The Transculturation of Thomas Mofolo's Chaka
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The Transculturation of Thomas Mofolo’s Chaka: Southern Africa and Francophone Africa in Dialogue Introduction p.1 Part I - Genesis Chapter 1 « The PEMS and Lesotho » p.13 Chapter 2 « Mofolo: His Life and Works » p.30 Chapter 3 « Mofolo and the PEMS » p.54 Part II – Translations Chapter 4 « The texts and their Authors » p.69 Chapter 5 « Translation Analysis » p.86 Part III – The Texts: Chaka, Négritude and Francophonie Chapter 6 « Senghor’s Choice » p.114 Chapter 7 «The Chaka(s) » p.143 Chapter 8 « Other Francophone Adaptations » p.190 Conclusion p.224 References p.239 Introduction Aim […] the [Shaka] myth is still far from being ousted from the popular imagination; and as recent propaganda by both the Zulu Inkatha movement and Afrikaner right-wing shows, Shaka1 remains a politically malleable, even volatile symbol (Wylie 1992:411). Dan Wylie’s insightful remark was made in the lead up to the first free elections in South Africa. In his analysis of the early historiography of Shaka, Wylie demonstrates that very little is known for certain about the Zulu king. Using Nathaniel Isaacs’ Travels and Adventures in Eastern Africa (1836)2 as a vantage point, Wylie demonstrates that ‘white’ literary texts on Shaka are unreliable. Shaka’s myth grew from the unquestioning plagiarising of Isaacs’ text which was inspired, on the one hand, by the author’s need to “conceal what the real Isaacs had been doing in Natal” (Wylie 1992:415)3 and, on the other, by a desire to “project onto the Zulu a paradoxical image of tractable discipline and friendliness balanced by unbridled and animal ferocity” (Wylie 1992:415). If the primary function of the early ‘white’ myths was to entrench Shaka as “the epitome of the African despot, a standard against which European virtue can be measured” (Wylie 1992:419), popular historical writing on Shaka 1 Note on orthography: I will use ‘Chaka’ throughout this dissertation unless citing from a text where it appears as ‘Shaka’, as in the above quotation, or when specifically referring to the historical figure independently from any of his literary representations. 2 Isaacs’ book is the first of only three substantial eyewitness accounts of Shaka’s reign (Wylie 1992:413). 3 According to Wylie: “[…] certainly he [Isaacs] was operating as a mercenary, fathering illegitimate children, running guns, administering capital punishment, and very likely slaving” (Wylie 1992:415). 1 at the time also contained what Wylie calls a strong ‘entertainment quotient’ which insinuated into the western imagination an image of Shaka and Africa fraught with mystery, exoticism, savagery, bloodshed and violence (Wylie 1992:415). At the outset, the first distinctive trait of Shakan studies is that myth, history and literature are intractably linked. Early texts on Shaka – including oral texts – can generally be divided into two categories: historical texts strewn with undependable and often fictionalised biographical information and fictional accounts awash with historical references often accepted as legitimate. * Thomas Mofolo’s Chaka was published in 1925 by the missionary press of the Paris Evangelical Mission Society (PEMS). By then, the debate on Shaka’s life had been raging for a century. Carolyn Hamilton elaborates: “[…] by the 1920s the figure of Shaka discussed by constituencies as diverse as popular novelists, Zulu nationalists, academics, and the writers of serious literature4 was the product of a century of discussions about sovereignty and governance […]” (Hamilton 1998:6). Mofolo’s Chaka is a text about Shaka drawn from oral lore and written in Sotho by a Sotho – “in fact the first Sotho novelist, [and] also the first African novelist” according to Alain Ricard (Ricard 2004:105). The translation of Chaka into European languages (with more than one English version) influenced other African writers, this time Francophone ones, who then adapted Mofolo’s story into entirely new versions 4 In this category I include Thomas Mofolo, and to Hamilton’s list I would also add amateur ethnographers. 2 where they infused the story of the Zulu king with further culturally-specific layers of their own ideological partialities. In the present study, I seek to perform a similar study to Wylie’s. However, whereas his work focuses on revealing the ‘white’ literary myths of Shaka, I propose to study the black myths of Shaka in Francophone literature. I intend to demonstrate how Chaka, the novel, contributed to the historical Shaka’s mythical status in Francophone African literature principally through Léopold Sédar Senghor’s construal of this myth in his poetic adaptation of Mofolo’s novel. Myth is to be specifically understood, here, in terms of how Wylie understands it in the Shakan context: Shaka is nothing if not – or nothing other than – a textual construct, and textuality has a way of attaining a solidity which ignores historical changes. If this happens for long enough, and strongly enough, the subject becomes a myth. Though much abused and too often loosely applied, the concept of myth is nevertheless a vital one in dealing with literature in which so much material is drawn not from empirical evidence, but from other reaches of the imagination. Most approaches stress myth’s positive force in enhancing poetic creativity and resonance, or in supporting group identities […] (Wylie200:6). * 3 Senghor’s poem Chaka first appeared in 1951 in the journal Présence Africaine.5 In the figure of Chaka, its main protagonist, the Senegalese author created one of Négritude’s most powerful symbols, posed, in his verses, as an intellectual challenge to the imperial cultural assumptions of the colonising powers. Effectively, in Senghor’s poem, Shaka/Chaka becomes, rather anachronistically, an anticolonial hero and his text a powerful analysis of the psychology of the colonised and the evils of colonisation (Jouanny 1997: 74). Senghor is in fact responsible for starting what became le mythe de Chaka in Negritudinist circles, inspiring, in turn, further rewritings of Mofolo’s novel.6 The variety of re-inscriptions that followed Senghor’s, from Seydou Badian’s politicised play to Tchicaya U Tam’Si’s portrait of Chaka as a modern antihero, offer new texts where pan-Africanist visions converged with personal quests (Mabana 2002:81). Argument I will argue that Mofolo’s text, first through its French translation by PEMS missionary Victor Ellenberger, and then through its adaptation into a poem by Senghor, created, in Shaka, an emissary of black liberation and a model for modern African governance across Francophone Africa in the literature on Shaka. Often, literary cultures from Anglophone Africa and Francophone Africa are treated as separate intellectual 5 Présence Africaine was a journal created in 1947 by Alioune Diop and was published in Paris and Dakar simultaneously. Kesteloot explains how Présence Africaine offered black novelists and poets of the time an essential forum (as well as the publishing opportunity that they lacked) to have their works read. “Each publication showed the solidarity of a tight-knit group who aimed at saving the works of authors who wrote for their people. The journal was a platform where thinkers and writers, politicians and sociologists, elders and young academics “attempted to define the originality of their Africanity that they tried to fit into the modern world” – Kesteloot quotes Diop from the first edition of the journal (Kesteloot 2004:207, my translation). 6 The fact that ‘Chaka’ appears as an entry in the Dictionnaire de la négritude is a legacy of this. 4 spheres. This thesis seeks to understand the dialogue between these cultures. For this, I will examine the evolving narrative of the cultural exchanges through the history of Mofolo’s novel and its Francophone re-writings. Previous studies of the Francophone adaptations of Chaka appear to have merely sought to list these works and evaluate them on their literary merits.7 I will show, however, that Mofolo’s Chaka is a transcultural text, which is at the source of a complex intellectual relationship between Southern Africa and Francophone Africa within the literature on Shaka. * In order to achieve this I will demonstrate the significance of Mofolo’s Chaka with respect to the author’s intellectual education and development by the Lesotho mission of the PEMS, which is still based in Morija today. I will then examine the translations of the novel in English and French and ascertain to what extent the nature of Victor Ellenberger’s French version facilitated its culturally-specific reading by Senghor, before I discuss the Francophone versions that followed his, Seydou Badian’s La mort de Chaka in particular. I begin by investigating the history of the PEMS’ presence in Lesotho from the end of the nineteenth century. I will show that the PEMS played a key role in nurturing a nascent Sotho literature through the introduction of the written word. My argument will be that, despite the PEMS’ obvious priorities, which were historically and politically consistent with missionary endeavour in Africa, the missionaries, particularly the first to arrive, took a profound and unusual interest in the local people and their culture. Rarely 7 The most notable ones are Blair’s (1974), Burness’s (1976) and Mabana’s (2002). 5 seen in the history of the evangelisation and colonisation of Africa by Europeans, the missionaries of the PEMS built personal relationships with the Basotho they had come to evangelise. This idiosyncratic way of relating to each other, initiated by Arbousset’s and King Moshoeshoe’s lifelong friendship, coincided with the beginnings of a homogenised and transcribed Sotho. In speaking of Arbousset, one of the first two PEMS missionaries to arrive in Lesotho, Ricard explains that he was the precursor of a completely new way for Europe to relate to Africa (Ricard 2000:46). He also, as will be shown, contributed greatly to the recording of traditional Sotho lore, working all his life on translating and writing Sotho.