An example will sharpen the point. In almost all works on Shaka, the origin of his name is discussed, operating as a kind of synecdochal lens through which the question of Shaka's own origins – his birth, exile and accession to Zulu chieftainship – is refracted. A 'folk etymology' is used to support or crystallise the story. In each case the name 'Shaka' is translated, and into the gap between original word and interpretative translation the writer's predilections are inserted (this happens with many words, such as 'Zulu' and 'Bulawayo' and even, a more general case examined by Christopher L. Miller, 'Africa' itself).3 This is, in effect, a microcosm of the process which occurs in all transcriptions of the reality of one culture into the discourse of another, or of the past into the present.
An ambivalence in the translation of Shaka's name is present from the beginning. Nathaniel Isaacs, without mediating comment, gives two versions. In one he derives it from 'Chekery or dysentery', which (the story goes) Shaka's mother, Nandi, was said to have contracted, in order to conceal her pregnancy. This crystallises the notion of Shaka's illegitimacy, which itself, as William Wörger wrote, 'forms, and becomes an emblem of, the man';4 it is also echoed by Isaacs's allusions to disease and insanity in his descriptions of Shaka's 'symptoms'5 and the repulsion informing his innumerable epithets of 'inhuman', 'insatiable', 'detestable' and so on. In the second, Isaacs connects the name with the word, 'in Sichuana at least', for 'battle-axe'.6 This carries the obvious connotations of insatiable warfare; it also, incidentally, demonstrates the ease with which early travellers transferred information from one 'tribe' to another, tending to see them as essentially undifferentiated. Both etymologies are implicitly jettisoned, without comment, when Isaacs avers that the name was changed from Checker to Chaka.7
Except for the plagiarism by D.C.F. Moodie (1888), Isaacs's interpretations vanish from the literature. So does fellow eye-witness Henry Francis Fynn's more plausible derivation of 'looseness of the bowels' – with the exception of J.D. Omer-Cooper.8 Both were overtaken by a more colourful explanation: that of the 'intestinal beetle'. This only appears in the literature (as does so much else) with A.T. Bryant's Olden Times in Zululand and Natal (1929), a century after Shaka's death. In virtually every subsequent account,9 and in conjunction with the 'stunted penis' story (also started by Bryant), it is utilised to support new, crudely Freudian explanations for Shaka's violence: his childhood of belittlement, implied in the 'beetle' appellation, fuels vengeance and ambition. Thus Huntly Stuart (nephew of James), in his play 'Shaka' ( 1981), has Dingane mock his predecessor with his 'royal BEETLE power . . . royal beetle authority'; and Lynn Bedford Hall's children's account (prudishly?) suppresses the illegitimacy-connection and has Shaka's young bullies use the term 'beetle' merely as insult.10
The importance, in this context, is not in the truth of the epithet but in how it is used. Thus Charles Ballard, in The House of Shaka (1988), wishing to lionise the man, evades the connotations of both the ludicrous and the Freudian in the 'beetle' story and gives the meaning of the name as 'break of day', 'fury', or possibly 'firebrand' (citing no source, but presumably resurrecting the obscurer derivation of the Revd J.L. Dönne and William Holden).11 Accordingly, Ballard suppresses the illegitimacy issue, asserting that Senzangakhona 'officially' received Shaka as his 'legitimate son and heir designate by adoption', and has Shaka assume the Zulu chieftainship as 'his birthright', rather than by murder.12 In effect, given the tenuousness of the evidence, this tells us more about Ballard than about Shaka; it is of a piece with Ballard's overriding concern to place himself on the right side of the modern political fence, to align himself in a kind of 'affirmative action' with emerging Zulu power: 'I sincerely hope,' he writes in his Acknowledgements, 'that the interpretation rendered in the following pages lives up to Chief Buthelezi's expectations of a work that embraces a Zulu perspective of the Zulu monarchy.'
I have dwelt on this to highlight the manner in which a single lexical choice can be incorporated into the writer's ideological stance, personal affiliation and awareness of audience. This process of translating a single Zulu word into the icon of an essentially Eurocentric posture is a microcosm of the processes involved in most European inscriptions, whether fictionally empathetic or historiographically explicatory, of 'the other culture'. It is some broader patterns of these processes I want to deal with.
The aim here is to propose a tentative terminology for those textual expressions of attitude, perhaps best termed gestures, which are most often repeated in the Shakan literature. I isolate three such gestures, for which I have coined the terms enterrment, layback and deadlighting. Such a 'synchronic' terminology, which to some extent overrides 'diachronic' historical variation, is justified, I think, by the exceptionally high degree of incestuous plagiarism, paraphrasing and unquestioning repetition which characterises so much of the Shakan literature.13
Because I am viewing these works in a strong sense as documents of a culture, the gestures I delineate here recur in other colonial literatures, though I will not attempt a comparative perspective here. However, I do not offer my terms as being comprehensive, or conceptually omnipotent or normative; rather, they should be viewed as momentary crystallisations of cultural gestures which by nature are fluid, protean and subject to manifold qualification. Hence I will range freely over the genres of 'history', 'fiction', 'poetry', to focus on gestures common to all of them.
Enterrment
By the term enterrment – en-earth-ment – I denote very broadly a gesture of derogation, of dismissal or suppression, which is expressed by aligning Shaka and his Zulus with the earth, that is, positioning them on a 'lower' rung of an implicit or explicit hierarchy.
The manifestations are many-layered. Europe's intellectual heritage of the 'Great Chain of Being' and, later, popularised forms of Darwinism, polygenist anthropology and literate history, combined in various ways with the practical superiorities of numerate commerce, firepower and progressionist technology to rejustify the ancient imageries. Blacks were easily assimilated to ingrained symbolisms of darkness 'below' enlightenment; lack of 'enlightenment' is easily expressed in terms of the earth-bound – the static, the animal, the 'natural', the sensual; the sensual is readily subsumed by a puritanical evangelism in the Satanic, and hence the unrestrained, the insane and the simply unintelligible.
An extract from a clumsy 'epic poem' by D.J. Darlow (1937) exposes the coalition of these sub-gestures with startling clarity:
What words are there to tell of deeds of blood?
Like a great torrent after weeks of rain
The Zulu army swept across the land,
A ruthless desolation. Those who fled,
In earnest of the flood worked their revenge
On who withstood them; ruin everywhere;
Behind the host the wolves devoured the slain,
Dogs that trotted at their masters' heels,
Hounds of Hell obedient to fiends,
Ranging th'Inferno slavering with joy.14
The comparison with uncontrollable animals and attendant passions is the common stuff of racism everywhere, and need not detain us here. Worthy of more note is the identification of Zulus with natural forces: flood, fire, deluges and storms are the most common. Isaacs, for instance, states that 'After a form of government had been established [by Shaka] recognising all these barbarities, a calm ensued, not unlike that which intervenes between the first and last shocks of an earthquake . . .' .15 Holden put it even more hyperbolically: 'As the raging volcano vomits forth from its fiery crater smoke, and ashes, and burning lava . . . entombing villages and cities at its feet, spreading dismay, destruction and death around; so, from the mouth of this despot a stream of fire was vomited forth . . .'.16 This is not, at bottom, much different from Nickie McMenemy's characterisation of Shaka, hovering between dread and admiration, as 'a most magnificent product of nature', a 'personification of the darkness of earth, of the imperturbability of air in which silver lightning sets the sky ablaze, of the revivifying, malleable, fertile-making power of water, and the triumphant, unsubduable,