Great African Reads discussion

SPOILERs

This thread is for discussions of our Sept/Oct 2021 read of Chaka by Thomas Mofolo - Notice that there may be SPOILERS (Find the no-spoiler thread here)

- Feel free to discuss anything you like about the book here: Here's a few questions to get you started:

How did you like the characters? The plot? The style? The portrayal of characters and their surroundings?

I have read about 40% now, and have enjoyed it. Mofolo's writing style puts me in mind of "folk artists", untrained but clearly talented painters. It's very story-focused with Chaka's character and thoughts shown primarily by his actions.

I finished the book last night (short review here) and loved the first half of the book, but did not like the bloody and cruel second half.

I just read the Wikipedia page on Shaka (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shaka) out of which I understand that the book is based on the real life of Shaka. It must have been an extremely violent period.

After his mother's death, Shaka's behavior became erratic: "Shaka ordered that no crops should be planted during the following year of mourning, no milk (the basis of the Zulu diet at the time) was to be used, and any woman who became pregnant was to be killed along with her husband. At least 7,000 people who were deemed to be insufficiently grief-stricken were executed, although the killing was not restricted to humans: cows were slaughtered so that their calves would know what losing a mother felt like."

I finished it tonight and the edition I read is an excellent recent translation. Chaka was not a nice man, but the history is fairly accurate with some literary license by the author.

Mzilikazi who was one of his commanders really fled and created the Matabele nation in the northern part of current southern Africa. In my text there is a reference to the Difaqane which is the period where the continuous wars effectively emptied large parts of the interior of the country in the early 1800s. There is some historical information from the diaries of missionaries and other adventurers who did interact with him and his legend lives on in stories.