Search All

Articles

1. From Shaka's Court to the Trade Union Rally: Praises in a Usable Past 1999

   https://ncsu.summon.serialssolutions.com/2.0.0/link/0/eLvHCXMwrV3NT8IwFH8RuHDxA40iSnogemqUtds6E2P4jIkQUZF4I2XtohFB2TyQ-Mf7OjaikHjy0mXtZevH7_36-vp-ABVuS7QjTFHPdzzKue9QaQWCcp95uJpGwhcrzhzopXdhkvFNYTHGajX1jZvcOEMcxtGeXb1_UKMbZc5XUxENmYgrqMuq5Vp2BnL4FCbIr9OkS2xGoF4QYsZxC2auza6cNq9Bcmxn2lvwlX5hHF5iRA1-xtmfxbkN44QWaR7H__ybbdhM-CmpLSbUDmzoSQH2O4lXMyQnpLNMxBwWIL8E0HkBNmM5zNOQJMGJu9Bqz6Zv5OFZvkqsNvp4EYmmBEknQSOpNEHKO52Qezkezy9Ib2bOsULyMiGSPIbmUhfpyTDag3671W9c00S4gfoOY3TEpDLr3EbyGQjl2rZg2vMVd10WOLiDMkm2JFOW1tVA-0J4XLvuyBmZqREgozwAopBKOEhOmOQB2lnkIYg2jDmiamtkoG4RKr8Hbogwmyy_cLjs2yKU0s4frrce_tlagvwiR4MJ0zmCbDT71MeQNUNehoz7VC9Drja46w7wrd5qYHljn5fj-YZlt9o0pXX7DfYQ5L0

   Chapman, Michael

   Research In African Literatures, Vol. 30, Issue 1, p. 35.

   This, at least, is one version of the [Shaka] story. There are many others in travelers' tales, diaries, popular novels by white writers, Black Consciousness poems, films, and television series.(6)... Read more

   This, at least, is one version of the [Shaka] story. There are many others in travelers' tales, diaries, popular novels by white writers, Black Consciousness poems, films, and television series.(6) Seemingly too immense for any one account, Shaka emerges as both hero (the Africanist nation builder) and villain (the blood-thirsty savage of the colonial record): in other words, as the construct of his various authors' own prejudices, preferences, and political agendas. In current rivalries between the ANC and the Inkatha Freedom Party, for example, Inkatha leader [Mangosuthu Buthelezi] has played shrewdly on Shakan Zuluness in challenging ANC influence among urban Zulus, and in securing for himself a power base in rural KwaZulu-Natal. What the constructions of Shaka's image suggest is the convergence of literature and history according to which both the fiction-writer and the historian utilize narratives, plots, characters, settings, metaphors, and ideologies in promoting their particular projects of the past. In seeking a usable past, therefore, we might decide to consider Shaka as neither hero nor villain, but as a figure more astute and sensitive than has generally been portrayed by numerous traders, adventurers, gun-runners, slavers, and lusters after Zulu women who, in the 1820s, represented the roughneck encroachment of the British colony of Natal on to Zulu custom and territory. In subjecting Nathaniel Isaacs's Travels (1836; long regarded as an authentic source of Natal history) to deconstructive textual analysis, we may take note of Isaacs's advice to [Henry Francis Fynn], trader and gun-seller among the Zulu, to "make the Zulu as bloodthirsty as you can" (Isaacs "Letter to Fynn") in order to persuade the British Government to annex Natal: a move that would have stood to benefit the fortune-seeker Isaacs. Such readings of history as narrative, of course, need to retain a purchase on the events of history as a yardstick of evaluation. Accordingly, a reinterpretation of Shaka hero and Shaka villain, as Shaka human being, strikes at the core of traditional white views of the mfecane: that Shaka's conquests were those of a savage force which defied rationality or analysis. What revisionism begins to see is a Zulu kingdom not entirely secure in its military might, but having to respond to a conflictual state of affairs: Shaka, undoubtedly an exceptional being, may also be understood in relation to surrounding shifts of authority, influence and territorial occupation consequent upon the beginnings of the colonial advance into older Zulu social organisations. Shaka may be regarded, therefore, as both belligerent and insecure; his wars both aggressive and defensive, expansive and conservative; and in relocating his praises in the living past, we might want to consider whether the hyperbole and relentless catalogue of victories ("he slaughtered Sikhunyana born to Zwidi") feature simply as the documentation of a bloody age, or whether the boasting style hints perhaps at a more complicated, even devious, rhetorical act concerning the obligation of the court poet to bolster the image of the kingdom at the same time as he fictionalizes its immunity from intrusions on its borders. If we are prepared to grant the praiser his own humanity in a psychology of poetry and social duty, in which he has to tell lies truer than the truth, we may become attuned to the resonance of several lines and phrases that persist in Stuart's variants of Shaka's praises. When the praiser announces that Shaka's name is fear -- "Shaka! I fear to speak the name Shaka!" -- the thrill of admiration might have mingled almost imperceptibly with the thrill of terror as the court poet, in resorting to the grand, ceremonial statement, attempted to conceal the dangerous political situation from his powerful, but human, king. Read less

   Journal Article  |  Full Text Online

See 1 article result