‘The Zulu Macbeth’: The Value of an ‘African Shakespeare’

Summary

Shakespeare, as a literary influence and as a powerful icon of education, culture and civility, has a fruitful history in South African creative writing. Published texts initially emerged from the mission schools in the early 1840s; thus, South Africa’s first writers were informed and influenced by an education in English Literature. Shakespeare was available not only as a series of texts, but as a cultural icon whose authority could be invoked for purposes other than the purely literary. The most well-known example of an early South African use of Shakespeare which is both literary and political is the work of Solomon Plaatje, the first translator of Shakespeare in Southern Africa. Plaatje’s translations into Setswana of five of the plays was meant in part to demonstrate Setswana’s worth as a language, in order to make a plea for its protection and survival. In addition, Plaatje wrote of his love and appreciation of Shakespeare, both to mark them as such, and to protest against the increasingly uncivilized behaviour of the colonisers in South Africa. From Plaatje onwards, Shakespeare has been available to South African writers to use for purposes simultaneously cultural and political, as both creative influence and as cultural capital.