Zakes Mda Quotes

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.

It is strange how things don’t change in these shanty towns or squatter camps or informal settlements or whatever you choose to call them.

Hymns flow into one another in unplanned but pleasant segues.

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

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.

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

We are like two hands that wash each other.

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

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.

It is not different, really, here in the city. Just like back in the village, we live our lives together as one. We know everything about everybody. We even know things that happen when we are not there; things that happen behind people’s closed doors deep in the middle of the night. We are the all-seeing eye of the village gossip. When in our orature the storyteller begins the story, ‘They say it once happened…’ we are the ‘they’. No individual owns any story. The community is the owner of the story, and it can tell it the way it deems it fit.