Launching
Zakes Mda – Guest Speaker
Thursday 7th March at 12 noon for 12h30
The Grill Room at Kelvin Grove
We are privileged to have celebrated author Zakes Mda with us at our next get together.
He was born in the Eastern Cape but spent his early childhood in Soweto, finishing his schooling in Lesotho. He commutes between the USA, where he is Professor Emeritus at Ohio University, and South Africa, where he is Extraordinary Professor of English at the University of the Western Cape; a beekeeper in the Eastern Cape (running a project he established in 2000 with rural women), and a director of NeoZane, an animation film production company. He is also an Honorary Patron of the Market Theatre and the Jozi Book Fair.
He is a prolific writer of novels, plays, poems and articles for academic journals and newspapers. His writing has been translated into twenty languages. Mda is a recipient of South Africa’s Order of Ikhamanga. In 2017 his novel Little Suns won the Barry Ronge Fiction Prize.
THE BOOK
Zakes Mda’s glorious new novel draws on the true history of ‘Farini’s Friendly Zulus’, men who were taken to Britain and then to America as performing curiosities. The novel opens in 1885 with the hero, Em-Pee, in wintry New York, contemplating with distaste the melodramatic ‘savage’
performance of ‘The Wild Zulu’, in stark contrast to his own true history, so little understood here: His Zulu colleagues call him Mpi, which has become Em-Pee to the English-speakers.’ His true name is not the only loss in this far, foreign country, and he is seen as little more than a freak show
act – though at least he is not kept in a cage like the beautiful Dinka Princess, with her gold-painted Papier-mâché crown, and a patchwork cape of Mink, Otter and Kodiak fur. For Em-Pee, it is love at first sight; though she is not free to love anyone back…
So begins one of Zakes Mda’s most striking stories, a short novel but one that packs a powerful punch and will stir up strong feeling in its depiction of terrible, real injustices and indignities, while at the same time also celebrating the vigour and ingenuity of the creative spirit, and the transformative power of love.
