Zakes Mda reminds me while sitting at the Grace Hotel that he doesn’t “need to be in South Africa all the time to be a participant in South Africa and its development. The world is my stage, I’m not a parochial person who needs to be here all the time in order to be a South African.”
He’s spent most of his time since 2002 in Athens, Ohio where he’s a professor in the English department at Ohio University. But the 62-year-old playwright, academic and novelist is back home for a few weeks promoting his latest novel, Black Diamond, the story of a magistrate, two threatening criminals and the bodyguard hired to protect her.
His previous novel, Cion, was a difficult and quite literary novel that saw the resurrection of Mda’s most famous character, the “professional mourner” Toloki, hero of Ways of Dying, arguably his best novel, and his transportation to the US. Black Diamond is a pretty straightforward and occasionally humorous story set in the West Rand of Joburg that began life in the wake of Cion’s success in the US.
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