Twenty-second International Conference on New Directions in the Humanities

Abstract

This paper interprets Thomas Mofolo’s precolonial African novel Chaka as an “encyclopedic narrative”, a genre theorised by Edward Mendelson in his controversial 1976 framework and redefined by various other critics since. My reading considers the ways in which this novel, originally written in Sesotho and published in 1925 by a missionary press of the Paris Evangelical Missionary, rewrites and translates traveling concepts associated with European enlightenment and the encyclopedic tradition. My reading of “the first African novel”, as it has been called, reflects on the ways in which Mofolo disrupts Anglo-American interpretations and reinterpretations of “encyclopedic narrative”. I argue that Mofolo’s literary experimentation with the encyclopedic genre was deliberate and should be read against the backdrop of its embeddedness in the historical context of mission literacy and literary activities that introduced Mofolo and his contemporaries to multiple, global audiences and markets alongside local ones.