The Boers or the English… that is not the Question: The Shakespearean Tragedy in Herbert Dhlomo’s Dingane

In his historical plays, the Zulu writer and journalist Herbert Isaac Ernest Dhlomo (1903-56) referred to William Shakespeare’s dramatic works in multiple ways. Richard III, The Merchant of Venice, Julius Caesar, Hamlet, Othello, Macbeth, and The Tempest are present in Dhlomo’s plays either as unattributed quotations – thus implying an ideal readership sharing a common literary background – or, even more conspicuously, as structural models, albeit thoroughly recontextualised. In the particular case of Dingane, a historical tragedy depicting the parable of the eponymous nineteenth-century Zulu King, prophecy, betrayal, murder, and vengeance constitute the main topoi around which the action revolves; the backbone of the play is clearly Macbeth, even if explicit references to Julius Caesar and Hamlet can also be found. The line of investigation proposed here, after an introduction to the cultural context in which the author wrote, provides a reading of Dingane as a representative text, useful to explore both the extent and the typology of Shakespearean echoes in the Zulu writer’s dramatic works. Since the critical field revolving around the deliberate, political appropriation of the dominant cultural tradition by the dominated has been thoroughly investigated in the last decades, I will try to highlight the much more nuanced and at times ambiguous effects that the use of Shakespeare on the part of mission-educated black intellectuals – living and writing between two worlds – actually produced.