He completed a Masters Degree in Theatre at Ohio University, after which he obtained a Master of Arts Degree in Mass Communication. He worked as a bank clerk, a teacher and in marketing before the publication of We Shall Sing for the Fatherland and Other Plays in 1980 enabled him to be admitted to the Ohio University for a three-year Master's degree in theatre. His first play, We Shall Sing for the Fatherland, won the first Amstel Playwright of the Year Award in 1978, a feat he repeated the following year. Consequently Mda preferred to write his first plays in English. This change of setting also meant a change of language for Mda: from isiXhosa to Sesotho. Citizenship in Africa, Japan and, indeed, everywhere is best explored productively as lying between the open-ended possibilities and tensions interconnecting the global and local.Zakes Mda is the pen name of Zanemvula Kizito Gatyeni Mda, a novelist, poet and playwright.Īlthough he spent his early childhood in Soweto (where he knew political figures such as Walter and Albertina Sisulu, Oliver Tambo and Nelson Mandela) he had to finish his education in Lesotho where his father went into exile since 1963. Citizenship is thus to be understood within a complex of power relationships that include ones formed by laws and economic regimes on a local scale and beyond. �Self� requires �others� to construct itself, a reality that is subject to renegotiation as one continues to encounter others in a world characterised by myriad forms of interconnecting mobilities, both global and local. The book elucidates the contingency of political membership, relationship between everyday practices and political membership, and how citizenship is the mechanism for claiming and denying rights to various political communities. Central to the essays in this book is the concept of flexible citizenship, predicated on a recognition of the histories of mobility of people and cultures, and of the shaping and reshaping of places and spaces, and ideas of being and belonging in the process. This book, the result of two years of research conducted by South African and Japanese scholars within the framework of a bilateral project on citizenship in the 21st century, contributes to such ongoing efforts at rethinking citizenship globally, and as informed by experiences in Africa and Japan in particular. Present day scholarship on citizenship tends to problematise, unsettle and contest often taken-for- granted conventional connotations and associations of citizenship with imagined culturally bounded political communities of rigidly controlled borders. Anthropological reflections on citizenship focus on themes such as politics, ethnicity and state management.
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