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Authors: Zakes Mda

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During this period I also travelled abroad extensively, giving readings and lectures and participating at literary festivals. For instance,
I took a group of writers to Reykjavik, Iceland, where we attended and conducted workshops on writing for children with writers from Norway, Denmark, Finland and Sweden. Since I was organising this event I made a point of having writers who roughly represented the demographic groups of South Africa. One of the writers was my former colleague at the National University of Lesotho who was at that time a civil servant in Bloemfontein, Mpapa Mokhoane. Together we wrote
Penny and Puffy
, which I illustrated. It was published by Aeskan in Reykjavik. We repeated these workshops in Cape Town, with most of the writers participating again.
Among the many countries I visited was the United Kingdom where I was on tour with other writers, including Ama Ata Aidoo whose short stories and plays I enjoyed when I was a high school student. I had been with her before in Germany with Ngugi wa Thiong'o, and somewhere else, I don't recall where exactly, with Miriam Tlali and Buchi Emecheta. Maybe it was Germany again on another occasion. Come to think of it, I have been to many places with these more mature and more powerful African women writers. Somehow organisers of literary events always harnessed me with them. But what makes me recall this particular case with fondness was an incident that took place in Bath where we had a reading.
When we arrived at the venue we found that there were posters all over the place of a charity organisation that was asking for donations; the funds would be used to educate the children of Africa. I was quite uncomfortable with this, though I said nothing about it. When we were about to take the stage the organisers told us that, before we began, the charity organisation would like to make a brief speech asking for donations. I found it very embarrassing that they were using us for fund-raising purposes when they had not told us anything about it. When they invited us to their festival they hadn't mentioned anything about fund-raising. But I would not have said anything; I would just have gone along with it, even though I was unhappy about it. I wouldn't have wanted to be ungracious to our hosts. But not Ama Ata Aidoo. She put her foot down and said no, we hadn't come to England to beg for anyone's money.
‘But it is for a good cause,' said the white-haired lady from the charity. ‘We pay for many children who would otherwise have no opportunity for education
…
especially girl children.'
Ama Ata Aidoo was not impressed.
‘Why don't African governments educate African children?' she asked. ‘Why should that be the role of English people?'
I could have kissed her. But, of course, that would have been too forward. We treat our elders with respect. We don't just grab them and kiss them, even when they have said something brilliant.
‘African countries are poor,' said the woman frantically. ‘They don't have enough money for education.'
‘Oh, no, they have the money, but they don't spend it on education because they know that you are there with your charity,' she said. ‘You will educate their children for them.'
She knew what she was talking about, this wonderful Ama Ata Aidoo. She had been the Minister of Education in Ghana. She knew of the millions that went to the military instead of to education and health services. And of those other millions that went into the Swiss bank accounts of corrupt leaders. She couldn't last as a cabinet minister because she was too honest and frank to be a politician.
Thanks to Ama Ata Aidoo, we did not become writers with begging bowls that evening. She was indeed an African leader after my own heart. I had written extensively – and also in my book
When People Play People
– against the dependency mentality that had been created by Western aid to developing countries. I am not talking here of humanitarian assistance when there are disasters and occasional catastrophes, but of regular aid that went into the day-to-day survival of the country. I have noted in some of my writings, and in the same book, that food aid from America and the European community has smothered to death the agricultural sector in a country like Lesotho. The peasant farmers have no incentive to produce food from their patches of land because more food will come from America or from the Food and Agricultural Organization of the United Nations.
Another trip that stands out in my mind was to Chile, where I was on a literary tour of Santiago, Valdivia and Valparaiso with South African
writers Nadine Gordimer, Wally Serote and André Brink; Chilean writers Ariel Dorfman and Antonio Skármeta; and Australian writers Peter Carey, Helen Garner and Roberta Sykes. In addition to these writers, we were accompanied throughout the tour by a man who was introduced to us as Gordimer's official biographer, Ronald Suresh Roberts.
During this tour we were entertained by government ministers and presidents of universities. We spent some time at the home of the late poet Pablo Neruda and also visited Salvador Allende's wife, Hortensia Bussi Allende, and their daughter, Isabel Allende – not the Isabel Allende who is the author of magical realist novels. I stress this because when I came back to South Africa and wrote an article about this trip for the
Mail & Guardian
the woman who was editing it argued with me, saying that I was wrong, the magical realist novelist and the Allende daughter I met were one and the same person. Yet I was the one who had met these people in Chile! I knew what I was talking about. When the article was published the editor had left out the contentious relationships. The main thrust of my article, however, was the Mapuche people, the natives of Chile, and their struggle to regain their land. I met a Mapuche writer in Valdivia who told me how his people were marginalised by the broader Chilean society and how they had suffered under General Pinochet, and continued to suffer under the new democratic government.
One thing that moved me on this trip was a visit to the Avenue of Memory at the General Cemetery where the remains of Salvador Allende had been transferred in 1990 after lying for almost twenty years in a private grave in Santa Ines Cemetery at Vina del Mar. The General Cemetery is truly the city of the dead with towering tombs, some of which are multi-storey. We stood at Allende's grave and observed a moment of silence. People came, prayed for him and left. But one man broke down and cried. Ariel Dorfman reached for him and embraced him. They sobbed in each other's arms. Ariel didn't know who the man was, nor did the man have a clue who Ariel was. They were just two Chilean men sharing their grief at events that happened two and a half decades ago, but that had left untold suffering that would be felt in Chile for generations. Some of the writers standing around Allende's tomb, including me, couldn't help but shed tears as well.
It is one of the images that lived with me long after I returned to South Africa.
When a Chilean cabinet minister visited South Africa I was invited to the banquet given for him in Pretoria. That's where I had a very brief chat to Nelson Mandela. We didn't talk about the letter that I wrote him or some of the snide remarks I made about his being ‘economical with the truth' in his statements in praise of a dead Sani Abacha. Instead he asked me: ‘Tell me, Zakes Mda, are you one of the twins?'
‘No, the twins are my younger brothers, Sonwabo and Monwabisi,' I said.
‘Oh, yes, you were the quiet one,' he said. I thought he would add:
how did you become so vocal?
But he didn't.
Obviously, I had not made much impression on him when I lived at his house forty-four years before, but the twins had. I can understand that; I was a reserved, introverted little boy.
 
Now, let me tell you ow I had a falling-out with my publishers, Oxford University Press. It started when I wanted to have an agent after a Japanese publisher to whom I had submitted
Ways of Dying
, hoping he would get it translated and published in Japanese, advised me of an agency in London, Blake Friedmann, which represented a number of South African writers. I wrote to one of the partners, Carole Blake, who told me her company was keen to represent me. In fact, she said, a member of the agency, Isobel Dixon, had approached Oxford University Press enquiring as to whether I didn't need their representation, and my publishers turned her down. I was offended when I heard this. Who the hell did they think they were to turn an agent down without consulting me? Did they think they owned me or something?
I immediately engaged the services of Isobel Dixon as my agent. My publishers opposed the move because they said they were capable of looking after my interests without an agent. I only realised at that point that they owned all the rights to the two books they had published,
Ways of Dying
and
The Heart of Redness
. I owned nothing of those books. They wanted to continue in the same vein with all the books I was going to publish with them. The contract that I had signed with
them placed me in their bondage, so that they had the right of first refusal for my next book, and it was going to be like that for each book I wrote in perpetuity. That's what happens when, as a new writer, you are just happy that a publisher is interested in your work and you sign a contract blindly. You may not even be aware that the terms are always negotiable, it is never a matter of take it or leave it, and you don't have to sell your soul to get published. I had sold mine and they were the sole decision makers on my work.
No wonder they didn't want me to have an agent.
I had a protracted email correspondence with Daphne Paizee, the publishing director of Oxford University Press, which ultimately turned very acrimonious. She was adamant that they would not tolerate my having an agent because that would eat into their heavy investment in me and my work, and I was insisting that an agent would in fact broaden the market, bringing in greater returns for their investment. She told me that my prospective agent had ‘painted a rosy picture' because there was nothing she could do for me that they were not already doing. And yet they were not able to market my work abroad. Even the French and Spanish translations of
Ways of Dying
were due to my own efforts when I was travelling in Europe. I wrote:
You people failed to market my work even inside South Africa! Every day I get phone calls from people who are looking for my books in the bookstores but can't find them. I don't think you know how to deal with the book trade. I think your expertise begins and ends with the academic trade.
There was this sort of back and forth for months, with Paizee at one stage telling me that I seemed to be ungrateful for all they had done for me. I took great offence at that because I didn't think they had done me a favour. Publishing my work was a business deal from which they benefited. I was getting desperate because I wanted to see my work all over the world. I offered them a 50:50 split if they agreed that the two novels, for which they held all the rights, be represented by an agent. Paizee finally wrote:
We will agree to an agent taking over the sale of UK and USA English rights as well as the remaining translation rights on
Ways of Dying
and
The Heart of Redness
. We also accept your offer of a 50:50 split on income from the sale of these rights as our costings assumed additional rights income and the agent you have appointed charges quite a high commission.
I responded with a tinge of bitterness:
It is a pity that you only agreed to engage this agent after offering you a 50:50 split – an unheard of thing. But it is fine with me. As long as my books, which certainly deserve a much wider readership than you have been able to muster, reach the important markets.
I had learnt a hard lesson that I hope new writers will also learn from reading this. It is a cut-throat world out there and, whatever happens, make sure that you own the rights to your own work. Today I own the rights of all my novels except
Ways of Dying
and
The Heart of Redness
. Someone else who doesn't have my interests at heart owns those. For instance, many translators and local publishers have been keen to have
The Heart of Redness
published in Afrikaans, but the owners of the rights of my novel have consistently refused to give them the rights because they say it is not in their interests, even though it would be in my interests as a writer to have Afrikaners read my work in their language.
When the agent, Isobel Dixon, who originally came from the Eastern Cape but now worked in London, visited Johannesburg I sent my son Neo to pick her up from Melville in my car and to bring her to my house for lunch. I was dazzled by her beauty and her youthfulness, and I told her so. She got a bit worried that perhaps I thought because of her youth she might not be able to handle my business.
‘Oh, no,' I said. ‘That's not what I mean. In fact, I think you'll do excellently. I am a man of art, I love beauty. It will be my pleasure to work with you.'
She had already read some chapters of
The Madonna of Excelsior
and she told me frankly that she didn't think it would do well. People did not want to read about the apartheid period, she said. She was, instead, looking forward to
The Whale Caller
; I had told her of my plans to write it, but I had not yet written a single line.
I was not deterred about
The Madonna of Excelsior
. I knew I was on to something there. It became the only one of my novels to be on the South African best-seller list. I was right. Isobel later sent me an email to admit that she was wrong. This is another lesson for young writers: always take the advice of others to heart, be they ordinary readers or experts in the literary field. But when you have faith in your creation do not be deterred. I had only written a few chapters of the novel when I received discouraging comments from my well-meaning agent who was looking after my interests and wanted me to be the best that I could be. I could easily have given up on that novel right there. But I was confident that I was on the right track, and it did finally pay off.

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