Zulu Shakespeares - Part Two
Last month saw the launch of Season Two of the TCC podcast Shake the Sword! The latest episode has just been released: Part Two of a double-header on Zulu Shakespeares.
This second instalment explores recent and ongoing creative practice involving translations of Shakespeare's plays and poems into isiZulu. Find out more about the new episode below (links to podcast platforms at the end of this post).
Anelisa Phewa
The episode starts and ends with former TCC Artist in Residence Anelisa Phewa performing his own isiZulu translations of Sonnet 116 and the “Strangers’ Case” speech from Sir Thomas More.
For Phewa, each sonnet is not a piece of text on a page to be read but a story to be performed and heard. There is the story commonly implied in or inferred from Shakespeare’s words; in Sonnet 116, it’s a story of true and eternal love, or at least a moment in a story when the speaker is convinced this is the case. But translation often facilitates adaptation, interpretation against the grain, even subversion – and so it proves here. Phewa’s character seems not to speak (or “think”) his words about love’s permanence with any conviction. If anything, they are spoken (or “thought”) ironically.
The second performance comes from the Speak Me A Speech film project (the TCC is one of the producing partners of Speak Me A Speech, teaming up with filmmaker Victor van Aswegen of CineSouth Studios). The “Strangers’ Case” speech is attributed to Shakespeare, although it is found in a multi-authored play, dating to the 1590s, based on the life of Sir Thomas More. It has enjoyed some prominence in recent years, particularly in response to anti-immigrant rhetoric and xenophobic violence.
As Shakespeare scholar Ruben Espinosa observes, citations of this speech in order to oppose xenophobia depend to a significant degree on Shakespeare’s perceived moral authority, reinforcing inaccurate “white saviour” narratives. Phewa’s version disrupts this dynamic, partly because his Thomas More is explicitly a black African voice, and partly through the recognition that anti-black xenophobia occurs within Africa (in this case, South Africa). The disruption brought about in Phewa’s rendition occurs through translation – specifically, a cultural and linguistic adaptation of the Shakespearean text - and this episode of Shake the Sword! explores Phewa’s translation strategies in detail.
Michael Mazibuko
In between these two examples, there are many other instances of contemporary Zulu Shakespeares discussed in the episode. Michael Mazibuko’s versions of Sonnet 25 and of Macbeth’s “Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow” speech from the JAM at the Windybrow series feature strongly. There are musical interludes relating to the 2008 film uGugu no Andile, a South African Romeo and Juliet, and Umsebenzi ka Bra Shakes, an experimental production in 2019 that emerged from a collaboration between the Market Theatre Laboratory, the JAM ensemble and the Centre for the Less Good Idea.
Written by Minki Schlesinger and Lodi Matsetela, uGugu no Andile was set in the early 1990s, prior to the country’s first democratic elections, when townships like Katlehong on the East Rand were scarred by so-called “ethnic” political violence. Gugu, the Juliet character, is from a Zulu family; Andile, the Romeo character, is Xhosa-speaking. (It’s also worth noting that the only full isiZulu translation performed in recent years was the 2019 uLomeyo noJula (Romeo and Juliet) at the Durban University of Technology (DUT), translated by Sabatha Ngcobo and directed by Siza Mthembu.)
This episode also features a song from Umsebenzi ka Bra Shakes that alludes to the rhetoric of the Soweto student uprising of 1976, a key event in the history of resistance to apartheid, during which thousands of students boycotted class and took to the streets to protest against the terrible conditions under which they were expected to learn – as well as the government’s attempt to impose Afrikaans as a language of instruction in various subjects. The state’s deadly response reinforced the power struggles that lie behind debates about language in education.
Shakespeare is, and always has been, part of the “prestige” (the cultural, political and economic authority) attached to English in South Africa, and English in education especially. So we especially hope that teachers and learners will listen to “Zulu Shakespeares” parts one and two to find out more about ways of engaging with Shakespeare’s work outside of the English paradigm. And, of course, as isiZulu is commonly spoken and heard in South Africa mixed with other languages, in many instances Shakespeare in isiZulu has appropriately shared the stage or screen with Shakespeare in other languages - a great example of translanguaging in our multilingual context.
Look out for this and additional episodes in Season 2 of Shake the Sword! on your podcast platform of choice.
