A Quote by Zakes Mda

My plays have been translated into all of the official languages of South Africa except Afrikaans.

Zakes Mda

Quote Topics

Africa Been Except Languages Official Plays South South Africa Translated

Quote Author

Zakes Mda
South African - Novelist
Born: 1948

I speak English, obviously, Afrikaans, which is a derivative of Dutch that we have in South Africa. And then I speak African languages. So I speak Zulu. I speak Xhosa. I speak Tswana. And I speak Tsonga. And like - so those are my languages of the core. And then I don't claim German, but I can have a conversation in it. So I'm trying to make that officially my seventh language. And then, hopefully, I can learn Spanish.

Trevor Noah

South Africa is really diverse, with many cultures and 11 official languages, so there are lots of different Christmas traditions.

Oti Mabuse

In South Africa, we speak English and sometimes Afrikaans, sometimes Zulu, sometimes Xhosa.

Watkin Tudor Jones

And now South Africa has finally woken up and it is doing great things. And if South Africa becomes the template to what AIDS is in the sub-Saharan continent, then all the other countries are going to follow suit. And Michel Sidibe, who spoke at the breakfast meeting this morning, was saying that there is so much hope for Africa now that South Africa has got its house in order.

Elton John

If I hadn't left South Africa, I felt I was at risk of being pigeonholed. I looked around and saw actors who, 10 to 15 years into their careers, were still playing stereotypical Afrikaans characters, stereotyped Indian characters. That was not something that I wanted for myself.

Adhir Kalyan

When I was in government, the South African economy was growing at 4.5% - 5%. But then came the global financial crisis of 2008/2009, and so the global economy shrunk. That hit South Africa very hard, because then the export markets shrunk, and that includes China, which has become one of the main trade partners with South Africa. Also, the slowdown in the Chinese economy affected South Africa. The result was that during that whole period, South Africa lost something like a million jobs because of external factors.

Thabo Mbeki

South Africa is regarded as being an extraordinarily important country - not just for South Africa, but for Southern Africa, for the BRICS, working now in a new way in which power is becoming more shared - thankfully.

Mary Robinson

My maternal family are South African and when I was small and my parents separated my mother and I went back to South Africa. So for me the emergence of my own childhood consciousness was in the context of 1970s and 1980s apartheid South Africa and the movement there.

Rachel Holmes

I've never been to anywhere in Africa except Egypt. We've never performed there, so I would definitely like to make that trip, probably to South Africa. I'd also like to score a movie from top to bottom. I've had songs in a bunch of films but never done an entire movie. I'd like to do that and have it to be a hit, too!

Maurice White

I live in South Africa. I'm proud to live there. I've always said I want to be a comedian from South Africa in the world. I will stay in places for a bit here and there and pop into New York for a while, maybe stay in London for a year, but my home will always be South Africa. I enjoy it too much.

Trevor Noah

We were land-based agrarian people from Africa. We were uprooted from Africa, and we spent 200 years developing our culture as black Americans. And then we left the South. We uprooted ourselves and attempted to transplant this culture to the pavements of the industrialized North. And it was a transplant that did not take. I think if we had stayed in the South, we would have been a stronger people. And because the connection between the South of the 20's, 30's and 40's has been broken, it's very difficult to understand who we are.

August Wilson

I was born in South Africa during apartheid, a system of laws that made it illegal for people to mix in South Africa. And this was obviously awkward because I grew up in a mixed family. My mother's a black woman, South African Xhosa woman... and my father's Swiss, from Switzerland.

Trevor Noah

Living here in North America - I have been Americanized. When I go back home now, there are things that I have far less tolerance for in South Africa. We've come such a long way in terms of race relations and the economy as well as people's willingness to move on. There are still a lot of things that are frustrating about being in South Africa.

Kandyse McClure

Nelson Mandela was an outstanding leader and a mentor for me. I was in South Africa at the time he was released. I was in South Africa when he was inaugurated as the first president.