Nomzamo Mbatha, who stars as Queen Nandi and serves as executive producer on the final season of Shaka iLembe, said something in a press statement that deserves to be read carefully. “This third season is the culmination of a world that African viewers have found deep love and admiration for. It builds on the legacy of African television while taking audiences on a journey from an all-conquering reign, to sweeping love stories, to the founding of another nation and the arrival of colonists. This is a triumphant telling of Nguni history on an epic scale.”
It is also, in all likelihood, the last telling of this kind for some time. And that is the story the industry is not having.
Shaka iLembe is, by measurable standards, the most significant African television production in the history of the medium. Twelve wins at the South African Film and Television Awards — the most decorated drama in that ceremony’s existence. The most-watched DStv drama series of all time. The most searched television series on Google in South Africa in 2023. Created by BOMB! Productions, produced at a budget that MultiChoice’s then-CEO described as the company’s most ambitious undertaking, it employed more than 8,000 people across its first season and over 16,000 in its second. Those are not content metrics. Those are economic impact figures that belong in a national cultural policy document.
The third and final season chronicles the conclusion of Shaka’s reign — his final military campaigns, the betrayals within his court, the arrival of the British at Port Natal, the beginning of the colonial encounter with the Zulu kingdom. Filming has concluded. It premieres on Mzansi Magic in 2026.
When it ends, the lights go down on something that may not be switched back on.
The Canal+ Question
MultiChoice — the company that commissioned, financed, and broadcast Shaka iLembe across three seasons — completed its acquisition by Canal+ Group in September 2025. Canal+ is now targeting €250 million in cost savings across the combined group in 2026. It has already closed Showmax, the streaming platform that was MultiChoice’s most significant content commissioning vehicle for bold, prestige African television.
Canal+ has been explicit that it will continue investing in local content. CEO David Mignot told industry audiences that local content investment will not decrease. The company’s 2026 showcase in Paris revealed prestige projects including Heist of Benin with Ava DuVernay and a Josephine Baker biopic from Maïmouna Doucouré. These are internationally oriented, diaspora-adjacent productions — significant in their own right — that are not the same as a seven-year commitment to filming the history of the Zulu kingdom entirely in South Africa with a South African cast speaking isiZulu.
Shaka iLembe was possible because MultiChoice had a specific incentive to fund it: a South African company, with South African shareholders, with a business that lived or died on the cultural loyalty of African audiences, investing in the single most powerful cultural argument it could make for why DStv was worth paying for. That incentive structure no longer governs the decisions about what gets commissioned for Mzansi Magic. Canal+’s incentive structure is different. It is broader, more commercially diversified, and — crucially — not existentially dependent on the goodwill of the South African audience in the way that MultiChoice was.
What Shaka iLembe Actually Required
This series did not happen because someone had a good idea. It happened because of a decade of accumulated craft development in South African historical television production, a production company in BOMB! that had built the infrastructure to execute at this scale, and a broadcaster that was willing to commit multi-season budgets before a single episode had proven its audience.
That combination — a developed production infrastructure, an ambitious production company, and a broadcaster with a long-term commitment horizon — is rare in African television. It was rare even in South Africa, where the production industry is the most developed on the continent. Shaka iLembe was the result of those three conditions meeting simultaneously, and it showed the continent what was possible.
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The production has introduced Ntando Zondi to the world as young Shaka — a performance that established a new benchmark for African child acting on television. Lemogang Tsipa as adult Shaka gave the continent a lead performance in a historical epic that can stand alongside anything produced globally. The costume department, the CGI team, the weapons specialists, the horse coordinators — the specialist infrastructure built across three seasons now exists in South Africa and is available for the next production that requires it.
The question is whether there is a next production that requires it.
What the Continent Has at Risk
Historical epic television — the genre that builds national and continental mythology at the scale that audiences remember and return to — requires a particular kind of financial commitment. It cannot be made episodically, season by season, with each renewal conditional on previous season performance. It requires a broadcaster or streamer to commit to a multi-year story arc before the evidence of commercial viability exists.
MultiChoice made that commitment for Shaka iLembe. The question for Canal+, for Netflix, for whatever constellation of platforms serves African audiences in the next decade, is whether any of them will make that commitment for the next great African story that requires the same patience and scale.
From where I stand, in Johannesburg, having covered this industry for twenty-five years, I do not yet see the successor. I see a landscape in which Shaka iLembe’s final season will be celebrated, the cast and crew will be applauded, the awards will accumulate, and the industry will begin the long wait for someone to decide that Africa’s history deserves another epic.
Shaka iLembe premieres on Mzansi Magic (DStv channel 161) in 2026. Production by BOMB! Productions.
— Lerato Dlamini has covered South African and continental African television from Johannesburg for twenty-five years.
