University of Cape Town – ELL2007F

Ryland Engels

15 May 2015

‘Faust in Africa’:
Thomas Mofolo’s Chaka as an Ironic Satanic Fable, rather than High Tragedy

“The events in Chaka’s life were overwhelming because they were so numerous and of such tremendous import; they were like great mysteries which were beyond the people’s understanding.”
– Mofolo’s recap at the start of Chapter Twenty-Three: ‘The Unquenchable Thirst’. (1981: 153)

In every way that matters, Chaka Zulu is an enigmatic protagonist, not a tragic hero, in Daniel P. Kunene’s translation of Thomas Mofolo’s eponymous Sesotho novel (1981). Ostensibly, the narrative is Chaka’s chronicle, the artful record of his unprecedented rise and quite predictable fall, but as Kunene makes clear from the outset1, “[b]y his own testimony, Mofolo … did not intend to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth about the Zulu king; but neither did he intend to tell nothing but ‘exaggerations produced by a facile pen.’’” (italics his, xiv) Legalistic wording such as this should beg the question ‘why then does Mofolo choose this interzone between reportage and superlatives to approach Chaka?’ What is it in the subject himself that necessitates his innovative novelization?

This essay seeks to parade the argument that neither the historical ‘Shaka’ nor the mythological ‘Shaka Zulu’ adequately explains the existence of this figurehead in ‘the history of the black peoples’. Instead, Mofolo invents an oxymoronic modern fairy tale, almost Kafkaesque in its implications, to simultaneously accompany and distance his readership from the exploits of a particularly strange hero. In strict opposition to the ‘great men’ of Ancient Greek and Shakespearean Drama, Chaka has no fatal flaw besides the lack of obstruction to his desires and therefore lacks all agency beyond the simplest of wants. We do not root for his ascension, his ‘quest’, except out of an initial pity. And the catharsis we acquire by his downfall is not so much from empathy as by the relief of our involvement in his sheer implosion, of sighing as a derailed train finally comes to rest. The ‘moral’ Mofolo eventually leaves us with, instead of any explicit political critique, is analogous to that of the story of King Midas – with blood substituted for gold, power for riches. That is, that human ‘drive’ can only produce an insatiable need for insatiability, a lust beyond proportion itself that cannot but come full circle to alienate the protagonist from the desire of which he is constituted. Or, put more simply, really do be careful what you wish for.

For Mofolo, the indivisible mystery of Chaka is perhaps the contingency of his existence. It is enough for myth-makers and hagiographers to become belated oracles and concur with Chaka’s first (female) doctor that from very early childhood it was

1. In his introduction to the present edition, in the section ‘The merging of history and fiction in Mofolo’s Chaka’.

simply apparent that “’[t]he events which [would] take place around [his life would be] of great importance; they [would be] weighty matters.” (14) But for historians to do their jobs a worthy theory is still required to contextualize the cropping-up of prime movers, and especially, as in this case, war-mongerers: “Sometimes while the nations are living in a state of peace, none bothering the other, a male child arises among one of them and he, even though but one individual, creates so much unrest that peace is banished from the earth and much blood is spilt.” But unlike such test-cases as Alexander the Great, Attila the Hun, and Genghis Khan, Chaka’s legacy seems particularly unprecedented, as “the sufferings which were occasioned by the difaqane[his Terror] were unknown in the olden days when the people were still settled upon the land.” (3-4) Thus, Chaka is necessarily the outlier to the outliers of military history, or at least in Mofolo’s estimate. Yet he was once, according to the record, one among so many ordinary princes. Mofolo therefore revises the emergence of Chaka’s personality to account for his “truly Achillean stature,” (Kunene, xvi) making him a definitive bastard to Nandi and Senzangakhona2, showing him banished with his mother for threatening the rightful succession of his half-brothers, and depicting him bearing “untold suffering” from the blows of his fellow calf-herders “for no reason whatsoever.” (11) Though we of course know of Chaka’s ‘destiny’ long before the turning point of his meeting with Isanusi in the wilderness Mofolo pulls out every stop before hand to evidence Chaka’s enforced degradation3, almost spoonfeeding us our understanding of the depths of alienation from which he will begin his rise. Thus, in an intriguing reversal of Sophocles’ Oedipus, Mofolo’s Chaka starts his saga as a disavowed excess, a human being reduced to an excremental remainder4 and forced to be a “homeless wanderer” (49) existing outside society, such that he assumes a form of

2. Not just illegitimately conceived but threatening their, and their age-mates’, lives thanks to the (fictional) puritanical taboo of the nations of Bokone, more appropriate to the world of Mofolo’s Morija mission than the pre-Christian tribal days.
3. Even a series of miraculous feats of protective bravery, killing a lion and a hyena with ease, only incense his community for his unavoidably conspicuous existence, forcing him to kill his half-brothers and others in self-defence, imposing a wandering exile which, Mofolo claims as in a sermon, demonstrates how “the fruit of sin is amazingly bitter, because we do not see any transgression on Chaka’s part in these matters…” (34) only on that of his parents and people.
4. A figure roughly equivalent to the Ancient Roman term ‘Homo Sacer’, or ‘the accursed man’.

self-reliance that, Mofolo implies, sanctions his forthcoming ruthlessness and abandon: “he decided that, from that day on, he would do just as he pleased, and that, whether a person was guilty or not, he would simply kill him if he so wished, for that is the law of man.” (35) This utter self-consciousness of both his freedom and his desire marks Chaka out as functioning at a level above the everyday sociopathic, as well as being unbound by the responsibilities and fears attendant on other mythological warriors. To use the example of Oedipus again, it is precisely the catastrophic quest for knowledge – the unearthing of the blinding underside of the reigning Law, of one’s self – that drives the narrative of conventional Tragedy. Chaka here already immanently knows his own capacity for sacrifice and suffering but still desires their reward (a glory to match his founding disgrace), and, almost immediately, he is presented with a deus ex machina to aid him in its achievement.

It is no paradox to say that Chaka is both a fated victim and the embodiment of what Hegel called the ‘abstract negativity’ of Evil5. The former is valid because Mofolo seems to constantly need to invent new ahistorical characters to steer the course of Chaka’s escalating violence in place of Chaka himself, the latter because what freedom Chaka does have he only expends in “deliberately [choosing] death instead of life.” (43) The first embellishment of Chaka’s character, we learn, is that he began as “a very brave person” (15) before the medicines his first doctor, a student of the sorcerer Isanusi, gave him imbued him with “an uncontrollable desire to fight”. (14) Likewise, in his meeting with the King of the Deep Pool6, the predictive lyrics imparted to Chaka alone are followed by the curious description of the ‘King’s’ disappearance: “[I]t did not go back into the water … but simply vanished and was no longer there; but more accurately we might say it seeped into [Chaka’s] body.” (25) The satanic associations of these advisers then reach their apotheosis in the first depictions of Isanusi and his servants, Malunga and Ndlebe, with the former observed as being “the

5. Which is to say a satanic evil existing seemingly for its own’s sake, as in the inherent malevolence of Shakespeare’s Iago and Richard III.
6. A ‘snake-headed’ monster with “ears [that] were very long like those of a hare” (22), hearkening back in the text to the introductory discourse on the ambiguous connotations of ‘water serpents’, and forward to the description of Ndlebe as a ‘hare-eared’ half-wit.

very incarnation of malice, treachery and betrayal” (37) and the latter two as figures “full of treachery and guile” (57) apparently arriving from “the very ends of the earth.” (56) Yet, of course, they appear to Chaka as his ‘triumvirate’ of benefactors, like Macbeth’s three witches, and almost the entirety of the rest of the narrative comprises their assistance of and consultations with Chaka over the successive phases of his rise to complete tyranny. They intercede in preparing him and the nation for Dingiswayo’s murder, assist him inestimably in battle after battle, prevent conspiracies against him from even being suggested, and even steer him into his doomed infatuation with Noliwa7. Despite which, they insist “[they] are mere barterers, accepting no responsibility; … it is the person [they] serve, [Chaka], who must choose the [assisting] medicine he wants.” (102) And Chaka, ignoring countless opportunities to settle his stock, always chooses more, consciously seeking out “the farthest reaches of the desires of his heart”, (48) because his desires, in their ludicrous abstraction, are as infinite as the ease with which the triumvirate facilitates their asymptotic satisfaction. By thus deferring all but the minimal agency of Chaka’s power on to his ‘enforcers’, Mofolo inserts the supernatural into history as a means of dramatizing events that, seen historically, appear to require supernatural, almost theological, explanations. The real Chaka wrought all the fear and violence he is accredited with in the novel withoutsatanic help (as far as we know), and to Mofolo, hearing again and again insistently superstitious stories from descendants during his research8, must have felt the need to include their implications in his novel. The predominant one of which being that Chaka’s unassailable will-to-power could not have existed in one mortal man but that he was merely the mascot of all-powerful manipulators while ‘the Creator’ deity was

7. But their true intentions, as opposed to the ‘just payment and reward’ Isanusi continually refers to, are implied by Ndlebe’s ‘pleading’ for the lives of Chaka’s brothers after Senzangakhona’s death, which the present-day narrator (Mofolo) finds “very surprising.” (77) I would suggest Ndlebe, and therefore Isanusi and Malunga, keep a collective eye out throughout the novel at the endgame of the facts of history. They essentially engineer all of Chaka’s lasting fame – including his short spear and battle tactics – so why not his Julius Caesar-like assassination by his half-brothers too?

8. The obvious source of the surreal anecdote of Chaka’s return from his father’s grave astride a horse and before a uniquely beautiful maiden (83-4), despite the fact that horses arrived in Natal with the white colonists much later and the maiden had equally never been seen before and then vanished into the ether afterwards.

seemingly missing in all but the invocation of his embodiment in Chaka. Needless to say, this narrative framework is completely at odds with classical Tragedy, and almost experimentally so. There the individual hero is also the play-thing of far greater forces – whether Gods, the elements, time, or fate – but the insoluble pathos of his exploits lies in his struggle against the inevitability of his own eventual failure, which is to say in the realization of his ultimate humanity. Chaka, as is emphasized by Mofolo many times, undertakes the opposite journey; devolving into an anti-human monster via his accession to the overwhelming will of his ‘demons’.

The other great implication of Chaka’s mythos is that he was essentially a ‘hollow man’ (a la T. S. Eliot) in a totalized space of leadership. In the increasing vacuity of his inhumanity, Chaka’s ego – his relatable consciousness – finally disappears and an unmediated short-circuit occurs between his superego and id that, since he is the tyrannical embodiment of both the Zulu state and people, matches his dual control of both the Law and the military, leading to his equal persecution of both the internal and external ‘Enemy’. After his generals Moselekatse and Manukuza escape his jurisdiction, the inherent paranoia in this Freudian powder keg is unleashed such that “[Chaka’s] spear destroy[s] the Zulu with the same viciousness as the enemy, making no distinction.” (142) From this point, his spear’s seemingly independent and unfussy logic of, in Isanusi’s words, “work[ing] till it’s blunt, till it’s covered to its very hilt with men’s blood” escalates to the level of the utterly ridiculous, to where Chaka can kill the one of his sons his mother sought to save by just casting his shadow over the boy, and eventually to where he appears “so fearsome that whenever he as much as raise[s] his hand as if to strike someone, that person die[s] at once with his mouth open…” (164-5) We can naturally here make the standard observation that Mofolo was somewhat prophetic in foreseeing the nature of the majority of 20th Century genocides, wherein (mostly Communist and African) dictators could exercise paranoia (both that of the state and their own) to “reduce everything to total annihilation” (46) for their own political peace of mind, but really the more interesting compliment to make would be concerning his attention not to Chaka’s acts but his influences. As aforementioned, Chaka begins his subjectivity as an excess – as an abused and discarded victim of fate – and he spends the rest of his ‘self-determined’ life apparently attempting to return humanity the favour. He doesn’t lust for power and kingship so much as the fame such positions imply, that is, he thinks he deserves the inverse of the infinite attention (re: disparagement) he always formerly received without asking, and he knows he can achieve it through the unanswerability of violence. In the Dionysian mode of both Wagner and Sade, Chaka’s is therefore a tale of overriding chaos in the name of sick, simple enjoyment. Like the Jacobins in the French Revolution, the triumph of his full ascension to ultimate revolutionary power becomes a literal nightmare, and subsequently and necessarily implodes after running out of external targets. Mofolo crystallizes this process in his final great image of the ‘Donga LukaTatiyana’; the mass grave of a valley that reappears in Chaka’s dreams as his personal Hell/Tartarus, in which the “milling multitudes” of ghosts and ‘evil spirits’ “comprise his kingdom”. (164) He immediately realizes the imminence of his death after this vision because, in a sense, he has witnessed his Dream coming true. Thanks to him, death finally has a greater dominion than life, and, of course, who better to take the reins of it than himself?

In the final instance, Chaka is definitively not a hero, let alone a tragic one. He is hardly even a villain, despite performing more evil than almost all novels have space for. In point of fact, he is a buffoon – a kind of muscular, effective Hitler – and his poker-faced portrayal betrays an unavoidable critique of the desire for the desire for power itself. In reconciling the historical and the mythological ‘Chaka’ into one purposefully two-dimensional character, Mofolo stakes out an intriguing function for the novel: as both showcase and smear-job of the ‘bigger than life.’ Isanusi assures Chaka that the achievement of his ambitions will leave a legacy of deeds so grand they will one day “sound like fairy tales ” in their telling. (46) It is perhaps Mofolo’s best irony that they do indeed, but tend more towards the tradition of the Brothers Grimm than that of Walt Disney.

Word Count: 2421

All references here are to:

Mofolo, Thomas. 1981. Chaka (translated by Daniel P. Kunene). Johannesburg: Heinemann Publishers.