Ideology and Philology in H. Rider Haggard's Zulu Romances: Translating Zulu Language and Culture

UNLIKE ALLAN QUATERMAIN, his adventurer hero, the novelist Henry Rider Haggard did not speak Zulu or Sesotho fluently.¹ However, Haggard knew the illusion of mastery evoked by a hero who could translate African languages. Quatermain writes in Marie (1912): "As I could speak their language I was more or less in command of this Zulu contingent [of warriors]."² Quatermain's command of his narrative world depends on his ability to move fluidly between Zulu, Sesotho, "Kukuana," Arabic, Dutch, Portuguese, and French languages. Accordingly, Haggard's hero enacts a fantasy of translational and philological mastery central to imperialist discourse. Translation in late nineteenth-century colonial South Africa functioned as imperial palimpsest, converting black oral texts into written treaties, theories, stories, vocabularies, and other colonial records. Haggard, as a colonial officer in the Transvaal in the 1870s, knew first-hand the centrality of translation to imperialist rule. Perched on a log, he recalls, he tried to take notes of a treaty negotiation in which Sesotho was translated first into Dutch, then English: "It was a very trying experience," he confessed in relation to his lack of linguistic skill.³ In his Zulu romances, such difficulties are smoothed away through a myth of translational ease and fidelity. Nothing, apparently, could be simpler than the hero's ability to learn languages on the hoof or the narrator's ability to present a transparently "true" translation of Zulu culture. This article examines Haggard's Zulu fiction in relation to its translational myths and the ideological linguistic center around which imperialist fiction turns. Colonial and philological texts provide a counterpoint to Haggard's novels, displaying consistent themes relating to the translation of South African identity.

Although the comments of nineteenth-century readers reveal the widespread appeal of Haggard's Zulu novels—"excellent" (King Solomon's Mines), "exciting" (Allan Quatermain),⁴ and "daring" (Nada the Lily)⁵—these novels have been seen by recent critics as representatives of imperialism's worst attributes: racism, misogyny, and Eurocentrism.⁶ Norman Etherington was the first to write of Haggard: "he could not write into his stories the brand of racism he casually espoused. His purpose was to use Africans to lay bare the inner core of European man," a sentiment taken up by other prominent critics.⁷ It is therefore somewhat surprising to find Haggard's Nada the Lily (1892) hailed as a "triumph of translation" of Zulu culture by Gerald Monsman, Broadview's editor of King Solomon's Mines (1885). For Monsman, Haggard is able to "construct, if not empirically to reconstruct, a past Zulu context that is narratively plausible and imaginatively faithful to past events."⁸ Distancing himself from mainstream postcolonial critique, Monsman makes an assumption that white imperialists' cultural and linguistic translations of Africa may be transparently faithful and veridic. In response, this discussion turns the conversation towards the roles of translators and translated in an imperialist context, an area overlooked in discussions of Haggard's work. For while Haggard set out to valorize Zulu culture and accurately represent Zulu history, it does not follow that he actually did so—or ever could. As the work of colonial linguists suggests, even supposedly objective translations, however impressively carried out, occurred in circumstances that highlight their subjects' lack of determination and were like fictional translations embroiled in ideologies of race, culture, and language.

The humanistic assumption that translation merely bridges the gap between cultures no longer holds sway. At the very least, translation is a "highly manipulative activity that involves all kinds of stages in the process of transfer across linguistic and cultural boundaries," as Susan Bassnett and Harish Trivedi tell us,⁹ and at worst is embroiled in racial discrimination and war, according to Lawrence Venuti.¹⁰ Translation's powers of transformation appear particularly worrying in a colonial context, as Tejaswini Niranjana explains: "Translation functions as a transparent presentation of something that already exists, although the 'original' is actually brought into being through translation."¹¹ Acknowledging the wider problems inherent to translation, such as relative cultural power (or lack thereof) and translation's role in discursive...