Prof Zakes Mda is a man who carries his homeland in him.

Despite living in America for over 40 years, the award-winning novelist, playwright, composer and painter is quintessentially South African. 

I find him reading a beaten up edition of Sowetan's sister publication Sunday Times and sipping a strong cup of coffee.

Mda, whose full name is Zanemvula Kizito Gatyeni Mda, has for the time being moved back to the country to be a visiting professor at the Johannesburg Institute for Advanced Study which falls under the University of Johannesburg (UJ). 

“I carry my South Africa with me and it lives in me, I live a South African life everywhere,” he says.

Like many children who lived through the apartheid era, Mda, who originally comes from Herschel in the Eastern Cape, moved around the world after he was born into the belly of apartheid in 1948.

The remnants of this nomad life casually seep into our tête-à-tête, as he switches between speaking in English, Xhosa and Sotho.

“I was born in the Eastern Cape and went to school in Dobsonville (Soweto), Lesotho, Switzerland and England. We were refugees in those days, so we were all over the place.”

Mda says when he left the country for the first time as a teenager in 1963 to follow his activist father into safety, he was mostly sad about leaving behind his friends and girlfriend.

“I don’t think I have disconnected with SA even though I live abroad. I write about SA and I am even more connected [to SA] than someone who is here all the time because when you are in a distance you are able to view something more critically.”

This criticism of SA has allowed Mda to write some of the most critically acclaimed novels and plays including Ways of Dying and The Madonna of Excelsior.

Relatively new in the world of novels after being a successful playwright in the 70s and 80s, Mda decided to delve into novels and tried to get his book, Ways of Dying, published in 1990, but it was rejected by a publishing house which criticised it as a “feminist diatribe”.

“I was in America at Yale University as a visiting fellow when I finished it. I sent it to Heinemann books for their African writers series; these were series by different African writers like Chinua Achebe...I sent it (Ways of Dying) to them and they rejected it and said it's feminist diatribe.

“I was offended but there was nothing I could do. I continued to write my plays because I was an established playwright then and this was my first novel. My poor novel just ended up sitting in my wardrobe.” 

This book was hugely well received when it was published in 1995 by Oxford University Press.

“This book becomes very famous and is winning awards and then there was an award called the Noma award and it’s chosen as the best novel in the English or Anglophone Africa [As a runner-up to overall prize]. The judge was the very same guy from the publishing house which said my book was a feminist diatribe,” he says.

Mda, who is now 74, says he always knew he would become a painter and a writer and that the San people are the earliest influences of his paintings. 

“I knew I wanted to write quite early on from when I was six years old. But I was also painting and drawing, which was my first love. In December I would go home to the Eastern Cape in the mountains and there were caves where the San people had painted and we would draw on the walls and we didn’t know it was vandalism of these museums of ancient people.”

The thespian is aware that he has lived a life that many artists can only dream of.

“My story is that of a lucky writer. Many writers are rejected because rejection is the staple of being a writer. It is something that you should expect.”  

Mda says he is inspired my many things when he writes and paints, including dreams, places he has been to and weird conversations he has had with strangers.

He has over the past few years delved deeper into his painting, holding exhibitions in America and SA and is even working on an animation with his son and daughter.

“I don’t write messages, I’m a storyteller, even in my paintings they are a narrative art. I never approach any form of writing by thinking of what message I want to pass in the story, sometimes I do not know and some reader will discover it through interpretation.”

Looking back at his illustrious life, Mda does not have many regrets but does wish he had made different choices in his relationships. 

“I am happy the way things happened but that does not mean that there will be no regrets. I am sure there have been regrets but I do not dwell on them...some of them may be that I wish that I made different choices in relationships and marriages.”

He said he is heartbroken about how SA has turned out. 

“My generation, we who fought for this freedom, we came back and messed up the country and we became thieves, incompetent and inefficient.

“It’s (SA) gone to the dogs and we are responsible for that because there are no consequences and there is a culture of impunity.”