Bryant shows himself keenly aware of the problem of the cross-cultural translation of terms, concepts and categories, and subsequent historians might have done well to take fuller heed of his initial warning. But Bryant himself continues the practice in the service of creating a 'proper atmosphere', that is, making the imaginative leap into the mind-space of the Other, producing a 'relatively accurate impression'. The word 'relatively' has an interesting double entendre: Bryant surely means it in the sense of 'more or less', allowing that the impression is bound to be no more than an approximation; but it also invokes the 'relativity' of the writer/reader's culture to that of the subject. Bryant seems to intend that when his narratee reads 'king' in Olden Times he is to imagine a man who, however undistinguished his accoutrements or 'relatively' mean his principality, commands a reverence from his subjects analogous to that accorded a European 'king'. But this importation of a European terminology functions as much to obscure the Zulu reality as to illuminate it. Instead of gaining insight into the individual particularity of the Zulu experience, the narratee in fact constructs a mental image relative to the European experience; instead of difference being inscribed, and the narratee carried over the cultural boundary into that difference, in this conceptual overlay (of 'kingship', say) the two cultures are effectively conflated. The use of Eurocentric terminology, in other words, embodies an implicit agreement between writer and narratee that the European concepts will finally dominate. The distortive effects of this are dramatically evident in the SABC TV series, in which costumes and 'palaces' are absurdly exaggerated, precisely to cater, not for the Zulu reality, but for the potential viewers' Eurocentric preconceptions.
Probably the commonest deadlighting gesture of this kind is the ostensible assumption of the 'Zulu point of view'. In this essentially fictional, cross-cultural foray of the white writers ' imagination into the mindset of the world of the Other, an attempt is made to reproduce the Other's 'authentic' voice. I am far from arguing that such imaginative leaps and transcriptions should never be attempted; it is probable (following Schopenhauer) that no communication whatever can take place without some such empathetic effort, a temporary shedding of self-consciousness. However, these leaps – the diametric opposite of the logical imposition of more 'scientific' discourses noted earlier – are themselves fraught with the dangers of false transpositions or distortive translations, and in a number of cases they undoubtedly 'deadlight' more than they enlighten.
The most immediately accessible example of this is the 'quotation', more often invention, of the 'voices' of Zulu people themselves. This occurs from the so-called eyewitness accounts onwards. Fynn generally refrains from making direct quotations – with good reason, since he was writing in retrospect. His accounts of discussions with Shaka are almost wholly in reported speech; he simply summarises verbal exchanges, and there is no pretence to be giving the precise words. On three significant occasions, however, he departs from this practice. On the first occasion, he records one of his earliest conversations with Shaka in the form of a drama, with a touch of annotation stylistically more appropriate to the novel:
'I hear you have come from umGeorge, is it so? Is he as great a king as I am?'
Fynn: 'Yes; King George is one of the greatest kings in the world.'
Shaka: 'I am very angry with you,' said while putting on a severe countenance. 'I shall send a messenger to umGeorge and request him to kill you. He sent you to me not to give medicine to my dogs.' All present immediately applauded what Shaka had said. 'Why did you give my dogs medicine?' (in allusion to the woman I was said to have brought back to life after death).103
And so on. There are several difficulties with this. Its unembellished format signals an attempt to erase bias, to reduce the event to its essentials, to position the narratee himself, as it were, within earshot; the purely 'auditory' quality of the recording is aided with a minimum of interpolation. But this very paring down to 'pure' audition itself necessarily excludes a multiplicity of factors that may have coloured the situation. What, for instance, happened in the unsettling shift of subject from king George to Shaka's anger with Fynn's medical activities: did Shaka simply ignore Fynn's reply about George, show disbelief or embarrassment, unaccountably switch topics, displace unexpressed anger? And how did the process of translation progress, when by all accounts, 'Jacob' the interpreter was hardly a fluent speaker of English – nor perhaps of Zulu – and Fynn himself characterises him as untrustworthy? Furthermore, if James Stuart's annotation is correct,104 this account was written up from memory in 1854, that is, thirty years later, and it is highly unlikely to have been recalled with the accuracy that its presentation is designed to suggest.105
Fynn's second deviation from the recorded-speech form is presented as the oration of Shaka's induna Ngomane:
The tribe had now lamented for a year the death of her [Nandi], who had now become a spirit, and who would continue to watch over Shaka's welfare. But there were nations of men, inhabiting distant countries, who, because they had not yet been conquered, supposed that they never should be . . .106
The implication of the textual presentation of this as direct speech is that Fynn is reiterating, presumably as closely as his translation will allow, Ngomane's actual words. But the displacement of the tenses from, for instance, 'have' to 'had', in fact inscribes Fynn's own distance from the original delivery of the speech; while we have no evidence to maintain it does not capture the gist of the original, it is certainly not the speech itself. That this hybrid of direct and indirect speech was conventional at the time – Isaacs also uses it107 – only reinforces the point: what we are reading is a twice-, perhaps three-times, veiled shadow of an original, for the veracity, even the occurrence, of which we have no external evidence.
Historiographically, this is no trivial point, for Ngomane's reported speech concerns the 1828 Zulu attack on the Mpondo and its aftermath along the eastern frontier of the Cape colony – an attack in which Fynn himself was involved, may even have engineered, and which he has in this text therefore every reason to conceal. It is quite possible, if unprovable, that Ngomane's speech is a fictionalised attempt to authenticate with a 'genuine Zulu voice' a story which may well be an alibi.
The same reservations affect a reading of another 'quotation' of Fynn's: a song, said to have been composed by Shaka and sung on the return of the izimpi from the Mpondo raid, and Fynn's exegesis of it.108 It is perhaps significant in this context that virtually the only instance in which Fynn 'quotes' Shaka's actual words – my third instance – is also during an argument about the Mpondo campaign. Fynn buttresses his personal defence by arguing that he attempted to dissuade Shaka from an attack too close to the colony; his account slips abruptly from a consideration of practical politics to a display of Shaka's innate violence: according to Shaka, 'Black people who had committed an offence should not be talked to but killed':
'How is it,' he observed, 'they attempt to play on your superiority of force and arms? You know they steal your cattle and kill your countrymen. By destroying a tribe entirely, killing the surviving chiefs, the people would be glad to join you on your own terms . . .'109
Apart from this sounding rather like a justification for what the whites did on the eastern frontier – and perhaps for what Fynn was trying to do himself – this bears all the hallmarks of a fictional invention.
The attribution to Shaka of such speeches, of course, tends to be substantial in the novels and to be leached from the histories. A.T. Bryant hovers over the ill-defined ground between the two; thus, into his chapter 'Shaka's Home-life at Dukuza: Its Dreams and Realities', which wavers between the sensationalist and the ethnological, he inserts this anecdote:
On one very rare occasion Shaka became – in a way suddenly humane: he abrogated the law prohibiting courting – for one night only. Towards evening, being in a playful mood, he popped his head above the isiGodhlo fence and bellowed out the general order, 'Proclaim to the izimPohlo hoys that they dress and be off to soma (have intercourse with girls)'; then as suddenly vanished. This was indeed an equivocal pronunciamento.