Sometimes There Is a Void

by Zakes Mda

  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.

  Acquiring this lovely agent was one of the best things that happened in my life as an artist. Yvonne Vera, who had fallen deeply in love with The Heart of Redness and called it ‘our novel’, told me that her books were published in America by Farrar, Straus and Giroux and were doing well. I asked Isobel to contact them immediately, and in no time she had clinched a deal with them. At the time I didn’t know they were such a prestigious publishing house. They were going to publish Ways of Dying and The Heart of Redness. I was honoured when a New York editor, Paul Elie, and his wife came to my house in Johannesburg to finalise things. I took them to the Market Theatre, but I don’t remember what play we saw.

  If it was a local play you can be sure that I had something to do with the process of its development. I was continuing as a dramaturge of this great theatre, and enjoying working with writers to develop their plays for production. I worked with Xoli Norman, a younger writer who was also a trumpeter, who had shown much talent in my workshops, and with the Tony Award winning actor John Kani, who I convinced to write his own play after a series of collaborations with Athol Fugard which were wrongly being attributed to Fugard alone. There was also Ntshiyeng Sithe, a young woman who was making her name with her brutally honest plays, and Percy Mtwa. You may remember Percy as a co-creator of some wonderful theatre with Mbongeni Ngema and Barney Simon. While working with him on his new play, I discovered that he was quite a sensitive soul. His theatre was far more intelligent than Mbongeni Ngema’s; that’s why Percy was less successful.

  But even outside the structures of the Market Theatre I continued to work with playwrights. I helped, for instance, in the development of a single-hander by our award-winning actress Motshabi Tyelele, which she continues to perform at various venues to this day.

  I was also involved in television production at this time. I had established a company called Thapama Productions in partnership with a musician who had a long-running radio show on SAfm, The African Connection, on music from Africa and the diaspora, and a former PAC cadre who had been exiled in Kenya where he became involved in a number of Hollywood movie productions that were shot in that country. Thapama produced The African Connection as a successful television show for the South African Broadcasting Corporation. But I am afraid we ran the company like a spaza shop – a township tuck shop. The musician partner travelled abroad extensively, spending weeks on end in France getting videos he could easily have sourced from South Africa. When the SABC paid out for a season he doled out all the money to us – with the lion’s share for himself – as ‘dividends’, without keeping proper books or investing some of it in the company. And, stupidly, I just sat back and let him do that. Soon the company was in debt and there were no new contracts forthcoming from the SABC because I had put my foot down that we would not pay the bribes that the commissioning staff of the national broadcaster demanded from producers.

  But I didn’t give up on television altogether. I wrote scripts whenever I was commissioned to do so. Shane Mahabier and his partner Saths Cooper commissioned me to write scripts for a police drama series titled Behind the Badge. I was surprised when the thirteen-part series was screened that I was not credited as the writer but as some peripheral person. Clearly South African television was another cut-throat industry that was not for the likes of faint-hearted me. I gave up on the production company and on all television work.

  But I didn’t give up on transferring scriptwriting skills to others. I established the Southern African Multimedia AIDS Trust – SAMAT. I found a venue at the Trevor Huddleston CR Memorial Centre at the Anglican Church in Sophiatown and recruited a number of HIV-POSITIVE people from all over Gauteng to participate in creative writing workshops. Some came from as far as the Eastern Cape and KwaZulu-Natal to tell their stories as part of peer education and to learn how to write them as short stories, radio plays and film scripts. The European Union funded our activities.

  I didn’t give up on other forms of community involvement either, even though some of them left me disillusioned. I was drafted on to the committee that was planning the Apartheid Museum at Gold Reef City. The committee was composed of architects, cultural workers and business people. This was a project of a gaming company called Akani Gold and it was created in order to win a bid for a casino licence in the area. The major movers in this company were the identical Krok twins, Solly and Abe, who had made their billions m
anufacturing skin lightening creams for black people who were eager to be white during the days of apartheid. They had a company called Twins Pharmaceuticals that manufactured and sold throughout southern Africa the Super Rose Lotion, Aviva and the He-Man. These skin lightening creams and lotions had high levels of hydroquinone that left many women and, to a lesser extent, men blemished for life. I had written about the damage of skin lightening creams in my earlier play, And the Girls in Their Sunday Dresses, and I found it odious to be working with these super-rich characters who had caused such damage in the name of profit. Some of the meetings were held at the twins’ sprawling estate called Summer Place in one of the northern suburbs of Johannesburg; it had once belonged to the Italian oilman Marino Chiavelli but was purchased by Solly Krok in the mid-1990s. I saw all the excesses of wealth and lamented the skins of black women who were fried with hydroquinone and were now hard and caked for ever.

  One morning I got a call from Reuel Khoza, a leading black businessman who was also the chairman of Eskom. He was part of the Akani Gold conglomerate and was in fact the one who had invited me to join the Apartheid Museum Committee.

  ‘We have an urgent meeting at Nelson Mandela’s house in Lower Houghton this afternoon,’ he said.

  I drove to Lower Houghton and was almost late for the meeting. We sat on the sofas in one of the living rooms of Mr Mandela’s mansion and he joined us while Zelda le Grange hovered around protectively. It was not the whole committee that met, but just a hand-picked few. They were all white except for me and John Kani. I sat next to Solly Krok as he outlined to Nelson Mandela the plans for the Apartheid Museum. Although I had no idea what the agenda for this meeting was, it became clear at once that Solly Krok wanted Mandela’s endorsement. I learnt from their discussions that they were buddies and that the Krok brothers had given him a few million for his projects, which were at that time the building of schools in the rural Eastern Cape. But he was demanding more from Solly Krok.

  ‘You know, every time I see you, I see money,’ Mandela said. ‘Give me more money, Solly.’

  It was as though somebody had tickled the puny Krok twin; he giggled and promised that he would give more money.

  Mandela didn’t seem to be paying much attention to the details of the museum. He turned to me and started telling me the problems he had had some years back, perhaps in the 1950s, with a stubborn Mda Mda when he was trying to convert him from the Unity Movement. I had nothing to do with Mda Mda, though I knew him as a respected lawyer in the Transkei and my father’s friend. He was the father of the dynamic Mda women – Lizeka who is known as a fearless journalist, and Thobeka who is a brilliant academic at the University of South Africa. But I had no idea why Mandela was telling me about Mda Mda. Had he perhaps forgotten which Mda I belonged to? But, of course, an elder cannot be denied the indulgence of his memories. We chuckled politely at his adventures with Mda Mda, took photographs and left.

  It became clear to me what my role was at this meeting. The impression was being given to Nelson Mandela that I was an important cog in the Apartheid Museum project. Yet I was not. I was just one of the many irrelevant committee members. The movers and the shakers of the project were all white. I was a black face who was merely a front to show the great man that black folks were participating actively in the project. It took me back to what happened with Blue Moon, when I was taken all the way to Welkom as a front. It was the same with a number of Black Economic Empowerment deals where white capital found some black faces to front for it.

  That was the last meeting of the Apartheid Museum committee that I attended. But John Kani had more patience than I had. He continued with the committee and today he is the chairperson of the Board of Trustees of the Museum.

  As for the Kroks, I wrote about them and their history in one of the chapters of The Madonna of Excelsior.

  My queasiness about the twisted world of business evinced itself once more when I became part of another Black Economic Empowerment deal. This time I was recruited by my actress friend Motshabi Tyelele, who had put together an empowerment group called Salungana with television producer Duma ka Ndlovu. We were part of Island Television, a bigger consortium that was bidding for a free-to-air commercial television licence. It was led by Makana Trust, a group of millionaires who were former apartheid prisoners. Most of them had served years on Robben Island where one of the Xhosa heroes of the early colonial times, Makana, was once imprisoned; hence a synonym for the prison is the Island of Makana. These former prisoners had turned into suave businessmen who already owned radio stations and other media-related corporations. They would be the majority shareholders if we got the licence and we and some orphanages and women’s groups would own a tiny minority share. Our presence as shareholders served mostly to convince the Independent Broadcasting Authority (IBA), who would decide which bidder would be granted the licence, that Island Television would empower the disadvantaged.

  I attended a few of the meetings where the documents of the bid were debated. They had been compiled with the assistance of Malaysian experts who would also be shareholders. At one meeting I was chosen to be one of the representatives who would defend the bid in front of the IBA. I told the meeting that my presence would disadvantage the bid because in my Sunday Times column I had been very critical of some of the processes of the IBA and of the woman who would be chairing the hearings in particular.

  ‘Why would you be critical of people who put bread on our table?’ asked Peter-Paul Ngwenya, the chairman of Makana Trust.

  All eyes turned on me admonishingly. I was a disappointment to the human race. I knew immediately that I was in the wrong place. If I carried on with these types my voice would be stifled for ever in order to appease the powerful forces that gave us a livelihood.

  Someone else was chosen in my place to defend the bid. The next meeting that I attended was the report-back after the IBA had made the decision. Island Television did not get the bid. But I was surprised when Mr Ngwenya told the meeting that in any event they knew that they were not going to get the bid. Thabo Mbeki had informed them that the television licence would be given to another group. Makana Trust’s turn would come when bids opened for another important venture. I wondered why we had gone through that laborious process if our leaders knew already that it was just for show, that we would not get the licence. This was what ‘managed democracy’ as it existed in Russia was all about, where the president had his dirty finger in everything. There was a semblance of fairness and openness, whereas in fact decisions had already been made behind closed doors. The chosen people were going through the motions knowing quite well whose turn it was to be doled out favours. So, you see, we had mastered that game quite early in our liberation. This was the typical patronage and crony capitalism I had been railing against, and there I was finding myself in the middle of it.

  Many years later I was to fictionalise these events in my novel Black Diamond.

  One little irony worth mentioning: the consortium that won the bid of what later became a successful commercial television station called e.tv was founded by a group that included me and my friend Melanie Chait. It was called Vula Television and Melanie was the leading figure. She and I spent days working on its programming at her house in Melville. We resigned from the group when our insistence on quality programming was rebuffed by the rest of the partners. That’s how I lost out becoming one of the owners of a television network. Island Television was my second attempt at becoming a ‘black diamond’ and it proved that I was not cut out to be one. I lacked the necessary gumption.

  I was destined to be a poor itinerant artist and scholar.

  Things started going bad in my personal life when Adele decided to return to Johannesburg. On the weekends she visited from Bloemfontein our relationship was generally cordial, although there would be occasional flare-ups of anger from both sides of the divide. She felt it was a strain to live so far away from her home and family, which was quite understandable. But what was she going to do ab
out the job in Bloemfontein where she was the director of L-MAP? She told me that the board of trustees had agreed that she could operate from Johannesburg where she could focus only on fund-raising for the organisation.

  ‘Are you giving up your job as director?’ I asked.

  ‘No, I am not. I’ll still be director but only focusing on fund-raising here in Johannesburg because that’s where all the big donors are located,’ she said.

  ‘Then who is going to run the organisation when you are here focusing only on fund-raising?’

  ‘Buti will.’

  Buti was her assistant in Bloemfontein.

  ‘Will he agree to do your job without the title and salary of director?’

  She became livid, and accused me of not wanting her to stay with me and her son in Johannesburg. There must be things that I was doing in that house with women; that’s why I didn’t want her to return. She would come back whether I liked it or not because it was her house too, she added.

  ‘I was merely asking because I don’t see how the board of L-MAP can approve of moving the office of director to Johannesburg. The people of Bloemfontein are very proud of L-MAP. Won’t they be suspicious that they are losing it to Johannesburg?’