Acclaimed South African author Zakes Mda's candid, vigorous autobiography SOMETIMES THERE IS A VOID has been released in South Africa by Penguin Books and will be published in the US in 2012 by Farrar Straus & Giroux. Zakes Mda will be touring in Cape Town and Johannesburg, and appearing at the Franschhoek Literary Festival in May.
In this memoir Mda weaves together past and present to give an intensely personal story of his development in life, in love and in learning, and the events and people who shaped him. Forced to follow his father, PAC 'founding spirit' A P Mda, into exile in Lesotho (then still Basutoland) at the age of fourteen, Zakes initially finds freedom from close parental discipline irresistible and becomes a frequenter of shebeens and an exponent of fast living, but he also becomes politicised during this time. We are given a fascinating insight into the growth and development of both the PAC and the ANC in exile, as well as contemporary social history.