Mdada (n), also Mdada-ism: elusive black theatrical satire in the old and new Southern Africa.

Zakes Mda has a fiercely independent critical mind, always shifting its perspectives, always ready for a more-than-real theatricality. His best playwriting is unavoidably provocative, and often works through forcing an improbable set of assumptions upon the audience — strangeness is his friend. One is only some of the time quite sure what is being satirised. Opposing but valid interpretations come easily off his pages to actors and directors, who can often play something two or three ways. Mda's theatricality is both African and modern, it often invites the adjective ‘surreal' but that word does not easily match the usually perfectly logical argument of the pieces. The plays often turn on a sadness or grotesquerie, some painful and ironic turn of history that has been, is, or will become important, perhaps ten years ahead of the time it is written about. The work has often been prophetic.

Earlier Plays

In the 1970s Mda offered three very disparate plays presented at the People's Space and Market Theatres. The dates are important — each play comes in a different political atmosphere. Dark Voices Ring (1976, the time of the Soweto student uprising) was a clarion call for revolution presented by a fiery young warrior and his deeply angry mother. They prepare themselves for the coming liberation war with song and the oratory of the oppressed, while his incapacitated father watches in silence, smiling only at the end of the play when the youth departs for the north to change the world. Little irony here, but hypnotic portraits. Archetypes: the liberation warrior, played at the People's Space by Fitzroy Ncgukana, and his agonised, powerful, harsh-voiced mother, played by Nomhle Nkonyeni, South Africa's dark powerhouse tragic actress.

We Shall Sing for the Fatherland (1976/7 when everyone else was doing revolutionary as opposed to protest theatre) was, as it were, written in the opposite direction, that of the mocking disbeliever in revolutions in the real world. Created from a perspective different from that chosen by many black South African writers of the time (Mda has always appreciated that black regimes can be as rotten as white) it presents two maimed ex-soldiers, now park-dwelling bums, who are patronised and abandoned by the callous generals, business people and politicians of a ‘successful’ liberation movement in an un-named country.