Word: umabatha
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Umabatha, the current revival of the 1970 play by South African playwright/director Welcome Msomi, is such a remarkable amalgam of widely different cultures, goals and modes of performance that it's difficult to know how to approach an assessment of it. Enacted entirely in Zulu by performers in traditional Zulu attire, Umabatha* is at once a history lesson, a dance-and-music spectacular, a celebration of Zulu culture and--last and, theoretically, most important--a reworking of Shakespeare's famous tragedy Macbeth...
...tribes under the great 19th-century leader Shaka Zulu. Moreover, Shaka's life was oddly parallel with that of Macbeth: a diviner prophesied in his youth that Shaka would become a "chief of chiefs," and his wife, Pampata, was his ablest and most ambitious war counselor. Thus was born uMabatha, the story of Mabatha (pronounced "Mah-bat-ta"): an amalgam of Shaka and Macbeth...
...history lesson, Umabatha is straightforward and brings out the parallels quite successfully. When viewed as an adaptation of Shakespeare, however, the play starts to look like a rather curious beast, and one isn't sure exactly what to make of it. Umabatha sticks fairly close to the main points of Shakespeare's text, retaining its great scenes and its characters, but, of course, those characters and the story itself undergo a process of transformation into a Zulu context...
...very first scene, for instance, introduces us to the famous three witches of Macbeth--who in Umabatha have become Sangomas, or Zulu diviner-women. rattling bones across the ground to tell the future and chanting maniacal melodies as they dance around their fire, the three Sangomas retain their function as eerie, ambiguous messengers of the world beyond, even as they are transformed into traditional icons of Zulu myth...