Zakes Mda Responds to Sandile Memela in Sunday Independent Interview

December 1st, 2009 by Tracey

The Sunday Independent’s Maureen Isaacson interviews Black Diamond author Zakes Mda, who responds to the accusations leveled at him in Sandile Memela’s recent letter against trends in black writing.

Here’s Mda on “not being a praise singer”:

BLACK DIAMOND, Zakes Mda’s new novel, presents an acid portrait of a society in moral decay.
In an interview in Joburg, Mda says he is happy that his viciousness is apparent; subject determines style, so the novel is accessible. In this it differs from The Heart of Redness (2002), The Madonna of Excelsior (2004) and The Whale Caller (2005).
Ways of Dying (1997), written at a time when people had begun to run out of time to mourn their dead and were forced to hire a professional mourner, necessitated Mda’s greatest creation, Toloki, who reappears in Cion, Mda’s penultimate novel, set in the US.
Mda’s refusal to sing praise songs to the powerful has been a consistent theme, which he traces back to his 1978 play We Shall Sing for the Fatherland, which he says foresaw the current crisis of corruption, depicted so clearly in The Heart of Redness.
In response to Memela’s letter accusing Mda, among other South African writers, of being “black racists”, he says: “It is racial arrogance to say that because I am black I can’t criticise black people. He (Memela) is being racist for criticising me because I am black. Only a fool would read that book (Black Diamond) and accuse me of being conservative.