by Thomas Mofolo

Almost half a century after the death of Chaka, the founding ruler of the Zulu kingdom, Thomas Mofolo was born in Basutoland, a small country known today as Lesotho, surrounded on all sides by the nation of South Africa. The Basuto people came to Basutoland as refugees in the early 1820s during a period of great turmoil caused in part by Griqua raids and in part by Zulu military expansion under Chaka, the great Zulu leader. Chaka, the first novel written in an African language to achieve an international readership, is the last of Mofolo’s three published novels and is considered to be the author’s greatest work. In Chaka, Mofolo, a missionary-educated Christian, broke with the proselytizing style of his earlier novels and wrote of traditional pre-Christian African culture. Some considered the novel a dangerous encouragement of pagan superstition, and Basutoland’s sole...