“Shaka’s life was originally recorded by white historians who imposed upon their accounts bigoted and sensationalist values – often labeling the Zulus as savage and barbaric. It is our intention with this series to change that view”

William C Faure [1]

In the imperial age no other African people caught the Western imagination more powerfully than the Zulu. This fascination, however, was a blend of admiration and repulsion (Kiernan 1995:232). The Shaka Zulu (1985) TV series was rebroadcast on the South African Broadcasting Corporation (SABC) in 2001, 13 years after its first screening in 1984. At that time the series drew the ire of radical white anti-apartheid historians who discredited the series’ depictions as historically inaccurate (Hamilton and Maré 1987; Maré and Wright 1986). Inkatha politicians, in contrast, lauded the series as faithful to their hero, King Shaka and saw it as a positive mobilising force for Zulu nationalism. This exclusionary nationalism dovetailed with the Apartheid ideology of racial/ethnic separation and it could be argued that the series served state purposes (It should be noted at the outset, however, that although the mutual belief in ethnic purity, pride and distinction facilitated an alliance between the government and Inkatha, it was not its sole basis). This bolstering of government ideology was vital at a time when the state’s legitimacy was under siege in the 1980s, and its stability was rocked by violence. Scriptwriter Josh Sinclair severed his connection with the series on realising director Bill Faure’s connection with Military Intelligence (Blignaut 1997). Faure claimed that he “liaised very closely with the Zulu royal family as well as the Zulu government”. In addition, Prince Gideon Zulu and the Prime Minister’s grandmother were employed as “cultural advisors” (Davis 1996:174).

Historians who critiqued the series were charged with offering “Ideological criticism … in the mold of a conspiracy theory” (Mersham, 1993:88). Gary Mersham (1987), a professor of communication at the University of Zululand, who worked on the set, initially offers a somewhat mechanistic communication analysis of the project. His later shift into a reflexive anthropological framework in his 1993 article shatters both his previous certainty as to the historical accuracy of the series, as he does of historians who insist on collapsing the categories of propaganda and myth into one another on the one hand, and the SABC and the government, on the other. A subsequent commentator, Peter Davis (1996), would be similarly labeled by Mersham as ‘conspiratorial’ and ‘ideological’ as he and others are simply wrong when it comes to their assumptions about how the SABC was funded, the cost of the series, his seeming ignorance of prior debates on this and other South African titles he discusses, and his complete lack of a theoretical framework. Davis’s practical criticism would have itself benefited from some accurate empirical research.

In early 2001, however, black historians and language scholars called for the removal of the series, claiming that Zulu children will grow up believing that “Shaka was a bloodthirsty king who ruled with an iron fist and caused great suffering to his people. They will then distance themselves from their culture” (Mkhize 2001:7). It is not the aim of this paper to investigate the ‘historical truth’ or ‘untruth’ of the series, but rather what the series shows about the political context of its production and how it is reflected in the visual conventions used. Nonetheless, the issue of ‘truth’ claims is briefly addressed here as an important element in the critiques of the series and one that has continued from its initiation by anti-apartheid historians. Circumventing the ‘truth’ quagmire, SABC’s Clara Nzama, acting head of TV1, defended the screening in terms of the series’ entertainment value and popular demand (Mkhize 2001:7). Mazisi Kunene, author of the epic poem, Emperor Shaka the Great, joined the fray. In 1979, Faure was considering using Kunene’s poem as the basis for the series, but its criticism of whites and the fact that Kunene was an exiled ANC member then lecturing in California, disqualified his work as source material (Coan 2001:9). Kunene himself said, “The series is rotten. It should not have been shown again, as it was mainly based on lies and was a propaganda tool aimed at projecting the Zulu people and their king as bloodthirsty savages and whites as their saviours” (Mkhize 2001:7). He also stated that the white filmmakers who made this series have “no knowledge of Zulu history”, a comment that implicitly recognises that the series was not made for a critical indigenous audience.

Shaka Zulu, made in Natal, South Africa, in the early 1980s, has been the most repeatedly screened mini-series ever shown on syndicated television in the United States (Morris 1988:1). By 1992, it had been seen by over 350 million viewers (Mersham 1993:80). The series dislodged John Marshall’s The Hunters (1958) and the later Gods Must be Crazy movies as the prime shaper of American perceptions of ‘tribal’ history in Southern Africa. The series even achieved cult status. On one TV station in Corpus Christi, Texas, for example, a weekly late night talk show during 1990, was plagued with callers phoning in and demanding to know: “Where’s Shaka Zulu?” after the screening of the series in that area. Being one of the panelists talking about the end of apartheid, I initially did not twig to the question being a refrain, almost a catch phrase being used by most of the obviously offbeat callers.

Shaka Zulu was aimed at an international audience that knew very little about the man (Mersham 1987:98). The only image the American public had of the Zulu, after Shaka, was to be found in films like Zulu (1964) and Zulu Dawn (1979) about the Anglo-Zulu War of 1879. These films depict Zulus as an awesome and elemental force, a fearsome tide of death against their enemies (Coffey 1987; Mersham 1993:81). In Southern Africa, however, the Shaka myth had been appropriated as the premier symbol of African achievement and aspiration, and Africa’s major challenge to colonialism (Badian 1961; Burness 1976). Zulus themselves “experience a durable and recurring motif of Zulu nationalism through the oral recounting of the Shaka Zulu tradition” (Mersham 1993: 81). According to Mahler, the American distributors held that the fascination by Western audiences with the “Dark Continent” would ensure the series’ success (1986:1), especially following the box office and critical achievements of Out of Africa (1985). While it could be that the magnetism of the series for international viewers was the reinforcement of the prevailing negative white Western colonial myths about Africa, which had developed from the 17th Century on, alternatively, it could have been a desire to return to a pastoral, pre-modern past. Whatever the attraction, and although the reasons given here may be an over-simplification of international audience motives, this marketing opportunity was thus exploited.

Filmmakers rarely possess the methodological skills to marry historiography with cinematography (cf. Tomaselli and Shepperson 2002). Furthermore, because film/video takes place in the perceptual present, historical reconstructions are always at a disadvantage. They are held hostage to financial and marketing decisions which themselves are subject to contemporary ideological currents and unquestioned attitudes. The American distributors, Harmony Gold, contrary to Faure’s original script, for example, demanded that the well known white ‘stars’ appeared in the first episode to satisfy US advertisers, to ensure its marketability. One of the results of cowing to an imperialistic, western market/audience, says historian Jabu Maphalala (Mkhize 2001:7), is that the series is “a colonial mudslinging of African history which arises out of the attitude of the invaders, in order to justify their invasion”. Maphalala’s statement, merges nationalism and fact: the colonial ‘invasion’ took place after Shaka’s time and it was in fact Shaka who was the coloniser in his own time, invading smaller and less powerful clans in Zululand. Nonetheless, the point of Mphalala’s words is that they indicate an extreme dissatisfaction about the way the film was made for its international viewers.

In securing international distribution, the role of the SABC had to be disguised to obviate the cultural boycott (Mersham 1987:229-30) and to overcome objections by anti-apartheid movements. (Co-investors included Gemany’s Tele-Munchen, Italy’s RAI, and Australia’s Channel 9.) The tactic of disguise had been more or less successfully used by the producers of The Gods Must be Crazy (1980) who identified that film as a Botswana production. Jamie Uys’s Mimosa Films thus largely insured themselves unquestioned access to international cinema markets in spite of the boycott against South Africa.

As far as world perceptions of South Africa were concerned, the SABC’s executive producer of the Shaka Zulu series explained:

I felt that the series could put things into perspective as far as the political situation is concerned in this country… Shaka Zulu will convince anybody… that the situation here, with the whites, numbering 5 million, as opposed to the majority 25 million blacks of different backgrounds, presents a difficult task to solve in the context of the political development. I believe that Shaka Zulu was much more successful than any other attempt to bring the realities of Southern Africa across to the rest of the world. But… this was never the intention behind the series to back up the government, or the SABC, or whoever might be involved in the political game (Quoted in Mersham 1987:239-40).

By the time of release, the international news cameras were projecting an image of civil war in South Africa. Faure complained that the international cameras always found the violence, neglecting positive images of South Africa. He hoped that Shaka Zulu would balance international perceptions about the conflict. In contrast, Maphalala (Mkhize 2001:7) prescriptively charged that “historical events should be based on fact and treated with dignity”. That’s what Faure and Inkatha claimed the series had in fact achieved on first release.

Reception of Shaka Zulu

The international popular press reviews of Shaka Zulu were not all positive. Neither did they necessarily accept the rationale provided by the SABC. Radical academics and activists alike slammed the series, writing and commenting in most cases from a revisionist perspective that examined the South African situation through the lens of racialised Marxism. These Anti-apartheid critics charged that the series was “a racist propaganda film promoted by the South African government” (Griffin 1986:1). Undoubtedly because of perceived racial stereotyping in the series and because of its essentialised, exclusionary depiction of ethnicity, which was supported by the Apartheid state, the series was similarly rejected by anti-apartheid groups such as the NAACP (1986:2), Unity in Action, African Activists Association, African Women’s Collective, All African People’s Revolutionary Party, American Friends Service Committee, Art Against Apartheid, Black Students Alliance, New African Peoples Association, South African Students Committee, Wages for Women Organization, and the ANC (ANC Memo November 12, 1986) [2] . The series would surely have represented to these anti-Apartheid groups the opposite of what they stood for. In terms of the Freedom Charter, for example, the ANC strived for an inclusive, non-racial democracy, rather than the parochial nationalism represented by Shaka Zulu.

In this analysis, I argue that the series undoubtedly worked to the political benefit of Inkatha, the Zulu Cultural Liberation Movement, and the militarized state under PW Botha, during the 1980s. The explanation for this consonance of interests is to be found in the nature of media state relations and ideology rather than in any Goebbels-type machinations on the part of the apartheid government or the SABC, as Davis (1996) so conspiratorially argues.

This article does not offer a critique of the content of Shaka Zulu per se, but rather a behind-the-scenes analysis of the series in terms of how films, and TV series work ideologically in terms of specific, but different, historical contexts, aesthetics and camera techniques.

Promotional hype

Harmony Gold’s claim that the series cost $24 million is nothing more than PR hype, an exaggeration intended to attract mass audiences. The actual cost was R12.8 million ($6 million). Despite its massive US and European exposure, the SABC never recovered its production costs (Mersham 1987:231-5). This kind of debt in the face of financial success often occurs because of the creative accounting used by First World distributors in exploiting naïve and less experienced Third World producers. The SABC was outmaneuvered by Harmony Gold which contributed less than $250 000 of the negotiated R4 million ($2.4 million) to production costs.

The advertising copy of American TV stations spared no hyperbole in promoting Shaka Zulu. Shaka was compared to other great generals of history: Julius Caesar and Napoleon. These adverts were headed: “Before King Shaka, the British had no respect for the Zulus”. A tempting catch phrase, but the fact is that the British were largely unaware of the Zulu nation before, and perhaps during Shaka’s time. It was only through the diaries of a couple of missionaries, trader Francis Fynn in particular, and oral reconstructions that anything is known about this era (see Ritter 1955 and Kunene 1979). Harmony Gold also issued a 15 page schools study guide based on the series, distributed throughout the United States (Mersham 1987:307-8). It is thus not surprising that the series has become so well known. Other forms of promotion included a tour of the US by Faure and Henry Cele, the Zulu actor who played Shaka. They talked about the need for blacks and whites “to come together” and spoke out against sanctions (see Hamilton 1987:22). This was another reason why opponents accused Faure of propaganda.

Shaka Zulu plays on white myths about Africans and Africa and takes on even more bizarre connotations in places like Corpus Christi. I will examine the televisual representation of this 18th Century era and show how the series negotiates history to serve contemporary political ideologies contending for legitimacy in South Africa during the 1980s. This was a class/race war that had been unfolding with increasing violence between October 1984 and 1990. Beginning with student and worker action against the government in 1984, protests spread from the Witwatersrand to the other provinces in the country until a State of Emergency was declared in 1985, continuing until 1990 with only a brief respite in 1986. (Worden 1994; Davenport 2000).

Ideological questions

At the time of Shaka Zulu‘s release in South Africa in 1987, the series legitimated the apartheid regime’s idea that ‘tribe’ equaled ‘nationhood’. This policy had forcibly imposed geographical entities, which after 1948 separated black ‘tribes’ from ‘white’ South Africa. These separate ‘states’ were first called bantustans and later, homelands. The Kwa Zulu ‘homeland’ or ‘self-governing territory’, the land of Shaka’s original rule, was to become one of these. The series was broadcast in English on the ‘white’ channel and in Zulu on the two ‘black’ channels. These channels were aimed at the urban black population living within ‘white’ South Africa (cf. Tomaselli et al 1989). (Zulu is something of a lingua franca, spoken and/or understood, by most black South Africans.)

Shaka Zulu‘s connotations of a savage and ruthless war-like tribe coming into first contact with British colonialism during the early 1800s, was equally acceptable to the Kwa Zulu government, headed by Chief Gatsha Buthelezi, and the state-controlled television service (SABC-TV). In the early 1980s, Buthelezi had entered into an uneasy, if mutually beneficial, alliance with the ruling white National Party, the liberal English-language Press and liberal English-dominated South African Natal capital, to ensure the protection of capitalism in South Africa against the then socialist-inclined ANC in exile. This awkward alliance also preserved the ethnically defined Zulu nationalist power base within an anticipated federal South Africa. The series reinforced the Zulu nationalist idea of a new birth in the contemporary context (see also Mersham 1987:379).

The so-called ‘black-on-black’ killings that occurred in Natal after 1986, and between August 1990 and 1994 in the Transvaal, resulted from this Inkatha/National Party alliance’s attempts to forestall the ANC’s political organization of these regions. The protagonists were Inkatha and the government’s security forces which protected Zulu ‘warlords’ and their ‘ impis‘ (Zulu regiments) during sweeps on non-Inkatha members in the Natal midlands and the larger cities (Tomaselli 1988). It is this context in which the series was made and broadcast that needs closer examination as an explanation of how and why the series was constructed in the way that it was. While this article is of the view that context is vital, it is interesting how the director of the series ignored the real historical context in which Shaka existed. In the reconstruction of history, sidestepping context intentionally or unintentionally ended up being a fundamental element in creating the myth of Zuluness, which served both the government and Inkatha.

Misrepresenting history

No attempt is made by the director of the series to historically contextualize the rise of Shaka. His ascendance to power was presented in terms of the ‘great-man’ theory. As Faure himself states: “License has been taken, but always with one aim in mind – to tell the story of a man, who in his own time, became a living legend! We had to do justice to that story while at the same time bringing to life the traditions and mythology of that period”. I will argue that Faure’s ‘license’ was couched, perhaps unintentionally, within apartheid discourse, and does no justice to either Shaka or history (see also Hamilton 1989). Viewers, are kept in the dark about the conditions in South East Africa, such as drought and the disruption of the Zanzibar trading routes by the Portuguese, that could have led to the phenomenon of Zulu ascendancy in the region. The result is a Zulu nationalist ‘myth’ centered upon the personality of one man. It is a myth which complemented apartheid-ordered South Africa and which ignores the conditions resulting in the consolidation of a number of other large kingdoms which emerged in South East Africa after 1750, but pre-dating Shaka’s accession to power. These conditions included territorial expansion, military innovations and harsh conditions of existence (Hamilton 1989:7).Faure argues:

when I went to Barry Leitch [3] , one of our cultural advisors, and sat and talked to some of the old indunas[headmen], we asked them to tell us how they saw Shaka. How had their grandfathers seen Shaka… but they all say the same thing “he was a great man!” It therefore became clear to me that I had one major aim and that was to tell this story of a man that had become a living legend (Quoted in Mersham 1987:117).

The common sense perception of Shaka as a self-made great man connected with two contemporary political processes – Zulu nationalism and apartheid – two contesting sides of the same coin in the struggle for power and racial dominance in South Africa during the 1980s.

The Shaka myth is exploited by Buthelezi when addressing the faithful at Inkatha mass rallies, and on television. He wears the same kind of royal regalia that Shaka is depicted as wearing. Indeed, during the 1980s, comparisons between Shaka and Buthelezi were often made by Buthelezi himself, the media, and ordinary South Africans (Maré and Hamilton 1987:1). At one level, Inkatha could then be viewed as a para-military organization reliving the Shaka impi (military) mythology in an attempt to mobilize politically through ethnicity to secure a slice of national power when apartheid finally fell. Through Shaka Zulu, the IFP and the Kwa Zulu royal house present themselves as “a cultural and political movement which are the inheritors and protectors of the ‘historical pride’ of the Zulu nation and its people…to inspire popular support and bestow the leadership with legitimate authority” (Mersham 1993:90). This is the same strategy that was used by Afrikaners to regain ascendancy after their defeat and dispossession by the British in 1902. In particular, the period between 1910 and 1924 saw the creation of organisations that would foster a sense of Afrikaner cultural identity, for example, the Nasionale Pers (a publishing house), Die Burger (a newspaper), Huisgenoot magazine and Die Broederbond in 1918, which aimed at mobilising political support. In 1929 the Federasie van Afrikaanse Kultuurverenigings was created to bolster Afrikaans culture and this kind of assertion culminated in the centenary celebrations of the Great Trek in 1938:

During 1938, of course, the story of the Great Trek and its commemoration in the symbolic ox wagon trek achieved such resonance that the mood of nationalistic euphoria that was aroused provided much of the dynamism for the National Party election victory in 1948 (Hees 1993: 4).

In regaining political and economic power, Afrikaners in turn dispossessed blacks through legal means, but with as much brutality as the British applied to Afrikaners in what became known as the 2nd Anglo-Boer War (1899-1902). Indeed, the Treaty of Vereeniging, which ended the war, saw the Boers effecting a compromise with the British, that there would be no consideration of enfranchising the ‘natives’ until the Boers received ‘self-government’ from the British (Pakenham 1979: 563-569).

Ceremonies and savagery

An ill-placed, almost morbid fascination occurs in the Zululand scenes in Shaka Zulu on ceremonies and rituals of Zulu life. Since such occasions are associated with ‘extraordinary’ or exotic behavior in any society, the result is the representation of Zulus as a bizarre and violent people. ‘Normal’, mundane life is seldom to be seen in the TV series. If white rituals such as marriages, public hangings, funerals, pomp and ceremony were filmed in the same way, the camera deliberately seeking out the ritualistic order and latent violence of such scenes, it would be just as possible to image white societies as incomprehensible, threatening and overly ordered as the director has done with the black society depicted. There are several cultural fallacies in the production, for example, execution by impaling on long poles did not occur (Msimang 1990:248) ; and, in the scene in which brideprice for Nandi is negotiated is impossible, as she would not have been permitted to attend the proceedings nor have a say in the number of cattle to be exchanged (Msimang 1990:249).

British institutional violence and racism is decentered, signaled through verbalization – the British talk about it, but they don’t DO it. ‘British’ politicking (at Lord Somerset’s court in Cape Town) is presented as rational, though King George is characterized as a racist buffoon who calls blacks “jungle bunnies”. This regal character stands in contrast to “Shaka who is a real man among men” (Faure quoted by Mersham 1987:355). As this quote suggests, Gary Mersham attempted, in his earlier writings, to buttress director Bill Faure’s rose-tinted perception of his series. He was undoubtedly inclined to do so because of his work on the set of the series.

Despite Mersham’s valiant attempt to argue that it is the British and their arrogant racism who are criticized by Faure, Shaka’s court is never imbued with a culturally appropriate rationality by the director. Rather, Shaka’s utterances are opportunistic distortions of simplistic white, mainly religious, logic. The series might well be “anti-British/anti-imperialist” which sets up the “indigenous people” as “good” and the “agents of British administration as effeminate, incompetent, hypocritical, arrogant, patronizing” (Mersham 1987). But this characterization fails to evacuate the inherent racism through which the Zulus have been depicted by the camera, dialogue and discourse, as I argue below.

Epics and history

Shaka Zulu, as an epic, is an historical drama which evokes cultural memory through oral repetition, amplification and re-creation (Sienaert 1987:1), where historical facts “have the importance fiction gives them” (Sienaert 1987:18). Following Northrop Frye (1957), common to cinematic and television epics are:

* A close attention to realistic detail: Epics involve large casts and spectacular costumes. They boast impressive decor and highly detailed mise-en-scène, usually enhanced by the use of complicated special effects and pyrotechnics. Witness the elaborate sets, emphasis on purported authentic costume (costume in many cases would have been nudity), huts built by time-honored means, ritual and ‘real’ Zulu actors. The series was filmed on the actual historical sites in Zululand, meaning that the film locations purportedly corresponded to the locations where the action took place in historical reality.

* The epic most commonly deals with history: Shaka Zulu expediently endorses the revisionist history, which served contemporary political maneuvering of both the white National Party and black Kwa Zulu governments of the time.

* The epic tends to examine a society’s social contract with God: In Shaka Zulu the various religious systems are shown to be in opposition to each other: Christianity vs traditional African belief systems, and their accompanying social systems. One of the reasons ‘witchdoctors’ (sangomas, divieners, indigenous healers) in the series are depicted as grotesque and larger-than-life characters is because narratives of 18th Century black life were primarily written by missionaries who considered sangomas as heathens representative of darker spiritual forces.

* The epic deals with the origin of social structure: The TV series offers an interpretation of how Shaka forged the Zulu empire. Contemporary utterances by Chief Buthelezi endorsed the series’ perspective in a way which reinforced the then current nationalistic political strategies of Inkatha.

* The epic validates social norms and values that are of central importance to a community’s faith in, and concept of, its identity: The norms that Shaka Zulu historically validates in the 1980s context of states of emergencies and militarization of societies are those of Inkatha’s political struggle. The series legitimated Zulu national identity (in accordance with apartheid ideology), and naturalizes the concept of ethnicity, which is correlated with ‘nation’, territory, independence and cultural integrity. Indeed, the post-apartheid Kwa Zulu-Natal tourist catchphrase is: “Woza (welcome) to the Kingdom of the Zulu”, uttered by Henry Cele, the actor who played Shaka in the series.

In Shaka Zulu the heroine, Shaka’s mother, Princess Nandi, seduced by the villain, King Senzangakhona, gave illegitimate birth to Shaka. She and her son, Shaka, are cast out by Senzangakhona. Shaka spends most of his life wreaking revenge on everyone about him, apparently because of his unhappy childhood (see Ritter 1955:1-60). That Faure ignored current scholarship on the subject (Hamilton 1987) also meant that social processes and complex historical contradictions were inevitably reduced to the actions of individuals and simplistic oppositions. The point I am building up to is that epic films like Shaka are not history, but reinterpretations clouded by the conventions of narrative in terms of prevailing worldviews. These conventions are specific to the particular medium in which history is recreated, and in terms of the current hegemonic representations of social forces, ideology and history. Shaka Zulu has to be examined not only in terms of ‘history’, but in terms of its relationship to contemporary social, political and economic processes unfolding within South Africa, both at the time of its original broadcast in South Africa, and further transmission in different countries and contexts at the same and other times.

In other words, readings of films and TV series are not identical across audiences. Each stratum of viewers from different classes, cultural experiences, histories and so on will impose their own interpretations on texts at different times and in different contexts. The screening of Shaka Zulu in Michigan in August 1990, seven months after the ANC was unbanned by the South African government – seven months of vicious killings between black political groups in Natal and the Transvaal – may well have served to frighten conservative white Americans on black rule in South Africa. This might have occurred to a greater extent than would have been the case had it been screened prior to 1990. In 1985, when my four-year-old son watched the series, his fearful refrain, as was the case with white school children across the nation, was “The Zulus are coming!” Audiences may also have tended to see this conflict as inter-tribal, rather than between opposing political positions, consuming also those who have no political allegiances. This view was reinforced by Dan Rather’s 48 Hours(1990) in which he predicted chaos if the ANC’s comrades seized power.

History and colour

Another crucial element is the photographic form of the series, relating this to issues of ideology and racism.

Shaka Zulu seems to have been shot through a sepia [4]  (dark grayish yellow-brown) filter, at least where the ‘tribal’ scenes were concerned. The photographic over-emphasis on yellow/brown/red in the Zululand scenes created an impression of ‘olden’ times. Its emotional effect alternates between warm, engaging colors to chilling blue, particularly in the thunder and lightning shots, which are associated with sorcery, magic and the supernatural.

Sepia, which filters the light in most of the afternoon shots of the kraals and interior shots in the huts, together with buckets of shiny sweat (oil, actually) on black skins and clouds of smoke made by fog machines, tends to obscure ethnographic detail. The resulting picture is a smudge of objects and people, depicted as an incomprehensible writhing, pulsating and faceless dark mass as they dart about the landscape in a storm of dust.

In contrast, shots of the ‘white’ areas under British rule in the Cape were filmed in stark ‘true’, bright colors. There is no clash of hot and chilling colors within the scenes about whites. Against the warm/chilling colors that dominate the shots of Zululand are the ‘true’ and seemingly ‘natural’ colors which fill the frames when scenes of Cape Town (or early Port Natal) are depicted. It never seems to rain in Cape Town, the light is neither an emotional dark gray yellow brown, nor a chilled blue. While the narrative might be criticizing the racist and pompous attitudes of the British governors, this criticism is not underlined by the tactical use of hue. This color contrast – in conjunction with the camerawork and mise-en-scène (the content of the frame, including props, lighting, color, perspective) – sets up a series of oppositions, which manifest themselves in the narrative, and are developed below.

Color, Racism and cameras

The use of color filters to set up the ideological oppositions – sepia for the Zulu scenes and a much ‘whiter’ or ‘truer’ hue for the white scenes pervades the series. The oppositions created are multiple:

* truth vs paganism
* civilization vs barbarity
* white vs black
* light vs darkness
* rationality vs magic
* science vs superstition
* education vs ignorance
* ‘normal’ behavior vs ritualistic order
* defence vs offense
* peace vs war
* nation vs tribe
* king vs king (on both earthly and spiritual levels)
* and, most important, a clash over territory, north vs south.

In Zululand, emotionally warm colors are starkly contrasted with the white, chilling blue of thunder, rain and lightning, which always occur with the depiction of the ‘witchdoctors’. These healers are depicted as superhuman, as grotesque individuals separated from ordinary people, as scary and monsterish – a typical white (mis) interpretation so often seen in films made by whites ‘for blacks’ and legitimized under the anthropological category of ‘mythology’. This is a “depiction of ideas in antithetic personifications, divine and diabolic interventions, verbal and physical confrontations larger than life and in surroundings made to cosmic and cosmological scale and most important: simplification for the sake of impact” (Sienaert 1987:19).

Mersham (1987:121), however, who worked on the TV set counter-argues these metaphors to be “an essential component to most myths… a storytelling convention since time immemorial”. As such, argues Mersham, the images of the witchdoctors are not necessarily racist in their narrative function as “magical creatures who aid or threaten the hero’s quest” (Parks 1982:15). They are commonplace in TV because they are essential to the mythical formula. What Mersham, however, possibly misses is that mythical formulas themselves often constitute racist encodings of social beliefs arising from historical transmission. And, since television is a Western form of expression, reinforced by Faure’s use of the epic, a form of storytelling sourced to the ancient Greeks, Shaka Zulu remains a white, Western interpretation. Izangomas – diviners who provide diagnoses based on contact with the ancestors – are an integral part of the community and were “unlikely to command packs of hyenas and maintain dens of dwarfs” (Hamilton 1989:18). This may be a literal response, but the scope of the metaphor is somewhat limited by Western preconceptions of African iconography. As author and broadcaster Thokozane Nene cautions, ” sangomaswere ordinary people, not grotesque beings” (Mkhize 2001:7). Mersham (1987:290) himself admits this ethnocentric bias as an “enduring Western construct with a long pedigree” (see Propp 1968:87-91), and refers to scholars who have identified the ‘liminal’ components of cultural ritual.

Liminality occurs where roles are reversed, rules bent and categories are overturned. “Uncommon sense”, including inexplicable behavioral practices beyond the rational also fall into this concept (Turner 1987a: 68; 1977:69, 88). Mersham quotes Miller’s traveller sources (1979) for assurance on the outlandish appearance of the witches, witchdoctors, mediums, diviners, mystics and ghosts found in black societies of the 17th Century.

While liminality may be used in the ‘real world’ to create myths about groups of people, it could be argued to be a fairly usual device used for dramatic effect, rather than stereotyping, in films and stories. In the light of this ‘innocent’ liminality, which Mersham believes is an unremarkable storytelling convention, he contends that my argument about Faure’s pejorative depiction of the witchdoctors is “extremely unbalanced”. Mersham argues that such conventions of the mythic form are “elements which are known to both the creator and his audience beforehand” (Cawelti 1970:27). Mersham (1987:292) agrees with Faure that “When we show the marking of the spear, to hell with it, lightning, thunder and out of the forests come these demon-like figures with huge red eyes. Because that’s the way some of these people described the event for me”.

Whatever credence Mersham invests his popular and academic sources, the fact remains that the bizarre appearance of the witchdoctors in Shaka Zulu intercepts the stereotypical discourses by which these characters have been imaged in the majority of films and books made or written by whites about blacks. This liminal image is endemic to Western social discourses about Africans and Africa. These weird depictions of ‘witchdoctors’ seem to be largely derived from the H. Rider Haggard literary stereotypes, made into scores of films and TV series since the early 1920s – eg. King Solomon’s Mines and Alan Quartermain. Liminality within a specific text which draws on this discourse can hardly escape this broader international racist imagery and discourses of ‘the Other’, though I concede the point that Zulu interpretations would cut through the bizarre to the essence of the depictions as they understand them outside of Western media representations.

The use of colour and liminality are merely two of the many conventions that the series uses in order to make a substantial visual impact. Visual impact can also be secured through shots of scenery. Like all epics since the earliest Western cinema, the camera in Shaka Zulu shows large expanses of land. It sweeps the landscape with tracking shots, long pans, zooms and crane tilts – up and down. Viewers are positioned by the camera to feel that they are witnesses to significant historical events which must follow an inevitable pre-ordained course, which cannot be interfered with and which must continue on their way. Privy to a God’s-eye-view, high angle and sweeping shots place the viewer in a dominant position, de-emphasizing the Zulu impis into tiny figures as they dash this way and that across the landscape in their hour of glory. Again, this dynamic style of camerawork is absent in the shots of Cape Town and the British colonial areas. The camera here is at eye-level, which creates a sense of ordinariness and equality.

TV and politics

Various historians and Zulu literary scholars have argued that Shaka Zulu bears little resemblance to history, and that his impis never threatened the Cape (Mkhize 2001:7). That might have been so, but the Zulu ‘nation’ of the 1980s was seen as a threat until a rapprochement between Buthelezi and English-dominated capital and the Afrikaner state became clear in the early part of the 1980s. Despite this, Chief Buthelezi’s impis were still regarded with fear by the average Afrikaans-speaking South African. Shaka’s successor, Dingane, massacred a Voortrekker party in 1839. A Voortrekker party under Andries Pretorius took revenge at the Battle of Blood River at which the Zulus were defeated but not conquered. This deliverance, later known by Afrikaners as the Day of the Covenant, continued to be solemnly celebrated as one of the great holy events of Afrikaner history until the early 1990s. This event is reenacted in De Voortrekker/Winning a Continent (1916), which became a cult film for Afrikaners celebrating the victory between 1916 and the early 1960s (Tomaselli; Strebel 1977). After 1994, the Day was appropriated by the extreme right wing, which sometimes celebrates with automatic rifles on the one side of the river. Zulus, in more racially inclusive reconciliation ceremonies at the new Ncube memorial, celebrate on the other side. On the evening prior to the inauguration of Ncombe in 1999, an Afrikaner mass murderer of blacks in Pretoria, who had been released under the amnesty programme, led a commando from the Blood River monument to seize the Inkatha flag, but failed to succeed!

Fear, mixed with respect, is reinforced by the ‘traditional regalia’ so often worn by Buthelezi at mass rallies broadcast by SABC-TV News, by his references to the past and by Inkatha mobilizing politically, often with extreme violence and, through calls to ethnicity and culture. Since these – ethnicity and culture – were taken by white Afrikaner intellectuals and politicians as being synonymous with the idea of ‘nation’ and national territory, Shaka the TV series became during the 1980s an affirmation of apartheid, of blacks being a threat, not only to themselves (eg. the vicious way in which Shaka is shown to have governed through extreme force), but to whites as well. Capable of unspeakable brutality as in the scenes where people are impaled, such images intercept the dominant Western stereotype and international media messages of savage blacks who are unable to govern in any other way.

This conclusion is reinforced in the Shaka Zulu “option kit”. This kit offers different sets of inserts through which different broadcasters could drop in alternatives to the impaling scene, for example. The other options included a less graphic wide shot, or Fynn grimacing in response to the (in this option) off-screen violence (Faure quoted in Mersham 1987:366).

It is notable that we are not shown the savagery of executions in the British Cape Colony during the Shaka era and the result is that a dichotomy between savagery and civilisation is set up. During the decade of the 1980s, these messages endorsed apartheid discourse which held that blacks were ‘different’ and should develop in their ‘own’ way in their ‘own areas’, safely out of the way of white civilization. Inter-state co-operation from the racially pure Bantustans, rather than a multi-racial society, was suggested as basis of interaction, a point on which the series as a whole ends. Under the changed context brought about by the unbannings of liberation movements in February 1990, Shaka Zulu now emphasized ‘order’ vs ‘disorder’, Inkatha as capitalist supporter vs ANC as socialist disorder.

Militarization and total strategy

The punch lines of the series occurred in the 7th episode. As King Dingiswayo appeals to his victorious general, Shaka, for “subjugation” rather than “destruction”, he launches into liberal humanist discourse as he pleads for the sanctity of human life and individual freedom. Dingiswayo was assassinated by neighboring King Zwide in 1816, who was in turn routed by Shaka in 1818. In the TV series, Shaka responds to Dingiswayo’s humanism by mouthing the militarist discourse popularized by the hawkish PW Botha’s regime of the decade of the 1980s. This was the ‘total war’ doctrine adopted by the SA Defence Force (Tomaselli and Louw 1989).

Shaka’s comments on Zwide are similar to those used by Botha’s securocrats to discredit anyone who opposed his policies. Shaka demands total control over the armed forces and the state. He gets it, just as PW Botha got it when he became State President in 1984 and shifted decision-making away from Parliament and the National Party caucuses to the supreme State Security Council. The TV character, Shaka, then, was ‘spoken’ by a discourse relating to the 1980s rather than the early 18th Century. The argument of this paper has suggested from the beginning that the visual representation in the series speaks primarily about the context in which it was produced and that this is perhaps more important than assessing claims that it shows historical ‘truth’ (this was one of the critiques presented by the anti-Apartheid activists in the 1980s). Mersham (1987:310-1) argues the opposite, that the series is an embodiment of the myth of a “founding community – an origin” (Sitas 1988:16) which “warns against violence in the pursuit of power”, though it tells the parable of a man obsessed with violence.

Shaka Zulu develops the idea of social control through extreme violence, but the last episode ultimately shows it to be misplaced when interaction with whites is rejected by Shaka. The resulting chaos is “a strong warning to independent black politicians like Buthelezi not to try to go it alone”. But more than just a caution to Buthelezi, the series:

neatly twists the veiled threats that Buthelezi directs at the South African state when it seems intransigent. It suggests by way of analogy that the modern Mfecane, which Buthelezi threatens may erupt if whites continue to ignore him, will be as threatening to the Zulu leadership as to the whites. In the series, Shaka’s decision to launch an attack on the Cape Colony is the beginning of his undoing. The lesson is there for Buthelezi, and any other black leaders, that a successful outcome for either party is predicated on close cooperation with the other. The alternative portrayed in everything will go up in flames and chaos will prevail (Hamilton 1989:26).

Ultimately this is once again an indication of the way in which the series links back to its context, where the text has specific relevance for the politics of the 1980s, even though the series was not necessarily made with this message for Buthelezi in mind.

Buthelezi at the time was mythified as a reconciliator, “the man who showed the way to black and white rule by consensus” (Shepherd-Smith 1988:124), whose ‘nation’, would again rise up against its colonial oppressors. In fact, the opposite occurred as Buthelezi, both hostile towards, and ally of, the apartheid state, found himself increasingly isolated after the release of Mandela in February 1990. This isolation was enhanced as more and more evidence accumulated on the role of Buthelezi’s dependence on the apartheid state and their joint use of violence to sustain the idea of Zulu nationalism after February 1990 in opposition to the ANC.

Conclusion: depictions of Zulus and ideological allegiances

Faure persuaded the contemporary Zulu King Goodwill Zwelithini to endorse the project. Faure himself stated: “It’s a mutual history, Europeans live in Europe, Americans live in America. I live in Africa and therefore I am an African, a white African” (emphasis added). What Faure has presented is a view of Shaka which endorsed the dominant, sometimes racist, stereotypes held by whites in South Africa, and the West at large. How those stereotypes will be interpreted by individual viewers depends on a variety of factors including their attitudes towards and understanding of apartheid, their image of Africa, their class positions and cultural preferences. The anxious refrain from very young white South African schoolchildren on seeing the series, for example, was “the Zulus are coming, the Zulus are coming!”

What I have tried to show is that in certain viewing contexts, Shaka Zulu offered a legitimacy for both ruling government and anti-apartheid elements (eg. the Kwa Zulu legislature and Inkatha). What connected Inkatha to the state’s security apparatuses was its support of capitalism and Zulu nationalism. The latter value, which should not be confused with ethnicity or ‘Zuluness’ as Mersham (1987:321ff) has done, is particularly strong in the series. This aided the apartheid state’s insistence that apartheid was a humane and historically sensible policy which permitted, indeed, encouraged black ‘tribal’ independence.

Buthelezi, however, was using the series to legitimize his role as a fundamental player, as the series implies that he is a natural leader as a result of his “close association with, and genealogical relationship to, the royal house” (Mersham, 1993:90), in the negotiations that were to ensue after February 1990 towards a national solution. While the series was ideologically useful for the often troubled National Party/Inkatha alliance, however, theories which implicate the SABC mechanistically with diplomatic “aims” of the government misunderstand the nature of the relationship between national broadcasters, the state and the preferences of TV audiences anywhere (see Wright and Maré 1986:4; ANC 1987:1; Davis 1996). The contingent, sometimes contradictory relationship between the broadcaster and the state and the way that all the individual components of the SABC machine worked to their own agendas, disputes the notion of any simplistically defined relationship between the broadcaster and state. It also refutes the idea of a unified SABC producing a consensus on audience needs. Mersham’s (1993) intervention is designed to question the seamless propagandistic models of the series’ critics and to relocate discussion in terms of myth:

Shaka Zulu is essentially a white South African rendition of a black myth – a political ‘mythomoteur’ – that attempts to efface fears about the future for white South Africans, to dispel class contradictions, and legitimate Kwa Zulu’s leaders’ rights to rule through the establishment of a political mythology of a founding community.

The series offered sites of struggle in the US as well. The anti-apartheid movement tried to prevent US cable stations from screening the series. The cable companies responded with advertising campaigns calling on viewers to judge the series for themselves. The fact that this conflict arose will have contributed to American awareness of the deeper issues relating to apartheid. But in judging for one’s self, it is necessary to have a deeper knowledge of both television conventions and political issues.

Peroration: the myth lives on

“A new series in the offing, Shaka Zulu – The Citadel, purports to be nothing else but entertainment. It is written and directed by – surprise, surprise – Joshua Sinclair, the scriptwriter for Shaka Zulu who ultimately severed his connections with director Bill Faure. Henry Cele appears once again as Shaka but this time he is joined by Baywatch’s David Hasselhof as a slave merchant and Omar Sharif as a Sheik. Grace Jones plays Nandi and James Fox, Edward’s brother, also appears. Nobody has seen it yet. Legal battles have prevented any public airing or video distribution” (Coan 2001: 9). And so the myth lives on.

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Filmography
Shaka Zulu 1985
Production co: SABC, Elmo De Witt Films
Distribution co: Harmony Gold
Executive producers: Bill Lenny, Leon Rautenbach
Producer: Ed Harper
Director: William Faure
VHS
Distributed by Broadcast Enterprises, Auckland Park, RSA
Copyright: SABC

Endnotes

[1] Quoted in Shaka Zulu: The Official Souvenir Brochure. BMS Publications in association with William C Faure, Howard Place, 1986, P.3.
[2] Carolyn Hamilton (1989:28) states that ‘ Shaka Zulu is no mere ‘racist propaganda’; on the contrary, it advocates interracial interaction and mutual dependency’. She says that ‘Tomaselli has argued’ (Tomaselli 1987:10) that the production endorses racism. It is worth noting, therefore, that this perception was shared by many anti-apartheid organisations.
[3] An anthropologist/farmer, also one of the owners of Shakaland, the TV series set, now an ‘authentic Zulu hotel’ (see Tomaselli 2001).
[4] The yellow may have been encoded by any one of a number of means. The film stock used, Eastman High Speed Negative 5294 ECN process has a tendency towards yellow in low light situations, while able to expose correctly where wide contrasts of light are found within the frame. Alternatively the sepia may have been added during post-production stages. Both processes require thought and effort to realise, indicating the deliberateness with which the sepia was used.