Shaka Zulu in the Polish People’s Republic (PRL): exploring South African-Polish links in the late Cold War

Abstract

ABSTRACT In the late 1980s, Poles tuned in with great enthusiasm to the miniseries Shaka Zulu, starring Henry Cele as the so-called Black Napoleon. The apartheid-era production was one instance of exchanges between the apartheid regime and the Polish People’s Republic. This counter-intuitive consonance – the screening of an apartheid cultural production in late-Communist Poland – is a fascinating case study that provides one important lens to understand the nature of the relationship between the two regimes, as well as insight into late-apartheid international relations in the last years of the Cold War.