Drawing on Thomas Mofolo's 1931 South African novel Chaka, Man Animal Thing reimagines the life of the nineteenth-century Zulu king Shaka (1787-1828) as a sequence of daydreams and pivotal events, transposing him into the present day of speed dating, UFOs and effervescent painkillers. 
Ranging across form and register, from lyric poetry to tweets to sudden wit, Alfred Schaffer's award-winning collection interrogates power, violence, myth and identity. Translated by International Booker Prize-winner Michele Hutchison, this is one of the landmark works of contemporary Dutch poetry, honoured with the Netherlands' most important literary award, the P.C. Hooft Prize.