Treachery and the road to destruction in Thomas Mofolo’s Chaka

I met Professor Sam on many different occasions, but I remember most clearly sitting by him at a conference at the 2011 FESPACO film festival in Ouagadougou Burkina Faso, and his generous hospitality at the at the Nollywood and Theatre for Development conference hosted at ABU in November 2011. We recently exchanged emails about a […]

I met Professor Sam on many different occasions, but I remember most clearly sitting by him at a conference at the 2011 FESPACO film festival in Ouagadougou Burkina Faso, and his generous hospitality at the at the Nollywood and Theatre for Development conference hosted at ABU in November 2011. We recently exchanged emails about a project in the Theatre and Performing Arts department at ABU. I’m still processing the shock. I hope in the future to host a tribute to these theatre artists and I welcome contributions from those who knew them. May they rest in peace and may God grant comfort to their families, colleagues, students, and friends. 36 years after Wole Soyinka influenced the founding of the Oyo State Road Safety Corp and wrote his 1977 article “National Road Slaughter” in the Sunday Times saying “We must show we mean business” about road safety, 25 years after the founding of the Federal Road Safety Commission in 1988, the road remains one of the biggest killers in Nigeria. This most recent blow to Nigerian theatre made me go hunting in my university library for Soyinka’s play The Road. The “Professor” in The Road, who participates in the Road’s sacrifices by removing signposts, ends the play as he is dying with bitter words that personify the road with the treachery of the thieves and villains who steal the resources meant to make the road safer:  “Breathe like the road. Be the road. Coil yourself in dreams, lay flat in treachery and deceit and at the moment of a trusting step, rear your head and strike the traveler in his confidence, swallow him whole or break him on the earth. Spread a broad sheet for death with the length and the time of the sun between you until the one face multiplies and the one shadow is cast by all the doomed. Breathe like the road, be even like the road itself….” (96). The inanimate road becomes a mirror and metaphor for the corruption which makes it so dangerous. This description with its invocation of a two-faced snake reminds me of the character of Isanusi, the personification of evil, in Thomas Mofolo’s Sesotho “novel” Chaka I have been teaching this week and which I wrote about for this week before I heard of the ABU tragedy.
For the past few weeks in the literature class I have been teaching, we have been reading D.T. Niane’s Sundiata: an Epic of Old Mali, which records in prose a griot’s re-telling of the epic of Sunjata, the 13th century Malian ruler. This week we read Chaka, the imagined account of the 19th century builder of the Zulu empire, written in Sesotho by Thomas Mofolo around 1909, though first published in the 1920s. The Heinemann version I read was translated into English in 1981 by former University of Wisconsin professor Daniel Kunene. The story recounts the early life of Chaka in a way that is reminiscent of the early life of Sundiata and other epic heroes. Both rulers have controversial conceptions and births, both have troubled childhoods persecuted by their step families and mocked by their peers, and both grow to be great rulers of huge empires. The way both stories are told, however, is different. While Sunjata is valourized by griots, Chaka’s life and choices are problematized by the author. Mofolo’s account of Chaka’s courage and “great deeds” becomes a kind of psychological novel, with moralizing Christian overtones. Although based on the historical Chaka, Mofolo invents characters, motivations, and events. Chaka becomes an anti-hero, the ultimate villain.
The book came to me at a time when I have been contemplating evil and what makes people go bad. What makes people betray those they love? What empties human beings of emotions? What makes people willing to slaughter innocent people? Mofolo offers one explanation.
Although Sunjata and Chaka have similarly heroic beginnings, Chaka’s story begins to veer off into a tale of evil that reminds me of blood money narratives about selling your soul to the devil from the classic Nollywood Living in Bondage, and the films that take similar trajectories, to the old German legend of Faust. Mofolo paints a sympathetic portrait of Chaka as a child. He is bullied by his peers because of his illegitimate birth and yet he is still brave, killing a lion that all the men of the town run away from and saving his brother’s sweetheart from a rampaging hyena. His own father persecutes him and orders his death. He runs away and meets the powerful sorcerer Isanusi, who offers the boy a massive kingdom and world fame, if he is willing to accept an evil medicine. Chaka eagerly takes it and this first choice sets into place the pattern for the rest of the choices he will make in his life.
Chaka’s lust for power and fame takes over his life, as he is guided by the two-faced Isanusi and his two amoral helpers Malunga and Ndlebe. Chaka loves the kind king Dingiswayo, who is like a father to him, but he disregards the king’s suspicion of his mysterious companions. When Malunga and Ndlebe reveal they have arranged the king’s death to help him rise to power, Chaka stops mourning, “surprised at the way in which these men had dedicated their lives to serving him.” Although he had danced in joy when he discovered that Noliwa, the king’s beautiful sister loved him and had promised Dingiswayo before he died that he would marry her, he “found that Noliwa was as nothing” in comparison to being a great king and having fame. His path to madness is ensured when, in an ultimate betrayal, he stabs Noliwa as part of his pact with Isanusi to gain power, and she dies with his name on her lips. He replaces her with a harem of other women, but love has left his heart and he becomes colder and crueler every day. Because he wants no children, he has his children murdered as his lovers give birth to them, and when his lovers protest, he murders them as well. When his own mother Nandi tries to save one of her grandchildren, he kills her in the same way he killed his one true love.
The great king becomes a raging madman. He insists on loyalty but is loyal to no one, killing his concubines, killing his most faithful friends, killing thousands of his own people. He conquers wide swaths of land and is known as a king of kings, famed the world over, but he does so by destroying the land he conquers and slaughtering men, women, and children. He cannot enjoy his power and fame, as there is no one left whom he can trust, and there is no one left who truly loves him.
The character of Chaka is filtered through Mofolo’s Catholic world view, and provides a particularly powerful morality tale about the fruits of sin, the way the choice of a small evil leads to greater evil. The choice of power and fame lures a boy who has had an unhappy childhood. But when he chooses to throw away those who loved him in his quest for power and fame, his decision results in a pathological madness, where he sets up his own men to kill each other. Hated and feared, eventually his own brothers kill him like a rabid dog.
Mofolo sets up a dichotomy here between the choice of love and the choice of power. King Dingiswayo and his sister symbolize “the spirit of human compassion,” beauty, and love. The devilish Isanusi gives Chaka the choice of inheriting Dingiswayo’s pleasant and happy kingdom and living happily with the woman he loves or in sacrificing the one he loves the most for an empire a “hundredfold.” Chaka in choosing fame and power destroys himself, those he loves, and the kingdom he gave up everything to possess.
This narcissistic lust for power, Mofolo implies, is the road to destruction.