It was gratifying to hear that our sources of magic were the same. When in later years I met him at a writer’s conference in Spain, he told me that his magic, too, came from his grandmother who had learnt it from African slave women. But it was only after reading Márquez that I realised my grandmother’s storytelling was a legitimate mode of creating literature. I had started writing some of my plays in a manner where the supernatural, the strange and the unusual, existed quite comfortably with reality, just as in the stories my grandmother told. My favourite novel of his is Of Love and Other Demons, the magical story of passion between a middle-aged Catholic priest and a young girl accused of being possessed by demons. My building was completed by Colombian writer Gabriel García Márquez, who taught me that I could tell my stories in the same manner my grandmother used to tell them.

Both of these older writers, now long departed, were my neighbours. I learnt this not only from reading but from long conversations with writers such as Sebolai Matlosa, whose famous novel Mopheme was adapted as a popular radio drama series, and historian and poet Mosebi Damane. Sesotho novels revel in the descriptions of the landscape. I also learnt about the effectiveness of the landscape in prose - using setting as another character in the story. I established friendships with some of the great writers of that language, particularly JJ Machobane, the author of the novel Mahaheng a Mats’o, who used to visit me at my place of work and would tell me stories about his agricultural invention called mants’a tlala - some form of irrigation scheme.įrom him I learnt of the deep connection between the creation of art and growing plants. More bricks and mortar were added by Sesotho novels I read in my teens and early 20s. Ingqumbo Yeminyanya, on the other hand, narrates them when they were subdued and “pacified”, and were battling with the contradictions of tradition versus modernism. My latest novel, Little Suns, tells the story of the same amaMpondomise people, taking the narrative from their origins right to their exile after a violent brush with colonialism. I do so in words and in paint and brushes. I was doomed to be a teller of stories for the rest of my life. Second, I was named after the main character of this novel, Zanemvula. First, it was about my people, the amaMpondomise, particularly the Majola clan whose totem is the brown mole snake. Two things fascinated me about this novel. Years later it was translated by the author himself as The Wrath of the Ancestors. This was the first full-length novel I read and it was in isiXhosa. I do know for sure that I was not yet 10. I don’t remember what age I was when I read Ingqumbo Yeminyanya by AC Jordan.

Little Suns by Zakes Mda