Chaka (novel by Thomas Mofolo)

Chaka is a novel written in Sesotho, the language of the Basotho people of Lesotho and parts of South Africa, by Thomas Mofolo. It tells the life of Shaka, the early nineteenth-century ruler who turned the small Zulu chiefdom into a powerful kingdom in what is now KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa. In Sesotho the name is spelled Chaka, which is why the book is known by that title.

The novel follows Chaka from his troubled birth and childhood through his rise as a warrior and king to his assassination by his half-brothers. It mixes history with legend and invention: many events are based on traditions about Shaka, but important characters, such as the sorcerer Isanusi, his two servants and Chaka’s beloved Noliwa, are Mofolo’s own creations.

Mofolo wrote the book around 1907–1910, but it was not published until 1925. It is often counted among the first great novels in any African language, and it has been translated into many languages. Readers and critics have compared it to Shakespeare’s Macbeth and to the story of Faust, the man who sold his soul to the devil, because it shows how ambition destroys a gifted man.

Thomas Mokopu Mofolo was born on 22 December 1876 at Ha Khojane in the Mafeteng district of Basutoland, then a British protectorate. His parents were Christian converts, and he was educated at schools run by the Paris Evangelical Missionary Society (PEMS), a French Protestant mission that had been working among the Basotho since 1833.

He studied at the Bible School in Morija and trained as a teacher. Morija, the first PEMS mission station in Lesotho, was the centre of printing and publishing in Sesotho. From 1898 Mofolo worked at the Morija Sesuto Book Depot and was connected with Leselinyana la Lesotho, the mission’s Sesotho newspaper. There he met missionaries and editors who encouraged him to write.

His first book, Moeti oa Bochabela (The Traveller of the East), was serialized in Leselinyana and published in 1907. It tells of a young man who leaves his cruel society to search for the Creator and finds Christianity, and it is widely regarded as the first novel published in an African language. His second novel, Pitseng (1910), is a love story about Christian marriage set in early-twentieth-century Lesotho.

Chaka was his third and last novel. In 1910, after a personal scandal, Mofolo left Morija and spent years working as a labour recruiter for the mines in South Africa and in other businesses. He never published another novel. In 1933 he bought a farm across the border in South Africa, but under the Natives Land Act of 1913, which barred Black South Africans from owning most land, he was forced to give it up. He died in poverty at Teyateyaneng on 8 September 1948.

Chaka’s father, the chief Senzangakhona, fathers him with Nandi before their marriage, which breaks custom. When the chief’s senior wives later bear sons, they threaten to reveal the secret of Chaka’s birth, and Senzangakhona gives in to them, disinheriting Chaka and turning against him and his mother. The boy is beaten and mocked by other children, while a woman healer strengthens him with medicines and ritual baths at the river. One dawn a huge serpent-like creature rises from the water, coils around him and then disappears, and voices promise him great power.

As a youth Chaka kills a lion that has attacked a man and later a hyena that has carried off a girl, while others flee. His bravery only increases his half-brothers’ envy. After a fight, his father orders him to be killed, and he runs away. Alone in the wilderness, feeling that there is no justice in the world and that might is right, he meets Isanusi, a powerful diviner and doctor who knows his secrets. Isanusi fills him with ambition, gives him a medicine that makes him love bloodshed, and makes him a short stabbing spear.

Chaka joins the army of Dingiswayo, the paramount chief of the Mthethwa, and becomes a celebrated commander. Two strange servants sent by Isanusi, the handsome and fierce Malunga and the big-eared spy Ndlebe, help him in everything. He falls in love with Dingiswayo’s sister Noliwa, and she with him. With Dingiswayo’s support he defeats his half-brother and becomes chief of his father’s people. When Dingiswayo is killed by his enemy Zwide, Chaka becomes ruler in his place and names his nation amaZulu, the “people of the heavens”.

Isanusi then offers him an even greater kingship, but at a price: he must sacrifice the person he loves most. After months of inner struggle, Chaka kills Noliwa, who is carrying his child. From this moment, the narrator says, the last spark of his humanity dies. His rule becomes a reign of terror: he executes soldiers who show fear, kills his own children, sends loyal generals on impossible missions and finally kills his mother. Tormented by nightmares of the dead, he is at last stabbed to death by his half-brothers Dingana and Mhlangana, and Isanusi appears to claim his reward.

The real Shaka kaSenzangakhona was born around 1787, the son of the Zulu chief Senzangakhona and Nandi. Traditions agree that he and his mother were forced to leave his father’s household and that he grew up among other peoples, eventually serving in the army of Dingiswayo of the Mthethwa. Around 1816 he became chief of the Zulu, then a small group, and after Dingiswayo’s death at the hands of Zwide of the Ndwandwe he built the Zulu into the dominant power of the region.

Shaka is credited with military reforms such as the short stabbing spear (iklwa), close-combat tactics, the “horns of the bull” formation and a system of regiments organized by age. His mother Nandi died in 1827, and accounts describe a period of violent mass mourning. On 24 September 1828 Shaka was assassinated by his half-brothers Dingane and Mhlangana with the help of the attendant Mbopa; Dingane then became king.

Much of what is known about Shaka’s character comes from a few European traders, notably Henry Francis Fynn and Nathaniel Isaacs, who knew him in his last years and who had reasons to portray him as a bloodthirsty tyrant. Zulu oral traditions, later collected in sources such as the James Stuart Archive, give a more complex picture. Historians also debate the Mfecane, the wave of wars and migrations in southern Africa in the early nineteenth century: older accounts blamed it largely on Shaka, while from the late 1980s the historian Julian Cobbing and others argued that this view was exaggerated and served colonial interests.

Mofolo’s novel combines these traditions with invention. Noliwa, Isanusi, Malunga and Ndlebe have no basis in the historical record, and the novel presents as fact some claims, such as that Chaka killed his own mother, that many historians doubt. Mofolo was writing a moral and psychological drama, not a history.

Mofolo began gathering material for Chaka while still at Morija. According to accounts of his life, around 1909 he travelled to Natal, where he visited places associated with Shaka, including the area of his grave, and collected oral traditions. He finished the manuscript and submitted it to the Morija Book Depot in 1910.

The missionaries who controlled the press were uneasy. Mofolo’s earlier books had been clear Christian fables, but Chaka described traditional beliefs, divination and magic in vivid detail without clearly condemning them, and it made a pagan warrior into a tragic hero. Some missionaries also doubted whether a novel glorifying, or even just depicting, Shaka’s violence was suitable reading for Christian converts. The manuscript waited for about fifteen years. It was finally printed in 1925, after Mofolo had long left mission employment.

Scholars have asked whether the text was changed during this long wait. Because the history of the manuscript is not fully documented, it is not certain how far the published version reflects Mofolo’s original. The delay is also often cited as a reason Mofolo stopped writing fiction. Despite this beginning, the book sold widely: by 1962 more than 40,000 copies had been printed in Sesotho.

At its heart, Chaka is a study of how an injured person turns cruelty on the world. Mofolo carefully shows the causes of Chaka’s transformation: his father’s betrayal, the persecution by his half-brothers and the injustice of his society. The reader understands why he makes his choices, while being horrified by what he becomes. This balance between sympathy and condemnation is one reason the book is so powerful.

The bargain with Isanusi is the novel’s turning point. Isanusi offers power in exchange for moral surrender, and the price rises step by step until it demands the life of Noliwa. Critics have often compared Isanusi to Mephistopheles in the Faust legend and Chaka’s path to that of Macbeth, whose ambition, encouraged by prophecy, leads to murder and madness. Daniel P. Kunene’s reading of the novel suggests another layer: Isanusi, Malunga and Ndlebe can be seen as parts of Chaka’s own personality, his ambition, his fierce pride and his watchful suspicion, given bodies of their own.

Christian morality shapes the narrator’s voice. Mofolo speaks of “sin” and describes Chaka’s heart as filled with darkness. At the same time the novel treats African beliefs, medicines and ancestral spirits as real forces within its world, which is one reason the missionaries were troubled. Critics have argued about whether the novel ultimately condemns Chaka from a Christian standpoint or presents him as a tragic hero in an African sense.

The book also reflects on power and nationhood. Chaka creates a nation and gives it a proud name, but he destroys his own people in the process. For Basotho readers, whose own kingdom had been founded by Moshoeshoe I partly in response to the wars of the Mfecane, the story of Chaka carried special meaning.

Mofolo wrote in rich, rhythmic Sesotho. He draws on the resources of oral storytelling and praise poetry: repetitions, doubled verbs and adverbs, and ideophones, special expressive words that imitate a sound, motion or feeling. These techniques make scenes such as the appearance of the river monster at dawn vivid and dramatic.

The narrator frequently steps back to comment, to explain customs or to reflect on the meaning of events, in a way that recalls both a storyteller speaking to an audience and a preacher drawing a moral. Critics note that Chaka contains less direct sermonizing than Mofolo’s earlier novels, but it keeps a strong moral frame.

The novel also uses praise-names and descriptions of Chaka as a lion, an elephant and a beast of the wilds, drawing on the heroic language of southern African praise poetry. Even at the end, when he is weak and haunted, the narrator still speaks of him in this heroic register, which gives his fall the grandeur of tragedy.

The first English translation, by F. H. Dutton, appeared in 1931 under the title Chaka: An Historical Romance, published for the International African Institute. A French translation followed in 1940, and later translations appeared in German, Afrikaans, Italian, Spanish, Swahili and other languages. In 1981 the Mosotho scholar Daniel P. Kunene published a new, complete English translation, which remains the most widely read.

Through the French translation, Chaka became an important figure for writers of the Négritude movement and of francophone Africa. Léopold Sédar Senghor wrote a dramatic poem “Chaka”, in which the king becomes a poet-hero who must sacrifice love for his people’s liberation. Other writers, such as Seydou Badian of Mali in his play La mort de Chaka, reimagined Shaka as a symbol of African resistance and unity. The South African poet Mazisi Kunene later wrote the epic Emperor Shaka the Great in Zulu.

Chaka is regularly named among the most important African books of the twentieth century; in 2002 it was listed among the twelve best on the list of Africa’s 100 Best Books of the Twentieth Century. It is widely taught in Lesotho and South Africa and in African literature courses worldwide, and it has helped to show that serious modern literature was being written in African languages long before the post-1950s wave of African writing in English and French.

Christian allegory or African tragedy? Early European readers often treated Chaka as a Christian moral fable showing the evils of paganism, or even as confirmation of colonial stereotypes about African rulers. Some contemporary Basotho readers accused Mofolo of being anti-Christian for presenting traditional religion so vividly, while others found the book deeply Christian. Later African critics emphasized its roots in oral epic and saw Chaka as a tragic hero whose downfall is caused by his own choices rather than by his African identity. Many modern critics argue that the novel holds these perspectives in tension rather than resolving them.

Hero or tyrant? The political meaning of Shaka has changed with history. For colonial writers he was often a symbol of savagery; for Zulu nationalism and for Pan-Africanists he became a symbol of African military genius and unity. Mofolo’s novel has been read in both directions, and writers such as Senghor deliberately reinterpreted it. Scholars debate how far Mofolo, a Mosotho Christian writing about a Zulu king, was concerned with Shaka as a historical figure at all, rather than with universal questions of power and conscience.

Missionary control. The fifteen-year delay has made Chaka a key case in discussions of how mission presses both enabled and constrained early African literature. The PEMS gave Mofolo education, a press and readers, but it also decided what could be printed. Critics such as Daniel Kunene have examined how Mofolo negotiated between Christian teaching and Sotho culture, and how the institutional conditions of publication shaped the text.

The main text is the Sesotho edition published at Morija in 1925 and reprinted many times since. Because the original manuscript and the correspondence about its delay are not fully available, scholars reconstruct the publication history from mission records, Mofolo’s biography and later testimony. This is why questions about possible editorial changes remain open.

Early translations should be used with care. Dutton’s 1931 English version is generally regarded as less complete and less close to Mofolo’s style, and Chaka the Zulu (1949) was an abridgement. Kunene’s 1981 translation aimed to be complete and faithful to Mofolo’s style, including his ideophones and repetitions, and was accompanied by an introduction on the author and the text. Kunene also wrote summaries and critiques of all of Mofolo’s works (1967) and a book-length study, Thomas Mofolo and the Emergence of Written Sesotho Prose (1989).

Among the broader studies, Albert Gérard’s Four African Literatures (1971) placed Mofolo within the history of Sesotho, Xhosa, Zulu and Amharic writing and helped establish the importance of literature in African languages. To separate Mofolo’s invention from history, readers can compare the novel with the historical scholarship on Shaka, including debates over the reliability of Fynn and Isaacs and over the Mfecane.