The spirit of Shaka Zulu is back, this time featuring a gaggle of international stars, reports Charl Blignaut
Ask any common or garden foreigner about their impressions of South African history and you can safely bet that the words “Shaka Zulu” will come your way. That’s got a lot to do with SABC-TV’s 1986 series Shaka Zulu – the show that, even more than movies like Zulu or Zulu Dawn, made the word “zulu” part of the international vocabulary.
It was shown, often more than once, in dozens of countries across the globe and remains one of the top five all-time most watched drama series in several countries.
Germany went crazy for it. So did Australia. In Poland, reports began to filter in of a gang of white fascists called the iZulu. South African curio shops sold out of little toy shields and spears and, in the United States, the series was flighted more than 30 times.
For the first time ever, the SABC broadcast a locally made drama series in both Zulu and English. Hell, they even marketed a board game called Zulu Wars around it. You got to slaughter whole tribes or brutalise your favourite colonialist without getting blood on your hands.
Now the spirit of Shaka is set to surf a new wave of pop culture. Not only is SABC- TV preparing to rebroadcast Shaka Zulu for the first time, but Joshua Sinclair, the man who wrote the series for director Bill Faure, is back in South Africa preparing to shoot a feature film of the Shaka story – and he’ll be bringing with him a healthy gaggle of international acting stars.
One of the writers and directors on TV’s wildly popular X-Files, film producer, medical doctor and lecturer in theology, Sinclair was this week brimming over with excitement about local acting talent. He hopes to begin shooting his Shaka movie, The Citadel, from early next month.
The Citadel tells only one part of the Shaka story, about a particular set of events in the Zulu king’s life. It is already in pre-production in Pretoria, where Sinclair has set up base. He is still not sure of the final cast, but one thing is certain: Henry Cele, every madam’s loincloth fantasy, will again be cast as Shaka and Kingsley (played as Farell by Edward Fox in the Faure series) will be played by former James Bond, Roger Moore.
Sinclair was also looking to cast Tom Selleck and Daniel Day Lewis, but this week, after auditioning and watching the reels of South African actors, he is extremely excited about two top local actors – Sean Taylor and Jeremy Crutchley.
Seipati Mkwanzi looks set to land the role of Nandi, Shaka’s mother. Mario Adorf, the German film star, well-known Italian actor Franco Nero, and Laura Morante, star of two of Bernardo Bertolucci’s films, have also been tipped for leading roles.
Faure’s epic series was based on Sinclair’s book, Shaka Zulu. The book alone has been translated into eight languages.
Sinclair came to South Africa to write the script with Faure and befriended the Zulu royal family and the Inkatha Freedom Party’s Mangosuthu Buthelezi – who starred in the film Zulu and who has always had a penchant for a movie camera.
The royal family happily approved Sinclair’s script and agreed to let the crew shoot in Zululand unhindered.
But, as the political situation within the SABC began to become apparent to Sinclair, he fell out with Faure. At the time no one knew that Faure, who had much to say about creating a new formula for inter-racial television, would later be fingered in the press as a propagandist who made films for Military Intelligence.
Eventually, Sinclair sued the SABC, citing apartheid as the reason why he did not want the project to see the light of day under the old government. He and Faure settled amicably out of court and Sinclair left the country.
“I vowed that when apartheid was abolished I would return to South Africa and take up the cudgel,” he said in a telephone interview this week.
His vision of Shaka in The Citadel will probably still not delight the historians who had a go at Faure’s Shaka. Sinclair insists that what we know of Shaka is based on myth and that no “accurate” biography exists – even though much is being made of a soon-to-be-published book by a South African historian. Sinclair says that, “working within the parameters of history, I will, like all others who have handled this subject, retain my poetic licence.”
Faure was criticised for removing Zulu political history from his series, and for his reliance on magic and gimmickry as sensationalist tools.
Sinclair says his new film has nothing to do with politics either. It will be interesting to see how he chooses to convey Shaka.
According to historian and novelist Stephen Gray, different periods have always depicted different Shakas. He sees Shaka as a “mega-myth” in South African culture that will invariably return to each generation.
Accounts of Shaka are almost all based on tales by colonial traders, and were “entirely fabricated in order to annex the territory”. In Victorian times Shaka was popularly perceived as “a bloodthirsty tyrant who was morally obnoxious. Any retaliation against him was therefore morally justified.”
It is, however, more likely that Shaka believed in reconciliation and that his “savagery” stemmed from a misunderstanding of Zulu tradition.
In the Union period the depiction of Shaka was “more friendly; he was pacified”. By the period after the Zulu Wars in 1879, Shaka was seen as “a rather likeable black sambo that you can do business with”.
Post World War II, he was “our good junior buddy who fought well, a black brother best trusted with a bicycle. But lately there’s been a huge movement of revision, spurred by our democratic elections. There’s a tidal wave going through history discourse now, discrediting the notion that Shaka caused the great dispersal of peoples in the 1800s, rendering the interior a wasteland.”
In this regard, Faure’s series never broke the ground he claimed it would. It popularised the myth, but still maintained the noble savage quality in Shaka. As Sinclair says today: “Bill kept going [to Cele], `Be vicious! Be vicious!’ ”
Gray says Faure’s Shaka was “very white fascist, very Freudian. I think the whole series was actually very homoerotic.”
Hey, there’s no denying that one of the charms of Shaka Zulu is the wealth of flesh that gets shown. All those loincloths and topless women. No wonder they flighted it 30 times in the US.
One cannot help but compare the current Shaka revival with the revival of another moving curio gem, Bertha Egnos’s Ipi Tombi. Both were subject to similar criticism in their time: politically correct folk found the depiction of Africa at best patronising, at worst politically insulting.
Ipi Tombi was frequently picketed by the anti-apartheid lobby here and abroad, yet its 1997 run as Ipi Ntombi (with Ken Gampu in the lead, as he was in the original) has been sold out.
The masses love Mama Tembu’s wedding and Shaka’s noble savagery and, as Ipi Ntombi continues to pack houses in Cape Town in anticipation of its Australian tour, movie sets are being constructed in Port Edward, Cape Town and Pretoria for Sinclair’s film. No doubt a horde of seamstresses is, as you read, putting the finishing touches to the finest of period colonial chic and checking the beads on hundreds of cloaks.
SABC2 this week confirmed that the rerun of Shaka Zulu has been scheduled for October 25. It will show on Saturdays at 5pm, situated after the rugby, within the heart of traditional soap opera airtime. That will most likely be preceded by a documentary on the making of Shaka Zulu, scheduled for October 18.
By Christmas the toystores should be well- stocked with imitation traditional weaponry and videos of the series could well be vying for tourist dollars with the proposed rereleased soundtrack of Ipi Tombi.
Egnos says the original recording is still a top seller around the world and, in South Africa, continues to sell in large numbers to visitors from other lands.
And so too does Shaka Zulu. No matter what angle you’re coming from, the masses have spoken. The style for this summer will be minimal and furry. The loincloth is back.