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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” 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.

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, which 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.