Thomas Mofolo’s Chaka has appeared in two English translations, the first by F.H. Dutton in 1931 (later republished by Oxford University Press in 1967) and the second — the one I read — by Daniel P. Kunene in 1981, published as part of the African Writers Series. the novel is a heavily fictionalized story — not history — of the rise and fall of Shaka kaSenzangakhona, the first rule of the Zulu Kingdom, rendered here as Chaka, reflecting the key fact that Mofolo wrote not in Zulu but in Sotho (though I believe standard Sotho orthography would render the name as either Tjaka or Tjhaka).
the novel begins with a narration of the illegitimate relationship between Chaka’s parents, Senzangakhona and Nandi, which looms over Chaka’s childhood and adolescence, leaving him ostracized and ultimately sentenced to death by his father. instead, however, he meets a mysterious diviner named Isanusi (lit. “Diviner”), who grants him supernatural abilities, which he uses first to win the favor of the overking Dingiswayo and, ultimately, to take over the (over)kingship after Dingiswayo’s murder by a rival state. now a great king, Chaka sets his sights higher, but as his ambition and his empire expand, his humanity contracts, until finally he is overcome by the evils he has done, enabling his younger brothers to assassinate him.
rather than attempting to write a single cohesive review, I’m going to signpost a few things I want to talk about here:
I’ll start with the back cover text of the Waveland Press edition:
Chaka is a genuine masterpiece that represents one of the earliest major contributions of black Africa to the corpus of modern world literature. Mofolo’s fictionalized life-story account of Chaka (Shaka), translated from Sesotho by D.P. Kunene, begins with the future Zulu king’s birth followed by the unwarranted taunts and abuse he receives during childhood and adolescence. The author manipulates events leading to Chaka’s status of great Zulu warrior, conqueror, and king to emphasize classic tragedy’s psychological themes of ambition and power, cruelty, and ultimate ruin. Mofolo’s clever nods to the supernatural add symbolic value.
let’s start with the last sentence. firstly, I’m not sure what “add symbolic value” would mean here. more importantly, however, it is a dramatic understatement to describe the relationship of the novel to the supernatural as “clever nods”. I would say, instead, that the novel’s basic premise is that Chaka achieved his position more or less entirely because he received supernatural assistance from Isanusi and his minions at every turn. it is first the magic of one of Isanusi’s students and then Isanusi’s own magic that make Chaka an indomitable hand-to-hand combatant, and it is Isanusi’s minions who make many of the tactical decisions that secure Chaka’s early reputation. Isanusi’s magic and his minions’ machinations grant Chaka the kingship, and Isanusi’s evil magic in the end consumes Chaka utterly, destroying at the same time any hope for the future, as he prophesies with his final breath that his brothers will in turn be overthrown by white settlers.
it strikes me that part of what is going on here is that the supernatural elements of the novel are both too important to the plot to be overlooked — so the blurb must acknowledge the presence of magic (even if it tries to downplay it), and it cannot reduce it to a magical realism avant la lettre — and, at the same time, while obviously grounded in Sotho traditions, just as obviously an invention of Mofolo’s, so it can’t be regarded simply as simply ethnographic. in fact, as Kunene (compellingly, I think) reads the novel, “Isanusi is the result of Mofolo’s transformation of Chaka’s ambition into a man” — in fact, a classic move of speculative fiction. I wanted to note this because is strikes me as illustrative of the ways the novel’s paratext is forced — because of general perceptions of African Literature — into a defensive position: the supernatural must be “symbolic”, because to take it seriously would — because the portrayal of Isanusi does clearly emerge from traditional Sotho ideas about magic and medicine — risk reifying the perception of Africa/Africans/African literature as primitive, irrational, and so on. but there is a third way, to which I’ll return in the next section.
the rest of the blurb feels, having read the novel, similarly defensive. the characterization of Mofolo’s narration as a manipulation is a substantial understatement: Mofolo, responding to the then widely accepted (and only relatively recently substantially challenged) historiography of the period known as the Mfecane or Difaqane (the latter the Sotho term), identifies Chaka as the sole cause of a period of mass displacement and unrest that was at the time estimated to have led to millions of deaths and destabilized African states throughout the region, facilitating colonial incursions and settlement. Mofolo could not be clearer on this point, I would say, with his narration referring to Chaka at one point as “Chaka, originator-of-all-things-evil”. part of what is at work here, I think, is a tension between, on the one hand, Shaka kaSenzangakhona’s status as a legendary figure often romanticized in non-Zulu contexts and a desire to find narratives of greatness in African history and, on the other hand, Mofolo’s portrayal of Chaka as unambiguously a perpetrator of genocide, though the term had not yet been coined. I cannot emphasize enough that Mofolo shows Chaka wiping out and/or forcibly assimilating multiple neighboring peoples — and ethnically cleansing more by burning them out of their villages and farmland — as well as ordering the murder of tens of thousands of his own subjects.
is this a “classic tragedy”? I don’t know. certainly Chaka is a victim of his own ambition (literally and figuratively, insofar as it is incarnated in Isanusi), but it’s also fairly clear that there is something, you know, Wrong with his ambition from the get-go. he’s not doomed by fate; he is, in fact, offered many opportunities to turn away from the (explicitly!) evil magics that are being exercised on, through, and around him. the final enchantment that dooms him is the product of his murder of the woman he is — supposedly — deeply in love with, because his desire for the greater kingship Isanusi promises him outweighs his love. I don’t really think this aligns with my experience with Classical tragedy, at least, although I’ll grant that there’s a Macbeth quality to it. mainly, though, I don’t know that I believe we’re meant to see Chaka’s story as tragic, insofar as tragedy usually implies that we are meant to feel some amount of pity for the character at its center. there are some aspects of Mofolo’s characterization of Chaka that seem, superficially, admirable, but overall Chaka feels to me less like Chaka being doomed by fate, or by god(s), or whatever else and more like Chaka getting his just desserts, having made indefensible choices.
on this point, I want to briefly note something Kunene says in his introduction:
One comes away with the impression that Mofolo strove for historical accuracy in some areas of his 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.
I find it difficult to imagine coming out of this book without feeling that Mofolo intentionally set out to challenge myth-making around Chaka. again, the text responds to contemporary historiography about Shaka’s destructiveness, and it should be borne in mind that the Basotho appear in the novel as indirect victims of Chaka’s genocidal campaigns — targeted not by Chaka himself but by one of his generals who has fled Chaka’s service only to bring the same violence to the people whose lands he intends to pass through. insofar as the Mfecane-Difaqane was understood as setting the stage for European colonialism — as the novel itself gestures towards in the end — I would guess that Mofolo saw himself as writing a tragedy, yes, but not, despite the book’s title, the tragedy of Shaka kaSenzangakhona. if this is a tragedy, it is the tragedy of the Mfecane-Difaqane as a whole and the brutal colonial regimes that emerged from it.
I’ve already touched on the main thing I wanted to discuss here, which is novel’s relationship to historical reality and its use of the speculative. as Kunene notes, many major elements of the novel’s plot are Mofolo’s invention: the narrative of Chaka’s illegitimate childhood and adolescence; the figures of Isanusi and his minions, Ndlebe (on whom more below) and Malunga; Chaka’s fiancée Noliwa, the sister of Dingiswayo, whom he murders to gain a final, greatest kingship. some of this is, I suspect, simply to be able to offer a more well-rounded drama, offering opportunities for interpersonal conflict as well as the military conflicts for which the historical Shaka is so well-known. but Isanusi, in particular, stands out for two reasons.
the first, as Kunene observes, is his symbolic role: Kunene’s reading of Isanusi as the embodiment of Chaka’s ambition is, I think, compelling. I was particularly struck by the gendered terms in which Isanusi addresses and molds Chaka, particularly as he is preparing to kill Noliwa. having enforced an extended period of reflection on Chaka before he takes this final step, Isanusi asks him repeatedly to be sure of his decision, and when Chaka affirms it in unequivocal terms, Isanusi, who has previously seemed to be discouraging Chaka from taking this step, suddenly changes:
At once, in the twinkling of an eye, Isanusi’s face lighted up and brightened, the trace of unhappiness which had clouded his countenance fled and made way for joy, and he said: ‘You have answered like a man; I like people of your calibre. I cannot get on with someone whose mind is fickle; I was simply testing you with my questions so that I should know the depth of your feelings; but I can see now that you are a man, for when you have spoken you have spoken. You are a king, and you have answered me like a king. [...]”
part of what is at stake here, it seems to me, is not only a critique of Chaka-cum-Shaka as the cause of the Mfecane-Difaqane but also a critique of the militaristic masculinity Chaka-cum-Shaka represents. in his account of the beginning of Chaka’s kingship, one of the acts Mofolo spends the most time on is Chaka’s abolition of traditional rites of initiation (in this case circumcision) in favor of training boys from childhood to be soldiers and — Roman legion-style — restricting their access to marriage. this marks a dramatic change in Zulu masculinity:
Their speech was all about war, their conversations were about war, their songs and praises were about war, their games were about war, even the manner of their eating was related to war. That is to say that all the things they heard, all the things they saw, all the things they did, were matters pertaining to war, because they did not see anything but the spear, the war axe, and the shield; and they expressed their pride through acts of war. Thus were all the male children of Zululand brought up in a unique way calculated to harden their hearts; they thought of nothing but blood, because he who knew best how to kill was the one who was considered to have gone through his initiation, and become a man.
it is notable that in Mofolo’s description of Chaka’s new capital, (u)Mgungundlovu, there seems to be no place for trade; this stands in stark contrast to the reign of Dingiswayo, Chaka’s predecessor, who we are told promoted industry and encouraged the centralization and professionalization of manufacturing, something Mofolo’s narration clearly regards as good. again, I think this fits into the novel’s broader historical argument: Mofolo is telling the story of how the Mfecane-Difaqane came to be, and within that story, within the historiography available in the ’20s, Chaka-cum-Shaka is not a tragic hero but a villain.
as I observed above, however, this is not only a historical novel: it is also a work that, beginning from the ontological framework of Sotho traditions — though Mofolo, as a Christian, was likely at least partly outside of these — engages in speculation, in this case the fantastic literalization of Chaka’s ambition through Isanusi, who offers Chaka a series of Faustian bargains that grant him supernatural power at, ultimately, the cost of his soul, transforming Chaka slowly but surely into something inhuman and monstrous, to the point where after his death even scavenging animals refuse to touch his corpse, marked as it is by evil magic. this is, in other words, I want to argue, a work of fantasy, or at least a work adjacent to fantasy, but one that is rooted in and deviates from Sotho metaphysics rather than Western ones.
now, the caveat here is, of course, that I am not Sotho. this reading is an extrapolation from (1) Kunene’s musings on the novel’s historicity and in particular the fact that Isanusi is entirely Mofolo’s invention, suggesting an active desire to give his interpretation of Chaka a fantastic element, presumably in the service of his broader moral arguments; (2) my sense while reading that even if the mechanics of the magic Isanusi practices are based on real Sotho traditions the effects of that magic are not, just as Mofolo seems to draw on real oral traditions about Shaka kaSenzangakhona (including, in one case, a transcribed orally-transmitted praise poem in Zulu) even as he creates a fictional narrative of the life of Chaka; and (3) the fact that Mofolo is a Sotho writer writing about Zulu characters and culture — that, in other words, Chaka is a projection, albeit an informed one, of Zulu history by an outsider, albeit one whose own community’s history intersects with the history the novel fictionalizes.
I make a point of this because it’s related to a bigger theoretical question that I’m concerned with in the ways “supernatural” elements in work by Black, Indigenous, and non-Western writers is often approached by white and/or Western readers, by evasion: it becomes “magical realism” or a “wonderwork” or is simply explained (away) as metaphorical. in doing so, critics so often implicitly concede the ground of realism/The Real exclusively to a specific, hegemonic Euro-Western ontological-epistemological framework. this, I argue, is a mistake: we should, on the one hand, be prepared to stake the claim texts like much of Leanne Betasamosake Simpson’s short fiction are realist in relation to a different ontological-epistemological baseline real; and, on the other hand, we should regard the use of apparently supernatural elements within texts that engage with other conceptions of the real as a point of departure to consider how these texts negotiate the boundary between what is real and what is not. if many of Simpson’s short stories are situated squarely within an Anishinaabe realism, some also signal their deviations from it, identifying themselves more or less explicitly as speculative, but in relation to a distinct baseline real. by the same token, I would argue that the foregrounding of the supernatural in Chaka is not, pace the blurb, merely a dash of “symbolic value” but an intentional decision by Mofolo to engage with and, I think, to push the boundaries of Sotho ontology-epistemology.
following from the previous paragraph, I think that while Chaka is an engaging (if grim) read for anyone, it should be of particular interest to SFF readers as a text that offers a glimpse of another kind of fantasy, one that begins from different presuppositions about the world and so arrives in a different place. if, as Delany argued, science fiction exploits “a specific dialogue, in a specific tension, with our present concept of the real” (“Science Fiction and ‘Literature’, 69) — a claim I think, following Tolkien and others, holds for (many kinds of) fantasy, as well — I think it can be both a useful intellectual exercise and an engaging, if sometimes challenging, aesthetic experience to come to a text that emerges from a different “present concept of the real”. for a non-Sotho reader, there is a threefold tension, between Sotho ontology, the ontological framework Mofolo sets out in response to this, and the hegemonic Western ontological system. (it’s possible this tension would be present for a Sotho reader, as well, insofar as, first of all, more than a century has passed since Chaka was published and many things in the broader Sotho world have changed dramatically in that time and, secondly, the novel is in fact set in the Zulu world.)
I think SFF readers should be interested in Chaka for the narrower reason that I strongly suspect that Mofolo’s portrayal of Chaka’s childhood and adolescence helped give the first section of Charles R. Saunders’s Imaro its shape. there are some striking parallels: illegitimacy, the bullying, the difficult relationship to herding, and, crucially, a significant lion fight that makes people want to kill him. there are, of course, differences, but there are so many similarities that I couldn’t help thinking Saunders must have encountered Dutton’s translation, presumably in the 1967 reprint.
the novel is, of course, from the 1920s, something that becomes particularly obvious in the portrayal of one of Isanusi’s two minions, Ndlebe, who masquerades as someone with a developmental disability (the R-word is specifically applied to him) in order to ferret out threats to Chaka’s ascendancy. its portrayal of women is also...well, they exist, anyway. I enjoyed Noliwa’s charmingly youthful exuberance when asked about her feelings for Chaka:
I die utterly! I am unable to give you any idea, to find words to make you understand, the manner of my death!
mostly, though, women are in the background: Senzangakhona’s jealous wives have a certain amount of agency, but they are the only ones, and insofar as their jealousy puts Chaka in the predicament that sets his life on the course it ultimately follows they are framed as essentially villains. otherwise, there is Noliwa (murdered), and Nandi, Chaka’s mother (also murdered), and there is — to be fair — Isanusi’s nameless student, a female doctor who gives Chaka his initial set of enchantments. and then there are Chaka’s concubines, variously assaulted or murdered. and that’s basically it.
in the context of a historical intervention that positions Chaka as “originator-of-all-things-evil”, I also was struck by Mofolo’s emphasis on the role of Isanusi, Ndlebe, and Malunga in Chaka’s life: in fact, Chaka’s only intrinsic (socially constructed) good quality is that he is extremely physically attractive; everything else is due to the direct or indirect intervention of Isanusi and his minions, up to and including magically brainwashing Chaka’s subjects. again, I think it would be difficult to come out of the novel thinking that Mofolo didn’t intend to deflate the myth of Chaka-cum-Shaka — he just does so by supernatural means.
relatedly, I’m also interested in the ways Mofolo is thinking about violence and militarism, particularly since military achievements and military reorganization are central to the legendary status of Shaka kaSenzangakhona. in addition to positioning Chaka’s military campaigns as enabling colonialism, Mofolo is also, it seems to me, interested in deconstructing the ways positive value assigned to war and violence in general. the brief glimpse of Dingiswayo’s economic policy suggests an alternative possible route for the development of a Zulu state, the possibility that the so-called Mthethwa Paramountcy might have gone down a different and, perhaps — I think the novel suggests — more productive in the long run path had Dingiswayo not been killed when he was. there’s perhaps a foreshadowing of Walter Rodney here, a recognition that the African continent had a range of industries before the advent of colonialism (though, for better or for worse, for the most part Mofolo is more interested in interpersonal drama than in the economics of Chaka’s new state).
there are a lot of other things to talk about — someone more knowledgeable than me would probably find it rewarding to think about the influence of Mofolo’s Christianity, something Kunene discusses a bit in his introduction vis-à-vis the question of Chaka’s (il)legitimacy. Kunene’s translation is lively and engaging, feeling both natural in English and like it captures a specific style. I would love to teach this alongside other “peripheral” novels in translation — early Ottoman novels from the 19th century, some of the Hawaiian newspaper moʻolelo, Markoosie Patsauq and Mitiarjuk Nappaaluk, ...
Chaka is an engaging, surprisingly dark, not necessarily tragic but certainly quite bitter novel, and absolutely worth a look if you’re interested in experiments with history, fantasy, the fundamental brutality of monarchy, and the violence of empire.
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