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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 the 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”