Nahum Gutman, Lobengulu King of Zulu, and the South-African Book

Eitan Bar-Yosef

South Africa, Jacqueline Rose has noted, often functions in Israeli literature “as the unlived life of Israel”. Indeed, from as early as the Uganda scheme of 1903 (envisioning a Jewish colony in Africa that would operate, according to Theodor Herzl, as “a miniature England in reverse”) to Ehud Barak’s assertion that “Israel is a villa in the jungle”, images of Africa have been central to Zionism’s self-fashioning.

Nahum Gutman’s Lobengulu King of Zulu offers an early articulation of this imaginary: written during his visit to South Africa in 1934 (to paint a portrait of Smuts), and serialized in 1935-6 (against the backdrop of the Palestinian uprising), Gutman’s adventure-story instantly became an Israeli children’s bestseller. Gutman informed his young readers that traveling to Africa was his long-life dream; what he did not disclose was the fact that his narrative borrowed its plot from an obscure South-African adventure book, The Seven Lost Trails of Africa by Hedley Chilvers (1930). Here, as in other key episodes in Zionist history and culture, the “English book” (Homi Bhabha’s phrase) becomes a crucial element in the construction of a distinct colonial mimicry.

By examining Gutman’s appropriation of the imperial romance, and by exploring later texts in which Gutman re-enacts his African adventures within Palestine itself, this paper examines how Gutman’s cheerful naïveté both sanctified and destabilized Zionist colonial mimicry. I will conclude by asking how this ambivalence could anticipate the role of “Africa” in Israeli culture today.