ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the conceptual elements of the cultural poetics of uMabatha. It examines the dramatic action in order to enable insight on the textual interplay that uMabatha embeds. In uMabatha: The Zulu Macbeth, Welcome Msomi’s reconfiguration of Shakespeare’s play, the Zulu identity is conceptualized in a way which involves a self-conscious enactment of culture and its traditions. Although uMabatha reconfigures Macbeth, it is not, like Shakespeare’s play, a drama that mainly depends on rhetorical techniques to structure dramatic action and articulate theatrically meaningful situations. Compared to the eighteenth-century transmediations of Macbeth in which the Witches sing and dance, ngoma musical elements reveal significant engagements in terms of their dramatic input. In uMabatha, the transmediatory situation of Macbeth’s narrative and action within fundamentally Bantu traditions of performance demonstrate how reconfiguration enables embodiment of foreign ideas and resources in new forms in new geocultural spaces.
