Chaka Read online

  Secondly, Mofolo introduces the concept of illegitimacy as a powerful motivation to action: it is the threat which Senzangakhona’s senior wives hold over his head when, having born male children of their own, they demand that Chaka be disinherited and he and his mother banished. And it is also for that reason that Mofolo’s Senzangakhona reacts to this threat with such a sense of fear that he capitulates. The historical Senzangakhona took the whole thing in his stride and proceeded to normalise the situation by beginning marriage negotiations. Illegitimacy is a concept that can only be legitimate in certain societies, for example an individualistic, monogamous society. Add to this the Christian concept of morality, and you have the element of guilt introduced, and inevitably a strong motivation for the man involved to deny paternity. This is why Mofolo’s Senzangakhona tries to camouflage the fact of Nandi’s premarital pregnancy. But in Zulu society paternity would be a pride and the child would never suffer a lack of identity or of care.

  Nandi’s expulsion from Senzangakhona’s household is another area of Mofolo’s variance with history. According to Mofolo, Senzangakhona was still very much in love with Nandi, and it was only because of the pressure from his senior wives that he banished her. But other accounts emphasise Nandi’s temperament as the cause of her expulsion. She is said to have had an evil temper, was domineering and generally intractable, making life for Senzangakhona utterly miserable.

  Next Mofolo creates the powerful magician, Isanusi, whose name means “Diviner”. When, at their first meeting, Chaka wants to know his name since “isanusi” only names his profession, Isanusi declares, with a self-assurance bordering on arrogance: “I am ‘Diviner’ both by name and by deed.” But such a person never existed. Isanusi is the result of Mofolo’s transformation of Chaka’s ambition into a man. Yet, a man who was also a doctor, a herbalist and a diviner, whose composite powers made it possible for Chaka to obtain his highest ambition through war and with the aid of magic. Ndlebe and Malunga, Isanusi’s aids, are similar physical manifestations of Chaka’s personality traits – vigilance and prowess respectively.

  Isanusi is both the originator and the instrument of many of Chaka’s desires. One of these, which again is contrary to historical fact, is the choice of a new national name. Historically, the name amaZulu (The Descendants of Zulu), was in use long before Chaka’s time, and was derived from their ancestor uZulu kaMalandela (Zulu Son of Malandela). Mofolo, on the other hand, makes Chaka choose his name, which literally means “People of the Sky”, in response to Isanusi’s suggestion that the new nation deserves a better name than the one they now have, namely amaFenu-lwenja (People of the Male Organ of a Dog). Mofolo uses this opportunity to underscore Chaka’s megalomaniac view of himself: “MaZulu! It is because I am big, I am like that same cloud that just rumbled, before which no one can stand.” He claims to be a messenger of Nkulunkulu, sent by him to make the Zulu people the greatest nation on earth by teaching them the art of war and rendering them invincible.

  But perhaps the most notable deviation from history which Mofolo exploits to the full to attain dramatic tension is his creation of Noliwa, Dingiswayo’s sister with whom Chaka falls in love. No such person existed. Yet Noliwa is the instrument of bringing to the surface that “last spark of humanity still remaining in him”, namely his human tenderness and his capability of loving. And there is no question about the genuineness of this love which makes Chaka dance for joy, and whose kindling and nurturing by Ndlebe is in sharp contrast to its ruthless sabotage and banishment by Isanusi at the time when it is at its highest peak. Chaka’s murder of Noliwa who is now pregnant with his child, is another artistic high-water mark for Mofolo. It is symbolic of the murder of both love and life in one swift stroke. Thus the “spark” is extinguished and “a beast-like nature took possession of him”.

  Then there is Chaka’s alleged murder of his mother, Nandi. While artistically this helps to hasten Chaka’s descent into a moral limbo, there is conclusive evidence that this is not what actually happened in history. According to Bryant, Shaka not only loved his mother, he adored her. Bryant, who relies heavily on Henry Francis Fynn’s diary, tells how Fynn, a close friend of Shaka, was out hunting elephants with Shaka when a messenger came with the news of Nandi’s illness at her royal village of Emkindini sixty miles away. Shaka immediately stopped the hunting and though it was a late hour, ordered a march to Emkindini which they only reached at noon on the following day, having travelled through extremely rough terrain throughout the night. Shaka asked Fynn to go in and administer medicine to his mother to make her recover. Fynn came out announcing that Nandi was suffering from dysentery, and that she was not likely to live. When Fynn emerged a second time to announce Nandi’s death, Shaka went and adorned himself in his best war attire and then came and stood before the hut in which his mother’s body lay. Fynn goes on to say: “For about twenty minutes he stood in silent, mournful attitude, with his head bowed upon his shield, on which I saw a few large tears fall. After two or three deep sighs, his feelings becoming ungovernable, he broke out into frantic yells, which fearfully contrasted with the silence that had hitherto prevailed.”

  One comes away with the impression that Mofolo strove for historical accuracy in some areas of this narrative with the same deliberate determination with which he distorted history in other areas, either by omission or by addition, or by bold shifts of emphasis. One reason for this is, as has been stated above, obviously the artistic one of enhancing the dramatic impact of the narrative which, after all, is a history-based fiction. Yet one wonders, at the same time, whether this constitutes the entirety of the “purpose” stated by Mofolo. After all, the image of the historical Chaka, the empire-builder the mere mention of whose name struck terror into the hearts of lesser kings, who set entire communities to flight rather than face his armies, the hero of millions – this image could be, and probably was, hurt by some of the distortions when taken literally as historical fact. It must remain an unanswered question, yet a nagging one, whether or not Mofolo intended to achieve this latter effect.

  Problems of translation

  The challenges of translation are many, and they are sometimes insuperable. Because of the culture-specific nature of language, the speaker is able to withdraw behind it to barricade himself away from the outsider. Yet there is an ambiguity here, namely that the more effectively he excludes the outsider in this way, the more thoroughly he reveals the richness of his own culture. The translator comes in as a kind of cultural go-between who provides his good services to pass on, as best he can, the benefits of one culture to the practitioners of the “other” culture.

  One of the most difficult things about translation is that you have to determine your loyalties before you embark on it. You have constantly to ask yourself whether your translation does justice to the original, whether in fact it says what the author intended to convey. Then, on the other hand, you have to make sure that by trying to be faithful to the original, you do not then travesty the idiom of the receiving language. Often I have found translating Mofolo not only difficult, but indeed also agonising. Having decided that my first loyalty was to the original, my first draft, especially in the more difficult areas, was almost always atrocious. I always had to come back to it without the original, to iron out its crudities, so that in the end I split my loyalty virtually equally between the donor language and the recipient language.

  Secondly, one has to decide what the purpose of one’s translation is. Is it for the purpose of revealing the style of the original? Is it in order to convey the idiom of the original through a distortion of the receiving language, if that be necessary? Is it to find the closest equivalent idiom in the receiving language? If one’s translation is trying to reveal the style which the writer makes manifest through his intimate knowledge of the structure and idiomatic versatility of his language, then the receiving language almost invariably suffers. So too if the translation seeks to jolt the reader into an awareness of the idiom of the original, whi
ch gives an exotic flavour to the translation. I suppose that one could say that the best translation is one which blends all these together according to the translator’s poetic sensitivity.

  Specific translation problems encountered

  1. No dictionary equivalent in English

  This involves culture-bound words, and has been handled in different ways. First, and perhaps most common, is that the original Sesotho word is retained, immediately preceded or followed by a defining statement, which is woven into the narrative in as unobtrusive a manner as possible. Here are some examples:

  a.Mofolo tells how, during the festivities in the feast called by Senzangakhona in order to find a girl he could take as an additional wife, the young men went to the young women and asked them to “kana”. There being no one-to-one equivalent between “kana” and any English word I know, I made the young men ask the girls “to play the choose-a-lover game called ho kana”.

  b.Mofolo says that ho kana is like the sedia-dia of the Basotho. I have said that it is like “the sedia-dia girls’ dance among the Basotho”.

  c.Mofolo continues his comparison of the Zulu lovers’ game with Sesotho equivalents by stating that it is closer to ho iketa than to the sedia-dia. I have handled this like the others by saying “ho iketa whereby a girl offers herself to a young man for marriage without waiting to be asked”.

  But even such definitions are not always adequate. For example, the girl who engages in ho iketa does not propose love to the young man as one has heard that women in Europe do during a leap year. The Mosotho girl engages in totally non-verbal behaviour in which symbolic acts are performed, the most important of which consists in her going to the young man’s home and sitting outside the courtyards in a certain attitude, thus demanding that her presence be recognised and certain rituals performed by her hoped-for in-laws.

  2. No equivalent idiom

  Sometimes I felt the original imagery had to be retained since it was so striking. But since a close (or “literal”) translation would make no sense in English, I often had to resort to a kind of paraphrase of the original. Here are two examples:

  a.Mofolo describes the pain Senzangakhona felt when he had to expel his wife and son from home under the pressure of the senior wives by saying that Senzangakhona “swallowed a stone” and expelled them, in other words he performed a most painful act. I translated this as follows: “The pain was like swallowing a stone.”

  b.When the woman doctor “works” on Chaka to strengthen him, her aim is that the young man should “have a liver”, and that explains why the major ingredients in the medicines she uses are the livers of brave and ferocious animals, and the liver of a brave warrior. The liver is the seat of bravery and courage, and to reflect this I translated this as: “he would also have bravery in his liver”.

  But again one does not always feel that such paraphrases and/or amplifications are either necessary or useful. So I am afraid some inconsistency is inevitable.

  3. The irrepressible stylistic feature

  I have also sometimes felt that the style of the original needed to be reflected in the translation. Where I have succumbed to this, the result has been to introduce an element of exoticism (not deliberate nor for its own sake), at the same time stretching the idiom of the receiving language. In these situations a “free” translation would have smothered the freshness of the original. Here are some examples:

  a.One of the hallmarks of Mofolo’s style is the use of various forms of repetition, resulting in a whole variety of parallelistic structures. In the following example, the effect of the repetition is to convey Mofolo’s admiration of his character, Chaka. It is Chaka’s first battle since he was enlisted in Dingiswayo’s armies, and he fights with adeptness, with courage, and with much grace, and he literally carves a path through the enemy’s ranks. Mofolo says:

  a a b c

  A sa kena,/ a sa kena/ ntweng,/ mora wa Senzangakhona

  and I attempted to retain the a, b, c rhythmic pattern by translating:

  a a b c

  No sooner had he entered,/ no sooner entered/battle,/ the son of Senzangakhona

  The rest of the sentence is: “than he felled men with his short spear, and he opened up gaps in the enemy ranks”.

  b.Another repetition pattern, perhaps even more difficult to translate, is one where Mofolo uses synonymy whose effect is to lend greater emphasis to the statement. In many cases I have refrained from attempting to carry this structure over into my translation. One of the few cases where I could not resist the temptation is where Mofolo describes how the tree Isanusi needed for one of Chaka’s medicines, which bled when chopped, could only be cut by someone completely naked. The relevant sentence is translated: “The person chopping it had to be naked, totally nude.”

  4. Second-language “interference”

  Writing in Sesotho about a Zulu king, Mofolo could not help breaking into Zulu at certain appropriate moments. Where he has then gone on to provide a Sesotho translation, I have followed the practice of giving the original Zulu and then translating Mofolo’s Sesotho into English. It has sometimes been necessary to correct Mofolo’s translation of the Zulu. In that case I have translated direct from Zulu into English, placing my translation in parentheses; I have then translated Mofolo’s Sesotho translation of the Zulu as it is in the open text. In many cases, however, including the long praise poem for Chaka at the end of Chapter 17, Mofolo has not translated the Zulu into Sesotho. In those cases I have given my English translation in parentheses.

  In this context, I should mention that Mofolo’s definition of the royal salutation “Bayede” is highly impressionistic and emotionally coloured. It reflects the sentiment that the greeting was god-inspired, having been revealed to Chaka in a dream, and thus confirming the growing myth that Chaka was chosen by the gods to come and teach the Zulu people the art of war. He is cast almost in the role of a Christ. It is this sentiment which Mofolo conveys when he says, “Bayede means he who stands between God and man, it means the junior god through whom the great God rules the kings of the earth and their nations.”

  I must not leave the reader with the impression that the translation was nothing but problems. There were numerous passages, comprising the bulk of the book, where the translation flowed with amazing ease and grace, making one marvel at the close parallels in human thought in different cultures, and its conversion into the intricate system of sounds called language.

  Daniel P. Kunene

  1Albert Gérard, Four African Literatures: Xhosa, Sotho, Zulu, Amharic, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971, p. 131.

  2Thomas Mofolo, Moeti oa Bochabela, Morija, 1907.

  3Thomas Mofolo, Pitseng, Morija, 1910.

  4The full title is Leselinyana la Lesotho, first published in 1863, and still being published today.

  5Paris, 1912.

  6Livre d’Or, p. 509. The original French reads: “Un quatrième manuscrit, consacré par la même auteur à décrire les moeurs des Zoulous, est en moment entre les mains d’un missionaire auquel Mofolo a demandé des critiques et des conseils.”

  7Ibid, pp. 508–9.

  8J. Zurcher, private correspondence with me, February 1979. Zurcher came to Morija from Switzerland in 1920 to take charge of the Printing Works.

  9Gérard, op. cit., p. 129.

  CHAPTER 1

  Nandi Chooses Chaka

  SOUTH AFRICA is a large headland situated between two oceans, one to the east and one to the west. The nations that inhabit it are numerous and greatly varied in custom and language. Yet they easily divide themselves into three large groups: the nations settled along the western seaboard are of a yellow complexion. They are the San and the Khoi. The ones in the centre are the Batswana and the Basotho. Those to the east are the Bakone or the Matebele. The boundaries between them are prominent and visible; they are boundaries created by God, not man, because the nations to the west are separated from the ones in the centre by great sandy waterless deserts, and those in the centr
e are separated from those to the east by a massive mountain range of towering peaks rising in the Cape Colony and running parallel to the sea, yet far, far away from it. These nations are markedly distinct from each other, so much so that a person travelling from the west to the east is immediately conscious of having come into a different country and among strange people when he arrives among the Sotho nations in the centre, and likewise when he descends towards the Matebele nations over there beyond the Maloti Mountains.

  Our purpose here has to do with the eastern nations, the Bakone, and it is fitting that, before we plunge into our story, we should describe how the nations were settled in the beginning, so that the reader may understand what will be narrated in the coming chapters.

  The greater portion of the land of Bokone, which lies between the Maloti and the sea, is covered by forest. Besides, the crops there are never bitten by frost, for there are only light frosts because of the nearness of the sea. It is a land of lush greenness, and of extremely rich pasturage. Its soil is dark, and that means that it produces much food; its indigenous grass is the luxuriant seboku; its water lies in marshes, and that means that its cattle grow very fat. There are numerous rivers, and that means that rain is plentiful. It is a land of dense mists which often clear only after the sun has risen high, and that means that there are no droughts since the moisture takes long to dry up.

  In the early days, when the people were still settled upon the land, nowhere were there as many people as here in Bokone, because its villages were not only large, but also numerous. As regards their customs, we can say that they are a people more skilled in medicine than any other group in South Africa, and no wonder, since they live in the proximity of forests where medicinal plants are in abundance. None can equal their skill in medicines used for witchcraft, for bringing disaster on one’s adversary, for love-charms, for charms to make one popular and bring good fortune and for dispelling one’s enemies – not even the Khoi or the San, who are so famous for their knowledge of herbs, can measure up to their excellence. They are also famous for their ability to communicate with their ancestors who died long ago, and to talk with them and thus obtain advice from the gods.