Chaka Read online

  CHAKA

  THOMAS MOFOLO

  NEW ENGLISH TRANSLATION BY DANIEL P. KUNENE

  FOREWORD BY WAMUWI MBAO

  Kwela Books

  Foreword

  A boy is born from an illicit union between a dissipated king and a young maiden. His father is pressured into sending him away, and the boy’s place is usurped by his brothers. The boy is bullied and tormented. He learns to fight back. He grows into a young man, who distinguishes himself militarily before a benevolent patron, and he becomes an exemplar in his field. He returns, a celebrated hero, scattering the pretenders to the throne, and becomes the leader of his people. His hubris gets the better of him, and he degenerates into madness before being overthrown by his brothers, who kill him.

  This dry convoy of facts is the skeleton of Thomas Mofolo’s Chaka, a story with a solid anchoring in the traditional, and yet, one that constantly overspills its pages, haunting, disturbing, melodramatic at times, but always captivating the reader.

  Mofolo is surely the pre-eminent Black novelist of early 20th century Southern Africa, and his prose exhales Chaka’s story as a tightly compacted page-turner whose power belies its brevity. He manoeuvres the reader through a narrative that is by turns entertaining and elegiac in texture, both an instructive lesson and a sobering foreshadowing of the oppressions that would visit Southern Africa under colonial rule.

  This latest republishing of Mofolo’s work is timely. A writer of colossal talent who has long been absent from general view, Mofolo’s magnum opus deserves to find a new readership. Chaka is an anomaly at its time of writing, and a story in conversation with the past and the future. It endures because we understand Chaka’s very human weakness, despite ourselves. Who has not, in a moment of misfortune, wished for the supreme power to escape one’s torments? Who has never wanted more? But we also understand the inevitability of Chaka’s demise. The favour of the gods does not long rest with those who wish to supplant them.

  To be sure, Chaka’s callousness, his brutality and his rage are as irresistible as they are horrifying. But why are there so many stories about the rise and fall of Shaka? The legends of the Zulu king who swept all before him in an orgiastic reign of terror have proliferated over centuries. His legend fascinates us because he has all the hallmarks of the great mythological tragic heroes: rageful bravery, an intense stubbornness that eventually undoes, and an enduring and compelling loneliness that rouses our pity. South Africa is a country overflowing with history, and while much has changed in the years since the last edition of Thomas Mofolo’s Chaka was published, it remains a fascinating exploration of the often destructive allure of power.

  This explains why, over time, the images of Shaka grew more and more spectacular, culminating in the granitic idea of him most of us have today. We’re accustomed to thinking of Shaka as a sort of action hero, the way he was presented in the famous 1986 television drama where he was materialised in the virile and rippling Henry Cele. Mofolo’s much earlier representation is quite far from those histrionics, but it contributes to the aura of the second-most well-known African leader (behind Nelson Mandela).

  The abiding fascination with Shaka has as much to do with how he has been represented as with the man himself. There are countless depictions of him, and while they may have a lot in common, which ones are to be believed? Is Shaka the Great Unifier, or a destructive and bloodthirsty warmonger? Here, we confront a difficult reality: we don’t actually know. Much of what has been accepted as fact about Shaka is an artful cobbling from dubious sources. There is precious little that can be verified conclusively.

  It is precisely this elusiveness that has allowed Shaka’s identity to have its strange and often perverse afterlife. His name functions as shorthand for a set of stereotypes about Zulu nationhood: war-like Spartans; disciplined, fearless people. The legend of his military prowess has bled over to sports and politics in ways that could not have been foreseen when Thomas Mofolo wrote his great work. Shaka has proven a surprisingly pliable symbol. Certainly, for a country in need of glory and mythology to offset its bloodletting, Shaka continues to function as a potent bearer of meaning.

  We can detect this in Chaka, where the hero is an ethical being rather than a self. But fixating on the veracity of Chaka’s story misses the nature of storytelling. If we set aside the need to seek a marbled finality where his biography is concerned, more interesting things emerge. For in the weave of Chaka’s story we might glimpse something fundamental about our country’s steeping in blood. In the Faustian pact that Chaka strikes with Isanusi, we see a prescient commentary on the price of progress. In the melding of the fantastic, the supernatural and the historical, we see how national stories are made.

  There is much to admire in Daniel P. Kunene’s translation, whose limpid recasting allows Mofolo’s prose to ring through in all its nuance. Kunene’s translation is fluent, and his scholarship is both authoritatively expansive and meticulous. He adeptly stretches the sinews of the English language to admit Mofolo’s words gracefully, easing here and there a phrase in Zulu. His achievement is in managing to render the strength of Chaka without allowing it to fall into imprecise theatricality.

  There is much in Chaka – the torsions of politics, the contestations between doing the right thing and serving oneself – that might strike a chord with the reader. This is what makes Chaka worth reading. Behind the cataclysmic violence, is Chaka a cypher for being true to yourself no matter what? A lesson in not selling your soul to the devil? He might be all of these things and more. But Chaka is not merely a didactic play. Mofolo’s pen inks an enthralling story whose endurance lies in its evergreen message: that one shouldn’t place too much faith in narratives, however compelling they are.

  Wamuwi Mbao,

  September 2015

  Acknowledgement

  I wish to express my sincere thanks to Ms Leah Mookho Lekhehle, Secretary to the Assistant Registrar at the National University of Lesotho, who typed this manuscript for me. I was fortunate to have a person of her competence, who insisted on producing a word-perfect copy, to do this project. The extremely difficult circumstances under which she worked for me called for a sense of dedication which she amply demonstrated.

  Daniel P. Kunene

  Introduction

  Some highlights concerning the history of the “Chaka” manuscript

  The history of the “Chaka” manuscript is discussed in some detail in my forthcoming book, Thomas Mofolo and the Emergence of Written Sesotho Prose. I shall therefore confine myself here only to some salient points which may be of interest to the reader of this translation.

  There seems to be no doubt whatsoever that the “Chaka” manuscript was completed by around late 1909, certainly before March 1910. It was on this latter date (on the 23rd March, to be exact) that Mofolo left Morija rather suddenly, as first stated by Gérard1 and now amply confirmed by evidence I later obtained at the Paris Evangelical Missionary Society (PEMS) archives in Morija. Mofolo returned to Lesotho in 1912, but not to Morija.

  The decision to leave Morija for good was an extremely painful one for Mofolo. He had established himself well at Morija by this time: he had published one book, namely Moeti oa Bochabela,2 which had been very well received by the missionaries and by many Basotho readers; the serialisation of another book of his, Pitseng,3 spread over one year in the Leselinyana,4 was nearing completion, and the work to be published in book form less than a month after his departure; he had been a member of the Lekhotla la Tsoelo-pele (Council of Progress) (given the English name of the Basutoland Progressive Association) since its inception in 1907; he was a reporter for the Leselinyana, and had just covered a meeting of the Lekhotla la Sechaba (Basutoland National Council) in February and March, just prior to his departure; he was a proofreader at th
e Morija Sesuto Book Depot; he also did occasional reviews for the Leselinyana. To leave a place where he had so much going for him was, no doubt, an act of tremendous sacrifice.

  We know that the “Chaka” manuscript was in existence by the time he left because it is mentioned in the Livre d’Or de la Mission du Lessouto,5 a commemorative volume published by the PEMS to cover the first seventy-five years of the Mission’s work in Lesotho, that is, 1833 to 1908. The Livre d’Or, published in 1912, states that “a fourth manuscript dedicated by the same author to describe the customs of the Zulus is at this very moment in the hands of one missionary from whom Mofolo has asked for criticism and advice”.6 What made “Chaka” a “fourth” rather than a “third” manuscript was the existence of another manuscript, also mentioned in the Livre d’Or, submitted by Mofolo very likely in 1908 and rejected by the missionaries. It is referred to by a French title, namely, L’Ange déchu (The Fallen Angel).7 As regards the “Chaka” manuscript being “dedicated to describe the customs of the Zulus”, Thomas Mofolo Jr (Mofolo’s son by his second wife, also known as Mofolo Mofolo) states that the original manuscript contained at least two chapters which described in some detail the history and customs of the Zulus, as well as their military system which had apparently impressed Mofolo very highly during his researches in Natal. Mofolo Mofolo states that these chapters had to be left out of the final manuscript as published in 1925 in order to reduce its size, since in those days authors were expected to pay the costs of producing their own manuscripts, and the less bulky a manuscript was, the less costly it was to produce. The two-plus chapters were left out for those reasons, says Mofolo Mofolo, and this was done in consultation with the author. According to Reverend Albert Brutsch, Archivist at Morija, while it is not quite accurate to say that authors were expected to pay to produce their manuscripts, there were nevertheless cases where, because of the excessive bulk of a manuscript, the author had to bear part of the cost. He cites Germond’s Chronicles of Lesotho as an example.

  The question of these omitted chapters naturally interested me a great deal, and I more than once put the question to Mofolo Mofolo whether there might not have been another reason for this action. He was, however, quite unequivocal on this point, insisting that the chapters were left out solely for the reasons mentioned above, and not because they were considered to be in any way offensive and/or detrimental to the teachings of the missionaries.

  There is evidence that the first time Mofolo gave any further attention to the “Chaka” manuscript since 1909 or 1910 was in the early 1920s, which coincides with the return to Lesotho from France of the Reverend A. Casalis, who was the one person who constantly advised and encouraged Mofolo in his efforts as a writer. This revision of the manuscript was finished some time before July 1922, the time when Mofolo told Zurcher that he (Mofolo) “had just finished writing the book Chaka”.8 When this is taken together with the fact that, as Gérard asserts, “the records of the ‘Conférence des missionaries du Lessouto’ clearly show that Casalis was solely and entirely responsible for the publication of the book”,9 the conclusion is inevitable that the revisions of the early 1920s were done with Casalis’s direct assistance, and probably at his suggestion. Casalis would then have, quite understandably, strongly supported publication.

  In terms of the delay in publication of Chaka, then, the problematic period is three years, that is 1922–5, and not the entire fifteen or sixteen years beginning 1909/10. Which means that there are still unanswered questions suggesting a hesitation in the publication of this book. This seems to be supported by the failure to serialise the book in the Leselinyana before publication, a time-honoured tradition which was still being practised at that very time. In the absence of evidence to the contrary, these facts suggest an attempt to suppress the manuscript. However, the major controversies around this book took place after, and not before, its publication.

  Translations of Chaka

  By translating Chaka into English in 1931 (published by the International Institute of African Languages and Cultures, now the International African Institute), F. H. Dutton made an important contribution to world literature, and performed an invaluable service to the dissemination of Sesotho culture through literature. Through Dutton’s translation, not only Europe became aware of, and benefited from, Mofolo’s masterpiece, but indeed Africa itself. We often lose sight of the fact that translations of this nature facilitate communication within Africa as well. It is through translation, to take just one more example, that the present writer came to enjoy p’Bitek’s beautiful lament, Song of Lawino, which he could not have read in the original Acoli. Dutton’s translation of Chaka inspired non-Sesotho-speaking Africa to heights of creativity as exemplified by the works of Senghor, Badian and Mulikita.

  After Dutton’s translation, Chaka was translated also into French. Then abridged versions were published in English, German, French and Italian. More recently an abridged version has been published in Swahili, very likely translated from Grenfell Williams’s English abridged version. And even more recently still, the unabridged version has been translated into Afrikaans. Unfortunately the translator, Chris Swanepoel, has marred an otherwise good translation by leaving out portions of the original without any explanation whatsoever. Some of these omissions are quite extensive.

  The merging of history and fiction in Mofolo’s Chaka

  By his own testimony, Mofolo, in writing this book, did not intend to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth about the Zulu king; neither did he intend to tell nothing but “exaggerations produced by a facile pen” as suggested by N. R. Thoahlane, a Mosotho reader writing in the Leselinyana in February 1927. In responding to a letter written by Reverend S. M. Malale, a Sesotho-speaking Shangana, in July 1928, in which Malale questioned the accuracy of certain historical facts concerning the establishment of the Shangana nation, Mofolo, having admitted that Malale was a better judge than he regarding that particular aspect of the history, went on to say:

  Ke a kgolwa diphoso tsa mofuta wona di ngata haholo bukeng ya Chaka; empa ha ke a di tsotella haholo hobane ha ke ngole histori, ke ngola tshomo, nka re ke ngola nnete, empa ee ekeditsweng haholo, ya fokotswa haholo, ha tlohelwa tse ding tse ngata, ha ngolwa tse ding tse ngata tseo e seng nnete, e le feela ho phetha morero wa ka ka buka ena.

  I believe that errors of this kind are very many in the book Chaka; but I am not very concerned about them because I am not writing history, I am writing a tale, or I should rather say I am writing what actually happened, but to which a great deal has been added, and from which a great deal has been removed, so that much has been left out, and much has been written that did not actually happen, with the aim solely of fulfilling my purpose in writing this book.

  A similar statement is found in the book itself, at the beginning of Chapter 23, where Mofolo says:

  mme ere ka ha e se kgopolo ya rona ho bolela ditaba tsa bophelo ba hae kaofela, re ikgethetse lehlakore le leng feela, lee lokelang morero wa rona mona …

  but since it is not our purpose to recount all the affairs of his life, we have chosen only one part which suits our present purpose …

  This unspecified “purpose” leaves one curious, and it is with a view to at least partially satisfying this curiosity that the following comments are made in order to identify some of the more important areas where fact and fiction are at variance with each other. In just about all of these, the effect is to build up greater intensity in the plot, and to increase dramatic tensions by creating new juxtapositions of highly volatile events and situations.

  Firstly, the spring of action in Mofolo’s version of Chaka’s life is that Senzangakhona, though having three or four wives, has no son and therefore no heir. To correct this situation, he decides to take another wife. He therefore arranges a feast to which he invites the young people from the neighbouring villages. Having fallen in love with Nandi, he persuades her to engage in complete intercourse with him in the fields on her return home. She becomes
pregnant, and in spite of hurried marriage arrangements, she is at least two months pregnant by the time she joins Senzangakhona’s household.

  While the above makes for an excellent plot which is simply chock-full of potential dynamite, the historical Senzangakhona did not have the problem of lacking an heir, and did not engage in the actions narrated by Mofolo. But since the historical Shaka had a truly Achillean stature, Mofolo’s artistic triumph is scored not so much in making Nandi give birth to Chaka, but in creating attendant circumstances which complement that stature. Thus Chaka’s alleged “illegitimacy” becomes his Achilles heel, and Mofolo capitalises on this triumph by making the senior wives soon get sons of their own, and thus have a stake in the succession.

  Senzangakhona’s meeting with Nandi is remembered differently in other accounts. According to A. T. Bryant in his Olden Times in Zululand and Natal, Senzangakhona was travelling when he saw Nandi bathing in a stream, was attracted to her, and asked for amahlay’ endlela (the fun of the road), but he lost his head and, instead of the customary external intercourse called ukuhlobonga, he destroyed her virginity. R. R. R. Dhlomo, a Zulu author and historian, states that Nandi herself, having heard about Senzangakhona and his handsomeness and tall stature, went to find him and declare her love for him.

  The pregnancy resulting from this first encounter is the subject of moral judgement by Mofolo. Firstly, he states that according to Zulu custom in those days, a young couple involved in such an act were killed, together with all their peers who shared the same sleeping quarters. But this is not true. While considered a disgrace and a devaluation of the girl, the accident of premarital pregnancy was nevertheless always regarded as a possibility, and law and custom provided for the normalisation of the situation by as quickly as possible moving the people involved towards a reincorporation into normal relationships. No one was killed for this act.