Leadership, Power, Social Transformation
Year: 2026
Type: book-chapter
Abstract: When Thomas Mofolo completed Chaka at the Morija mission press, he produced what would become one of the most significant literary achievements in any African language — a work that has generated a century of scholarship without ever being fully claimed by a single tradition. Two distinct critical lineages have formed around it: one reading Mofolo in translation across the postcolonial world; the other engaging with the Sesotho in which he wrote. For a hundred years, they did not speak to each other.This volume ends that silence. Power, Resistance, Memory and Meaning: Centenary Reflections on Mofolo's Chaka brings both traditions into sustained, unresolved conversation for the first time. The ten essays gathered here do not merely coexist — they contest one another, find different things in the same passages, and assign different weight to what matters. That friction is not incidental; it is the scholarly method this text demands. Chaka has always been a work of productive tension, composed at the crossroads of missionary modernity and indigenous intellectual life by a man who was neither passive instrument nor simple resister, but something more historically interesting than either.The volume's signal achievement is institutional as much as it is critical: for the first time, the global comparatist and the Sesotho literary scholar occupy the same room as genuine interlocutors. Neither tradition functions as footnote to the other. Neither dissolve into the other. What emerges is a richer, more honestly contested account of one of African literature's most enduring achievements — and an implicit indictment of the epistemological habits that kept these conversations apart for so long.A hundred years on, Mofolo's Chaka is still speaking. This volume, at last, listens in both languages. Written in an African language at a colonial mission press, suppressed for years by its own publishers, then translated across the globe — Chaka is among the most consequential novels produced anywhere in the twentieth century. Its centenary demands exactly this kind of reckoning. "What Kunene dismantled, with characteristic scholarly generosity, was not the canon itself but the invisible wall surrounding it. He revealed what I had not been taught to see: that the African literary tradition was, and had always been, far deeper, broader, and more linguistically complex than the anglophone curriculum had permitted us to imagine."MUKOMA WA NGUGI, CORNELL UNIVERSITY · FROM THE PREFACE.
Source: UJ Press eBooks
Language: English
Subfield: Literature and Literary Theory
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: hybrid
OpenAlex ID: W7220980554