Resource Details
Author / Producer
Dube, John Langalibalele, translated by J Boxwell
Title
Jeqe, the bodyservent of king Tshaka
Description
[Dube, John Langalibalele."Jeqe, the bodyservent of king Tshaka". Translated by J Boxwell. South Africa: Lovedale Press, 1951]
[John Wright in 2018 for the FHYA: John Langalibalele Dube (1871-1946) was born into a family of amakholwa (Christian ‘believers’) in colonial Natal. He grew up at Inanda, a station of the American Zulu Mission, and was educated at Adams College in Natal, and at Oberlin College in Ohio and the Union Missionary Training Institute in Boston. By the early years of the twentieth century he was becoming a leading intellectual figure in Natal. In 1901 he established Ohlange Institute, an industrial training school, at Inanda. In 1903 he played a major role in setting up a new Zulu-language newspaper, Ilanga lase Natal, which has survived to the present. He became drawn into the politics of the colony and of South Africa more widely, and in 1912 was elected first president of the South African Native National Congress (later the African National Congress). He was voted out of office in 1917, but remained active in public affairs. He was also active in literary circles, and in the 1920s published several books which exhorted Africans to lead moral, upright lives.
In 1931 Dube published a work of fiction, Insila ka Tshaka (Insila kaShaka in modern orthography), which has been described as the first novel to be written in isiZulu. It is set in the reigns of Shaka and Dingane, and tells the story of Jeqe, a youth of humble origins who rose to become one of Shaka’s leading attendants. The book seems to have been quite widely read, and in 1940 Dube published an expanded edition. After his death, this edition was translated into English by his friend J.D. Boxwell and published in 1951 under the title Jeqe the Body-Servant of King Tshaka. In different ways, all three editions form important sources of evidence on how the times of Shaka and Dingane were narrated among African intellectuals in the second quarter of the twentieth century. They are here made available in digital form.]
Custodial History
File Name
Dube__John_and_J_Boxwell._Jeqe_the_bodyservant_of_king_Tshaka__1951.pdf
Date Created
1951
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Upload date
2020-03-03 11:15:54
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