Chaka. Thomas Mofolo
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.
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.