The Teacher and the Bard: Herbert Dhlomo's Historical Drama

Herbert Isaac Ernest Dhlomo (1903-56) was an exceptionally prolific Zulu intellectual, deeply involved in the cultural debate of the first half of the twentieth century. His dramatic production is the target of the present essay: I offer a reading of his five historical plays that takes into consideration, together with their cultural and political significance, also literary aspects like structure, coherence, character consistency, style and register. Such an approach to Dhlomo’s works, which combines the analysis of thematic issues with the scrutiny of formal attributes, is meant to supplement the prevalent trend of recent literary criticism, which is more inclined to discuss the writer’s production in terms of its impact on coeval intellectuals and on future generations, rather than to engage with stylistic features. I propose to bring to the foreground the contextual, biographical and literary aspects of Dhlomo’s dramatic works which inform, as I anticipate in my title, his markedly didactic and prophetic mode of writing.