Zakes Mda Has Spent a Lifetime Turning Memory Into Art

In 1974, Zakes Mda found himself helping to load the boot of Gilbert Hani’s Volkswagen Beetle in Mafeteng, Lesotho.

More than half a century later, he has written the authorised biography of Gilbert’s son.

Chris Hani: A Life of Courage and Compassion, released in 2026, brings Mda back to a history he did not encounter from a distance. But while Chris Hani is the subject of his latest book, memory has been one of Mda’s subjects for much longer.

Born Zanemvula Kizito Gatyeni Mda in 1948, he grew up with politics inside the household. His father, A.P. Mda, was a leading figure in the ANC Youth League who later became involved in the formation of the Pan Africanist Congress. Political persecution eventually pushed the family into exile in Lesotho.

Mda himself became politically active while still young. But another language for understanding the world was developing alongside politics: art.

### Before the novels

Long before Ways of Dying made him internationally known as a novelist, Mda was writing plays.

Theatre became a way of confronting politics, inequality and community life, and his work eventually extended into theatre-for-development — using performance not simply to entertain communities, but to allow people to examine the conditions in which they lived.

Then, in the early 1990s, came a change.

While at Yale, Mda bought an old IBM computer from a student. He had long wanted to write a novel but doubted whether he could sustain prose. On Christmas Day in 1992, while looking after his infant son, he began trying.

The experiment became Ways of Dying.

More novels followed: The Heart of Redness, The Madonna of Excelsior, The Whale Caller, Cion and others. Across them, Mda repeatedly returned to history, land, colonialism, mythology and the uncomfortable space where the stories a country tells about itself collide with the lives of ordinary people.

That makes his decision to write about Chris Hani feel less like a departure than a continuation.

### The other Zakes Mda

There is also a Zakes Mda who paints.

His visual work draws from traditions including Basotho litema and lipatrone while engaging influences from expressionism and Cubism. Characters and ideas do not necessarily remain trapped in the medium in which Mda first imagined them. Literature can become painting; history can become theatre; lived experience can become visual language.

In 2026, that side of his work became particularly visible through Blessed by the Bees, an exhibition exploring memory, labour, community and identity.

The bees are not merely metaphorical.

Mda is also a beekeeper and has been associated for decades with rural beekeeping work in the Eastern Cape.

It is an unusual combination until you look at the rest of his life. Mda has rarely kept his worlds neatly separated.

Writer. Playwright. Painter. Academic. Composer. Political exile. Beekeeper.

Each seems to find its way into another.

### Turning Hani back into a person

Now, at 78, Mda has turned his attention to a man South Africa has spent more than three decades turning into a symbol.

Chris Hani was assassinated in 1993, at a moment when South Africa’s political future remained dangerously uncertain. In death, the revolutionary, communist leader and military commander became an icon.

But icons have a problem: the larger they become, the easier it is to lose the human being underneath.

Chris Hani: A Life of Courage and Compassion attempts to recover that person.

Mda’s research draws on Hani’s family, comrades and political contemporaries, following him from rural Cofimvaba through political awakening, armed struggle, exile and the negotiations that preceded democracy.

It also looks beyond the revolutionary image.

There was a young Chris Hani who had been an altar boy and once considered the priesthood. There was a son, husband, father, intellectual, friend and political figure operating inside movements that were themselves filled with disagreements and competing personalities.

For Mda, reconstructing that world also means confronting the limitations of memory. People living through exile and liberation were not necessarily preserving their lives for future historians. Records are incomplete. Memories conflict. Myth grows in the spaces between them.

And Mda knows something about those memories because parts of the history overlap with his own.

More than fifty years separate the young Zakes Mda helping Gilbert Hani with his Volkswagen in Lesotho and the writer now launching an authorised biography of Gilbert’s son.

Between those moments came exile, theatre, novels, paintings, bees, universities, political change and several versions of South Africa.

Perhaps that is why the new book feels so naturally placed within Mda’s larger body of work.

He has spent a lifetime returning to the places where history becomes story and story becomes memory.

This time, instead of creating another character, he has taken one of South Africa’s biggest political symbols and gone looking for the person underneath.