The composer and performer of the iconic opening Zulu chant in “The Circle of Life” from The Lion King is suing a comedian over a viral podcast comment about the song.
The lawsuit, filed on Monday (March 16) by South African composer and singer Lebo M, stems from Zimbabwean comedian Learnmore Jonasi’s appearance last month on the podcast One54 Africa. In a now-viral clip, Jonasi said the famous “The Circle of Life” chant, “Nants’ingonyama bagithi Baba,” translates in English to “Look, there’s a lion. Oh my god.”
Lebo M (full name Lebohang Morake) wrote this chant and performed it in both the 1994 original The Lion King movie and its 2019 remake. Lebo M alleges in the Monday lawsuit that the chant is a form of royal praise poetry that relies on metaphors, and its true translation is, “All hail the king, we all bow in the presence of the king.”
“Jonasi’s reduction to ‘Look, there’s a lion. Oh my god’ is not a simplified translation — it is a fabricated, trivializing distortion, meant as a sick joke for unlawful self-profit and destruction of the imaginative and artistic work of Lebo M,” reads the legal complaint.
The lawsuit demands a whopping $27 million in damages from Jonasi for defamation, libel and business interference that could affect Lebo M’s longtime collaborative relationship with Disney. Lebo M says he “now fears for his life due to Xenophobic comments,” and he claims he’s been “confronted and bombarded” with comments about the podcast clip while on tour with Hans Zimmer in Europe.
Lebo M’s claims face tough odds, as the First Amendment broadly shields comedy from legal scrutiny and liability for defamation. Lebo M’s lawyer attempts to get around free speech protections by arguing that Jonasi “did not frame this as a joke in delivery.”
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“Defendant presented it as factual knowledge with misguided authenticity to increase exposure and mockery of Lebo M’s creative masterpiece,” writes attorney Michael Younge.
The lawsuit marks an escalation in a back-and-forth that’s been taking place on social media between Lebo M and Jonasi since the podcast clip went viral. Lebo M stated in a March 4 video on Instagram that he’d messaged Jonasi about his concerns, but the comedian brushed him off and said he’d been doing the same joke for eight years and did not plan to stop.
“It’s rather painful to see an ignorant wannabe comedian promote ignorance and it become so globally powerful,” said Lebo M in the video. “I did try to engage this young man, and he was so arrogant.”
Jonasi responded with an Instagram video of his own on March 14, saying he was initially receptive to Lebo M’s messages and had hoped they could create a collaborative video clarifying the situation — but that he shut down the conversation after the composer called him “self-hating.”
“I realized that I’m not having a conversation with somebody that actually wants to do that,” said Jonasi in his video. “This person is literally not attacking the joke, but my character.”
A rep for Jonasi did not immediately return a request for comment on Tuesday (March 17).
