Wednesday, February 14, 2024

THE READING RHEUM: NADA THE LILY (1892)




When I was growing up, I occasionally saw cartoons make short jokes about "The Vanishing American," usually showing a Native American slowly fading out of existence. I knew that this was some arcane adult reference, and eventually I learned that the phrase was the title of a 1922 serialized novel by Zane Grey about the vicissitudes of a Navajo tribe, and of a 1925 silent film adapting said novel. Whereas the novel and the film depicted Native Americans being victimized by White Christians who were either condescending or avaricious, the phrase by itself took on the implication that Native Americans were doomed by their own primitivism, a verdict also articulated much earlier in Fenimore Cooper's 1826 LAST OF THE MOHICANS.

In 1892 H. Rider Haggard gave the English speaking world NADA THE LILY, which might be said to be his version of "The Vanishing African." Haggard had lived and worked in Africa for several years, and thus knew enough about the terrain and the customs of the African people to lend verisimilitude to his two best known novels, KING SOLOMON'S MINES (1885) and SHE (1886). The star of SOLOMON'S MINES, big game hunter Allan Quatermain, became the subject of seventeen other works-- and the one sequel, ALLAN QUATERMAIN (1887), is also widely regarded as the first novel to feature a "lost civilization." That novel also introduced the mighty, axe-wielding Zulu warrior Umslopogass as a boon friend to Quatermain, though both heroes die at the end of the book.

However, the death of his characters didn't keep Haggard from writing prequel-novels, and just as he wrote several for Quartermain, Haggard also wrote an "origin story" for Umslopogass, of which he is the sole star.

To be sure, his story is told by an interlocutor: Mopo, a witch doctor with apparently real divinatory skills. Mopo's life becomes intertwined by the formidable warlord Chaka during the latter's reign ot terror in the late 1700s and early 1800s. Chaka marries Mopo's sister, but the warlord is ferociously paranoid about being overthrown by kindred, and he regularly slays any of his male progeny. Mopo and his sister arrange a deception by which Chaka thinks his son has been executed, when in fact he is raised as the son of Mopo and Mopo's wife. Umslopogass grows up believing that couple to be his real parents, and that their real daughter Nada the Lily is his sister (when she is in truth his cousin).

Umslopogass and Nada fall in love despite believing themselves siblings, but assorted circumstances keep them apart until their tragic ending (inevitable in terms of continuity, since Nada doesn't exist in the future life of the Zulu hero). Despite being unaware of his royal lineage, Umslopogass pursues a heroic destiny. He journeys to a rival tribe to undergo a ritual combat, in which he wins his formidable axe from the tribe's chief. In his one ambigously supernatural adventure, he encounters a pack of wolves that may or may not be evil human spirits reincarnated as jungle predators. He also befriends a weird "witch man" known as Ghazali, who is an ally to the wolves but also becomes the Zulu's companion. Umslopogass does not get to contend with his wicked father Chaka, who is assassinated more or less in keeping with historical record. 

There are no named White characters in the novel until Quatermain is mentioned at the very end. However, various references make clear that the Zulu way of life is doomed due to colonial encroachment and the superior firepower of Europeans. Nada, who is not especially mythic except as a support-character to the main hero, is also said to have some distant White ancestry. I'm not sure Haggard included this detail in support of his theory of "The Vanishing Zulu," or because he didn't think his readers would buy into the narrative of Nada's incredible beauty if those readers thought she looked like the average Black African woman. 

I'm sure Haggard's work, and his association with European colonial rule, would win him no fans with many modern readers, though it's a vivid tale of love and war in a vanished culture. Nevertheless, to the best of my knowledge NADA is the first prose novel to focus entirely upon the actions of a Black African hero-- who, given his one encounter with the supernatural, might also be rated "the first Black superhero," or "superhero-adjacent," should one prefer a less general term. 


No comments:

Post a Comment