Sometimes There is a Void: Memoirs of an Outsider. By Zakes Mda.

They “stopped the gravy train just long enough to get on themselves,” said Desmond Tutu in disgust over the post-apartheid greed of South Africa's liberation elite. If Zakes Mda's account is anything to go by, the Nobel laureate was guilty of understatement. The African National Congress (ANC), he claims, is “overtaking Nigeria” in patronage and cronyism.

His father, A.P. Mda, was the “founding spirit” of the Pan Africanist Congress of Azania (PAC), which broke with the ANC in 1959 in protest against, among other things, that party's links with the Soviet Union. In political exile Mda senior practised law in Lesotho where, as an austere Christian, he embodied the PAC's motto: “Service, Sacrifice and Suffering”. He charged deserving clients little or nothing for his services and moved his impoverished family into what his son describes as a slummy township. Their house had no electricity, a rusty corrugated iron roof and no ceiling; “the toilet was a pit latrine outside and we had to draw water from a communal tap a few streets away.”

The underlying and sometimes overriding theme in Mda junior's anguished autobiography is his admiration for his father's life and his failure to live up to it. He is, he bravely admits, a physical coward. His only stab at violent political action ended in farce. He was commissioned to murder an alleged Communist spy but was so frightened that he emerged from behind a boulder to hand over his Derringer pocket pistol to the man he was supposed to assassinate.

The turmoil in Mr Mda's private life saddened his mother as well as his father. He constantly mistook lust for undying love and engaged in brief affairs with numerous women. The second of his three marriages ended in a protracted fight for the custody of children and the final pages of his book are spoiled by a spiteful assault on this former wife.

In contrast, Mr Mda achieved ever greater success in his public life. His plays were performed everywhere and he became a star turn at literary festivals in Europe and the United States. “We Shall Sing for the Fatherland”, a play he wrote 30 years ago, was once rated among his least political. It is now seen among his most prophetic as, in its author's words, it “l(fā)ooks at the life of the veterans of the liberation struggle who are now marginalised in the new society they helped to bring about.”

This was the fate of A.P. Mda, whose contribution to the struggle, his widow lamented, was entirely forgotten by the triumphant ANC. Like his father, Mr Mda also feels marginalised. He applied for several important cultural and media posts, the interviews went well but each time he was blackballed by the president's office. He helped set up a film and television production company and then found no new contracts were forthcoming from the South African Broadcasting Corporation after he refused “to pay the bribes that the commissioning staff of the national broadcaster demanded from producers”.

As he was not wanted in his own country, Mr Mda left it to take up a professorship at Ohio University and strove to persuade himself that, as a liberal secular humanist, “South Africanness” was just one of his several identities. An autobiography suffused with love for his homeland says otherwise. So do his novels.