And the Girls in Their Sunday Dresses: Four Works marks an important achievement in South African theatre - the publication of a second collection of plays and a cinepoem script written by Zakes Mda. The first collection, We Shall Sing for the Fatherland and Other Plays, was brought out by Ravan Press in 1980 and subsequently expanded and reissued in 1990 under the new title The Plays of Zakes Mda.

Mda's unusual distinction, particularly for a black playwright, can be partially accounted for by his unique status and location in the history of South African theatre. It is the consequence of his peculiar biography, dramatic skills and the thematic concerns of his plays. Inasmuch as Mda's creative and theoretical works are part of the black theatre movement which crystallised in the seventies, there is no mistaking the many ways in which his work goes against the grain of the performance traditions and politics of the same movement.

Zanemvula Kizito Gatyeni Mda was born on 6 October 1948 in Sterkspruit, Herschel District, in the eastern Cape Province. He was the first child of three boys and one girl born to Ashby Peter Solomzi and Rose Nompumelelo Mda. Soon after his birth the Mda family moved to Johannesburg and Zanemvula grew up in Orlando East and, later on, in Dobsonville, Soweto.

He returned to Herschel in his teens, initially to visit his grandparents during school holidays and later when his parents, trying to isolate him from mischief in Soweto, decided that he should attend school in Herschel. Mda was joined by his father who returned to Sterkspruit to practise as a lawyer. His recollections of the Herschel district are anchored in its desolate landscape and the stark poverty that characterised most peasant households.

Mda's year of birth also marked the accession to parliamentary control of South African politics and society of the National Party - a political development that was to be of great import to the Mda family. In the fifties the National Party government embarked on a consistent campaign to enforce racial segregation and to eradicate radical African opposition to its policies, especially that initiated by the African National Congress and the Pan Africanist Congress.