Zakes Mda Quotes

For instance, when the Whale Caller wants to consummate relationship with his wife, images of whale interfere at the moment of ex- citement and he goes limp

You have always been good at creating beautiful things with your hands.

The villagers will actually lose more than they will gain from the few jobs that will be created. Very little of the money that is made here will circulate in the village.

Camagu has no heart to tell her that Athens is a college town that is even smaller than the nearby town of Butterworth*.

We go for what we call a joll. All it means is that we engage in an orgy of drinking, raping, and stabbing one another with knives and shooting one another with guns.

By the time he has finished, every inch of the walls is covered with bright pictures – a wallpaper of sheer luxury.

When they believe all the children are asleep, they want to be pleasured. The next day they wake up and continue with their empty theories.

You see, they say they are fighting for freedom, yet they are no different from the tribal chief and his followers. They commit atrocities as well.

The Cult of the Unbelievers began with Twin-Twin. Bhonco Ximiya’s ancestor, in the days of the Prophetess Nongqawuse almost one hundred and fifty years ago. The revered Twin-Twin had elevated unbelieving to the heights of religion.”

They do not like to be called squatters. How can we be squatters on our land, in our own country? Squatters are those who came from across the sea to steal our land

In those days, they did not allow people of his colour onto any of the beaches of the city, so he could not carry out his ablutions there, as he does today.

They rig Sharisha with dynamite. [...] the emergency workers place more than five hundred kilograms of dynamite in all the strategie places, especially close to Sharisha's head.
Like a high priest in a ritual sacrifice a man stands over a contraption that is connected to the whale with a long red cable. With all due solemnity he triggers the explosives. Sharisha goes up in a gigantic baU of smoke and flame. [...] [The Whale Caller] is looking intently at the red, yellow and white flames as Sharisha rises in the sky. It is like Guy Fawkes fireworks

Funerals were held only on Saturday and Sunday mornings those days, because death was not as prevalent then as it is at present.

Yes, Bhonco carries the scars that were inflicted on his great-grandfather, Twin-Twin, by men who flogged him after he had been identified as a wizard by Prophet Mlanjeni, the Man of the River. Every first boy-child in subsequent generations of Twin-Twin’s tree is born with the scars.”

Lunga Tubu's voice coming from the waves, singing a Pavarotti song," he muses wistfully that "maybe one day Pavarotti will adopt him"