction with a local quilting group in Athens, Ohio, uncovers a story of two local slaves and their journey toward freedom.

Additionally, Dr. Mda has published approximately thirty plays, which stylistically weave together traditional African oral tradition with magical realism. He has been recognized for The Hill (1980), which won an Amstel Playwright of the Year Award, and We Shall sing for the Fatherland (1979), which received special merit in the Amstel Playwright of the Year Award. The Plays of Zakes Mda (1990) has been translated into the eleven official languages of South Africa.

 Dr. Mda’s lecture, entitled “Write What You Don’t Know,” will combine a reading from his novel Cion with a discussion of the factors that influenced his writing as well as the methods he used to gather material for the novel.