The story of South Africa’s biggest television production

“At first I thought we were digging a deep hole for ourselves, people are so passionate about this character,” says Angus Gibson, director and co-creator of the biggest South African production ever. Show Ilembe.

The character in question is King Shaka, or ShakakaSenzangakhona, the most famous of the Zulu kings who reigned in pre-colonial times. A hugely important figure in South Africa’s Zulu culture, he has often been portrayed in Western media as a brutal warlord, contrasting with the tough military and political leader most scholars agree. The desire behind making the series was to right this wrong.

Gibson, Desireé Markgraaff and Teboho Mahlatsi – The experienced trio behind Show Ilembe production house Bombe! Productions – knew the project would define his career. They wanted to tell a story of King Shaka that South Africans considered their own and erase decades of pre-colonial history they did not recognize.

“This story was extremely important to us, because African history has been misunderstood in almost every way,” Markgraaff says. There are very few television shows or films that explore the history of this rich and fascinating continent – ​​the very cradle of humanity. Telling this story seemed like the first step in helping to change that: creating something beautiful that Africans around the world could connect with.

The founders of Bomb! have built a reputation for creating films and television shows that put an African eye on storytelling. Gibson co-directed Jonathan Demme’s Academy Award-nominated biography of Nelson Mandela, Mandela: son of Africa, father of a nationTeboho directed a Silver Lion winning short film Portrait of a young man who is drowning and Markgraaff was co-producer of the multi-award winning documentary series Amanda! : A revolution in four-part harmony. The trio also made These are thesea visceral and honest South African Broadcasting Corporation (SABC) drama series from the late 1990s set in a Johannesburg township school. Yet facing Shaka would be an entirely different challenge.

Gibson recalls that the original idea was to first create a pre-colonial film or series, covering different narratives about largely obscure figures from across Africa. However, M-Net, the South African pay TV channel owned by African content giant MultiChoice, suggested focusing on the Zulu king – by far the most important historical figure of South Africa’s pre-colonial era.

There have been previous attempts to tell its story, or at least its role in the history of Western settlers in Africa. SABC, then owned by the apartheid government in South Africa, released Shaka Zulu in 1985, but told the story largely based on the writings of British traders who had interacted with Shaka, and through flashbacks of Henry Francis Fynn, a settler with an important role in the history of South Africa who would appear in season 3 of Show Ilembe.

In the United States, more recently, a $90 million Showtime series titled King Shakawhat mattered Training day director Antoine Fuqua among its executive producers, was fired before its release due to cost-cutting measures. Production in KwaZulu-Natal province shut down 12 days before the film was completed, a devastating blow to South Africa’s creative community. His unexpected disappearance made the MultiChoice show, broadcast on M-Net’s Msanzi Magic channel, even more critical.

Consult the king

Initial apprehension about facing Shaka coincided with the start of the pandemic. After several years of development, the freeze in global production allowed for a period of even more in-depth research. Historians, academics and family descendants, even the late Zulu King Goodwill Zwelithini, who gave his blessing, were consulted and every available chart and written source was studied. This led to two results: a television series that is far more historically accurate in terms of clothing, hairstyles, language, and political dynamics than anything that has come before, and the idea that Show Ilembe would not only concern the man himself, but the people around him.

Once M-Net gave the green light for what constitutes the biggest-budget production in the company’s history, Gibson decided to hire the two people he envisioned to play Shaka and his influential mother, Queen Nandi – newcomer Lemogang Tsipa and Nomzamo Mbatha, the actress and activist known internationally for her roles in Coming 2 America and the latest Bruce Willis film Assassin. “I had to go through auditions, but I knew who I wanted,” Gibson says. “It was non-negotiable in my head.”

In addition to playing the historical character she had always dreamed of playing, Mbatha became an executive producer. “For me, it was important to be part of something that fully tells the story of our beginnings,” she says. “Bomb! has always demonstrated an understanding of the television landscape in South Africa and Africa as a whole. It was a period in history where we were kings, so how did we explore that and flesh that out? Both of my roles were daunting tasks, very laborious in the best way.”

The choice was made to tell the story of Shaka’s rise to the head of the Zulu kingdom and his eventual assassination, incorporating the characters who would define his reign. Senzo Radebe has been cast as Shaka’s estranged father, King Senzangakhona, with Thembinkosi Mthembu, Dawn Thandeka King and Shandiwe Kgoroge playing other lead roles. NtandoZondi is the young Shaka.

Season 1, which charts Shaka’s journey to manhood and Queen Nandi’s role in his rise, launched in June 2023 and immediately broke audience records, with 3.6 million viewers in its first week – the highest ever for a MultiChoice channel. The production created more than 8,000 jobs and generated more internet searches than any other television show in South Africa that year.

Across the continent, Show Ilembe broadcast on Mzansi Magic and other local M-Net channels, in French-speaking territories on Canal+ — which just took over MultiChoice — and in South Africa on Showmax, the streamer backed by NBCUniversal and Sky. MultiChoice called Show Ilembe a “love letter” to the nature, wildlife and history of the KwaZulu-Natal region of South Africa.

Show Ilembe then set the record for the most wins in the drama category at the South African Film and Television Awards in 2024, and filming for season 2 quickly began, this time with 16,000 jobs created, under the title Bomb! recounted how Shaka consolidated his power in early 19th century Africa as the new king and began building one of the continent’s most powerful empires in the KwaNobamba region, now KwaZulu-Natal province.

After another hugely successful series ended on August 30 this year, Deadline revealed that MultiChoice has ordered a third and final season, which will air in 2026. The final season will explore Shaka’s enemies trying to undermine his reign and the arrival of Francis Fynn and the British colonizers.

“In the first season Shaka has to convince people, in the second season he goes on a journey with them and in the third he beats them to it,” says Gibson. “I want you to look back on him and recognize what a genius he was, and recognize his flaws. He was certainly brutal and he alienated people, but he was a visionary.”

The “Tom Cruise Marketing Bible”

When we speak with Gibson and Mbatha via Zoom call, they are filming a large set piece. Mbatha says the scale is “much, much bigger” than before, adding: “The whole thing feels completely new and really speaks to the vision coming to life.” »

Extras and crew often come to the set on non-working days, she says, while describing how the leads feel a shared sense of history in the making with the magnitude of their performances. Wearing a stunning flared Zulu headdress known as hailworn by married women to signify their status, Mbatha laughs when talking about stars using “Tom Cruise’s marketing bible” to sell the show, “going to malls, kissing babies and hugging moms, and understanding the tangibility of it all.”

She adds that for an African production and storytelling of this scale, this level of personal investment is vital, especially compared to other recent projects on Africa. For example, “Black Panther “It was an incredible project that made its mark, but from an African narrative perspective, it’s not something we can really relate to,” she says of Marvel’s success.Show Ilembe has a closeness to people.

Gibson takes up the subject. “We wanted to completely flip the lens and the recognizable world to be African, so when the settlers come in Season 3, they’re exotic things, not the other way around,” he says.

Does he feel Show Ilembe achieved these noble goals? “I expected half an audience to love the project and the other half to think we got it completely wrong and have no right to tell the story, but it’s been extraordinarily affirming,” Gibson said. “In the African context, there is a groundswell of deep appreciation for the project and people feel they have seen a representation of their past that they can celebrate.”

The question now is how far this can go. Gibson remembers that executives at a major American cable network liked viewing the series, but didn’t think a drama shot almost entirely in the Zulu language could resonate with audiences. “We need courageous broadcasters out there,” he says. “We have one here.”