‘Yasuke: Way of the Butterfly’ is the brainchild of filmmaker and producer Mandla Dube whose Pambili Media is the publisher of the series.
Since the 1960s, the story of Yasuke, the first African Samurai, has been depicted in comic books, films and video games. While it is known that Yasuke is African and arrived in Japan in 1579, little is known about his early life, despite the fact that he ultimately served under Oda Nobunaga, one of the key unifiers of feudal Japan.
A new graphic novel series, Yasuke: Way of the Butterfly, is bringing this chapter of his story to life. Written by Kenya-born, South Africa-based author Fidel Namisi, and illustrated by South African visual artist Loyiso Mkhize, it tells the story of how Yasuke became a samurai, highlighting its key message that, “contrary to popular belief, Yasuke was never a slave.”
Sculptor Nicola Roos, known for her life-size sculptures of Yasuke, emphasizes the importance of telling his story from an African perspective. Roos, part of the team behind the graphic novel, first encountered Yasuke's story in 2015 while researching marginalized historical figures. "I couldn’t believe it’s a story no one was telling from an African perspective,” she says.
That is no longer the case, as two volumes of the graphic novel series have been launched at Comic Con Africa (CCA) in Cape Town and Johannesburg, with volumes three and four scheduled for release at next year’s CCA editions.
Development and writing
Yasuke: Way of the Butterfly is the brainchild of filmmaker and producer Mandla Dube (Silverton Siege, Heart of the Hunter), the founder of Pambili Media, the series’ publisher.Dube found out about Yasuke from one of his colleagues, cinematographer Tommy Maddox-Upshaw, shortly after wrapping the film Kalushi: The Story of Solomon Mahlangu (2016).
“He sent me this one-line African samurai story, and he said, ‘Hey, I know you like the presence of Africans in Asia,’” Dube recalls. “I’m a student of history; I majored in radio, TV and film, and I minored in African history. So the presence of Africans in the diaspora has always been of interest to me.”
Dube immediately reached out to every African history professor he knew, and one of the recommended readings was They Came Before Columbus: The African Presence in Ancient America. Other key research materials included The Sculptors of Mapungubwe by Zakes Mda and 1421: The Year China Discovered America by Gavin Menzies. After hearing of Dube’s plan, Chicago-based producer and filmmaker Floyd Webb, who was working on a documentary about Yasuke, shared his research with Dube and his team to help in the development.
The project gained momentum when Netflix’s VP of Content for the Middle East and Africa, Ben Amadasun, expressed interest and got into a development deal with Pambili Media. But, after a year in development, Netflix shifted focus. Despite this, the streamer granted Pambili Media the IP rights, which laid the foundation for the graphic novel.
‘Yasuke: Way of the Butterfly’ was written by Kenya-born, South Africa-based writer Fidel Namisi and illustrated by South African visual artist Loyiso Mkhize.
Photo courtesy of Pambili Media.
With this material in hand, Namisi, whose work often explores African superheroes, began to fill in the gaps of Yasuke’s undocumented life in Africa. “That was an advantage because the difference between fiction and history is that history answers the question: What happened? Fiction answers the question: What could have happened? And so, my work as a writer is to answer the last question,” he adds.
Namisi continues, “And when you have too many historical facts, sometimes they can bog you down and make the story boring. Because, many times, history is boring. So, I was pleased that we had just enough information to locate this character in a very intriguing historical epoch and civilization, which was the Mwenemetapa empire before he went to the Far East.”
Mkhize, known for his work on Supa Strikas and Khwezi, drew from the compiled research and was inspired by Japanese manga like The Vagabond. “It's like creating or imagining African heroes and what they look like and how that translates into the medium of comics,” Mkhize says. “But with Yasuke,” Mkhize says, “there's factual information, and I have to stay true to it.” He adds, “This was a living human being, a historical figure. How do you translate that but still keep the edge of a hero intact because this is somebody that you want to inspire [the reader]?”
‘Yasuke: Way of the Butterfly’ mixes historical fact and folklore and, as a result, consists of a complex web of clans, characters and places Yasuke encounters in his quest.
Photo courtesy of Pambili Media.
The story so far
Yasuke: Way of the Butterfly mixes historical fact and folklore, and as a result, consists of a complex web of clans, characters and places Yasuke encounters in his quest. Yasuke is imagined as an elite Barwe Tonga warrior of the Mwenemutapa/Mutapa empire bordered by the Zambezi and Limpopo rivers of Southern Africa in present-day Zimbabwe and Mozambique.
In his quest to recover the Ngoma Lungundu — his people’s rainmaking drum believed to have been stolen by the Butua clan — Yasuke is also searching for meaning. There’s nothing he wants more than to be fully inducted into the order of the Barwe Tonga Knights. “My life has no meaning except to protect that drum and return it to its rightful owners,” Yasuke says inVolume 2.
Pressure is mounting for Yasuke to recover the Ngoma Lungundu — which Dube says is the MacGuffin in the narrative — as it’s the main requirement for an important ceremony by the king.
By the end of Volume 2, Yasuke is still far from reaching the Far East and there are no signs he will end up there. While details about the upcoming volumes remain under wraps, the focus is beautifully captured in the series’ opening line: “Before a boy became a warrior, before he became a man, he first had to meet his ancestors."
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