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Submitted by billie2005 on October 13, 2005
Category: English
Words: 2748 | Pages: 11
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When I started to read Mofolo"s Chaka, I was struck by the manner in which Mofolo had moulded Chaka's character. What is more interesting is the fact that the book was written at the beginning of the Twentieth Century, to be precise -Mofolo finished the book in l909, and yet it raised controversial questions, which are directly linked to the Shaka/Mfecane debate today.
Although the book was finished in l909, its publication process was delayed. In the early twenties, Mofolo revised the book and it was finally published in l925. It is not clear why the book was delayed.
Firstly, Mofolo's novel was a premature study. Given the nature of the debates today, it has not received the status that it deserves from various critics. Kunene, to quote just a few, in his book Thomas Mofolo and the Emergence of Written Sesotho Prose, has seen the novel as a distorted view of what actually happened. He also argued that it brilliantly portrayed Chaka's cruelty and Mofolo's racism. Kunene argued that Mofolo's hatred for the Zulus caused him to destroy the King of the Zulus and he also suggested that the novel is a brilliant combination of fact and fiction. The latter view interests me more, because it raises a question to me. Is this not what historians always do in their historical writings?
Given the nature of historical debates today in relation to history and literature, I would like to argue that literature is a relevant source in the historical process. This is simply because of similarity between the historical conventions' and literary works. Firstly, historical conventions require us to use sources as evidence for our arguments. Historians SELECT relevant' information for their arguments. At some stage when there are loopholes they manage to find their way through the past and use their imaginations to recreate the past (Clingman, Radical History Review, 46/7, 1990). At the end historians often come up...
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