Listen up: Zulu Shakespeares
Well, it’s been a minute . . . actually, it has been a couple of years since the first batch of episodes of the Tsikinya-Chaka Centre’s podcast, Shake the Sword!
In that time, the TCC has been a hive of activity - publishing, conferencing, running workshops, making films - and, somewhere along the way, podcasting was placed on the backburner. But the wait is over, and finally Season 2 of Shake the Sword! has been launched.
K.E. Masinga in studio
Episode 1 is the first instalment in a pair on Shakespeare in isiZulu. Although Zulu is the most widely-spoken home language in South Africa, it boasts surprisingly few complete and published translations of Shakespeare’s plays. There have, however, been many examples of Zulu Shakespeare on South Africa’s stages, screens - and airwaves!
K.E. (King Edward) Masinga, known as “Mangethe” by his thousands of fans, was a popular radio personality whose career at the South African Broadcasting Corporation extended from modest beginnings - as the only isiZulu radio announcer in the 1940s - to celebrity status on Radio Bantu in the 1960s and 70s. Our story in this episode focuses on his achievement in the 1950s, during which he translated no fewer than nine of Shakespeare’s plays into isiZulu, adapting them into radio dramas. They were part of the country’s soundscape during the “Sophiatown era”.
This episode includes extracts from an archival recording of Masinga performing the famous funeral oration from Julius Caesar - Mark Antony’s “Friends, Romans, countrymen . . .” - which was much-quoted on the streets of Johannesburg after Masinga’s translation first aired in 1955: “Zihlobo, bakwethu, maRomani . . .” he begins, creating a speech that would resonate down the decades (and, most recently, would provide the inspiration for the new title of the Shakespeare Society of Southern Africa’s journal).
Welcome Msomi as Mabatha
Then we turn our attention to Welcome Msomi's uMabatha, the "Zulu Macbeth", which maps Shakespeare’s play onto the power struggles between leaders of the Zulu people in the nineteenth century. uMabatha follows Macbeth closely in terms of character and plot, and a number of key speeches are patterned on those spoken in Shakespeare’s play. Yet, as the performance scholar Peter Kirwan points out, “to compare the two texts is to miss the significant elements of uMabatha that make it extremely different to Macbeth. In many ways, the text of uMabatha is a vehicle for communicating elements of Zulu cultural traditions to Western audiences that may not get much of a platform. Most notably, the play requires a large cast of dancers and musicians to create the visual and aural display of drumming and ritual dancing that pervades the play.” After premiering in South Africa in 1971, the show quickly became an international success.
Critics of uMabatha argue that the drumming-and-dancing spectacle feeds into Western perceptions about Africa – colonial stereotypes ranging from the “noble savage” to the “violent native”. Thus, while the reception of uMabatha in the UK and the US from the 1970s onwards was broadly shaped by anti-apartheid sentiment, it could be argued that, ironically, the show’s success had the effect of reinforcing precisely those essentialising, “tribalist” tropes that had been the basis of colonial and apartheid apologetics.
In the post-apartheid period, uMabatha was recruited by Nelson Mandela into a reconciliationist agenda; as the late Martin Orkin argued, Mandela decided “to recommend and promote a revival of uMabatha” in 1995 because it offered a “blander nationalism” than the more threatening forms of Zulu nationalism that Mangosuthu Buthelezi and the Inkatha Freedom Party were amplifying at that time.
Part One of “Zulu Shakespeares” finishes with recent interpretations of speeches from uMabatha, looking ahead to Part Two, which will focus on contemporary Shakespeare translations and performances in isiZulu. Look out for this and additional episodes in Season 2 of Shake the Sword! on your podcast platform of choice.
