What the Lion King Lawsuit Actually Tells Us

The Sleeping Lion: How African Music Keeps Waking the World

There is a moment at the beginning of The Lion King that stops people cold.

Before the animation fully renders. Before the story begins. A single voice cuts through the silence — raw, ancient, enormous — and something happens in the body that the brain hasn't processed yet. People tear up before they know why. Children go quiet. Adults who haven't cried in years find their eyes wet.

That moment is not Disney magic.

That is a Praise Imbongi — royal proclamation poetry in isiZulu and isiXhosa, thousands of years old. Composer Lebo Morake encoded an entire African cosmology into that opening. He gave Disney something civilization had almost forgotten it was missing. And for thirty years, most of the world sang along without knowing what they were saying — without knowing they were participating in a ceremony of African royal address older than the Roman Empire.

When a comedian recently reduced that chant to "Oh look, there's a lion" and it went viral, Morake sued for $27 million. People laughed. They bought the t-shirts. They missed the point entirely.

The point is not the lawsuit. The point is what the laughter reveals.

The Lion That Was Never Just a Lion

In 1939, a young Zulu man named Solomon Linda walked into a recording studio in Johannesburg and recorded a song called "Mbube" — lion, in Zulu.

It became a sensation. It defined an entirely new genre called Isicathamiya — a word that means "to step lightly," "to walk like a cat." The name carries its own history. Migrant workers from rural villages, forced into cities to work the mines, crammed into monitored hostels, held singing competitions late at night on their tiptoes. They danced quietly so the white guards wouldn't wake. They turned suppression into art form. They made beauty out of the instruction to be invisible.

Linda sold the rights to "Mbube" for ten shillings — approximately $1.50 — in 1939. He never saw another cent from it.

In 1961, an American group called The Tokens took the song, changed the words, renamed it "The Lion Sleeps Tonight," and it topped the charts worldwide. It became one of the most recognizable songs of the 20th century. It was used in The Lion King. It generated millions of dollars in royalties over decades.

Solomon Linda died in poverty in 1962. He could not afford a headstone.

His daughters fought a lawsuit for forty years. In 2004, they settled for an undisclosed portion of future royalties — reportedly around $1.6 million split three ways. Disney did not acknowledge what had been taken.

Here is what else was taken: the meaning.

In Zulu tradition, the lion represents kingship, strength, and sovereignty. Linda's original lyrics — the lion is quiet, the lion sleeps — were widely understood as coded language. The power of the Zulu nation was not dead. It was waiting. A sleeping lion is not a defeated lion.

By the time the song reached America and then the world, it had become a gentle lullaby about a passive animal in the jungle. The defiance was gone. The code was broken. What remained was a pretty sound with the meaning extracted, like a song pressed flat and dried and put in a frame on a wall, decorative and dead.

This is not a coincidence. This is a pattern.

The Pattern Has a Name

The same story runs through the entire history of American popular music.

A poor white kid from Tupelo, Mississippi grows up in a Black neighborhood, goes to Black churches, absorbs Black music the way children absorb everything around them — through the skin, before language. He hears the gospel, the blues, the rhythm and the release. He carries it into a recording studio in Memphis, and the world calls it rock and roll, and his name is Elvis Presley.

The Black artists who built that sound — Big Mama Thornton, whose "Hound Dog" Elvis covered and made famous; Sister Rosetta Tharpe, who invented the electric guitar sound rock and roll runs on; Chuck Berry, Little Richard, Fats Domino — watched a white face receive the credit, the airplay, the Ed Sullivan appearance, the safety.

Because safety mattered. The music that became rock and roll was not just aesthetically transgressive. It was socially threatening in ways the 1950s took seriously. Authorities arrested performers. Radio stations banned songs. The church — still immensely powerful in mid-century America — was scandalized. Elvis's hips were filmed from the waist up on television because the full motion was considered obscene. Jerry Lee Lewis was destroyed by the press for marrying his cousin. Little Richard, whose flamboyance made Elvis look conservative, was dismissed and derided.

The reaction was not to the music. The reaction was to what the music carried — African rhythm, African joy, African bodily freedom, African spiritual ecstasy — moving through white American bodies in public, in daylight, on television. That is what was obscene. Not the hips. The origin of what the hips were doing.

The Church Never Liked Music Either

Here is the part of this story that gets forgotten.

Music was not always part of Christianity. For most of the church's history, it was actively suppressed.

Women were forbidden to speak in church — taken directly from Paul's letter to the Corinthians. In parts of medieval Europe, instruments were banned from worship entirely. The organ was considered dangerously sensual for centuries. Polyphony — multiple voices singing different lines simultaneously — was condemned by Pope John XXII in 1324 as obscuring the sacred text with "lascivious" melody.

In Serbia, single-string instruments called gusle — one string, to limit the emotional range of music — were the result of laws restricting what sound could be made. The acoustics of ancient stone churches were designed to amplify the human voice, not because the voice was celebrated, but because instruments were forbidden and the architecture had to work with what was permitted. Those chilling resonances people find so moving in old cathedrals? They were built around absence.

Dancing was never part of church practice. Singing came in slowly, grudgingly, hedged with rules about what was permissible. In early Puritan America — the tradition that shaped Boston, that ran the Salem witch trials, that burned women and seized their land under the theological cover of a king who had the Bible translated into English so he could control its interpretation — music was suspect, the body was suspect, joy was suspect.

The pursuit of happiness that Americans hold as a founding ideal is, at its root, a rejection of exactly that tradition. Thomas Jefferson owned multiple translations of Lucretius's On the Nature of Things — a Roman text that argued for pleasure, for the material world, for life before death — because it had nearly been lost. The church had suppressed it. One copy survived in a German monastery, found by a medieval book hunter named Poggio Bracciolini in 1417. Without that accident of survival, the philosophical foundation of American liberalism might not exist.

New York was built on Dutch and French ideas — welcome, trade, pluralism, the Statue of Liberty a gift from France, the backing of Amsterdam's merchant freedom. Boston was built on Puritan certainty. The difference between those two cities runs through American culture still.

The point is this: when African Americans brought music, rhythm, call-and-response, and ecstatic physical worship into American Christianity, they were not accepting what the church offered. They were transforming it. They were returning to something the church had spent centuries removing. They brought back the body. They brought back joy. They brought back the ancient understanding that music is not decoration — it is how the sacred speaks.

That is not the church being generous to Black worshippers. That is Black worshippers rescuing the church from itself.

What Gets Banned Is What Threatens Power

Native Americans were forbidden by law from speaking their own languages, practicing their own ceremonies, or living with their own families. The drum — the heartbeat instrument of virtually every indigenous tradition — was banned. Authorities understood something that cultural historians sometimes forget: music carries identity. Ban the music, and you begin to dismantle the people.

In Hawaii, the hula — a sacred practice encoding history, genealogy, and relationship with the land — was made illegal by missionary influence in the 19th century. Hula was not entertainment. It was library. It was how a people without written language kept their knowledge alive, in the body, in motion. Banning the dance was burning the books. Outdated anti-dancing ordinances still exist unrepealed on some parts of Maui.

The pattern is not coincidental. Every time a colonizing power encountered music it could not control, it banned it. Not because music is trivial. Because music is not trivial at all.

Solomon Linda was told his song was worth ten shillings. Native peoples were told their songs were heathen noise. Hawaiian elders were told their dance was immoral. Elvis was told to stand still. And for a moment — for decades, sometimes — it worked. The lion slept.

But it never died.

Michael Jackson and the Question Nobody Asked

Michael Jackson is the most successful recording artist in human history. He is also a man who spent the latter half of his life visibly attempting to remove his Blackness from his face — or who was read that way, publicly, relentlessly, as if the question of his skin were the only interesting thing about him.

The truth of Michael Jackson's relationship to his appearance is complex and contested. What is not contested is the cultural environment he inhabited. A Black man who danced the way he danced, who commanded the stages he commanded, who generated the revenue he generated — and who was destroyed, piece by piece, by a media apparatus that found his every vulnerability more interesting than his genius. He was the most famous person alive, and he spent that fame under a microscope calibrated to find him monstrous.

What gets less attention is what Michael Jackson did for African music and rhythm in the global imagination. The moonwalk is a direct descendant of capoeira, of African American street dance traditions, of James Brown, who is himself a direct descendant of gospel, which is a direct descendant of the field hollers enslaved people used to communicate across distance. Every movement traces back. Every beat has a root.

And the root is African.

Not metaphorically. Not culturally. Genetically, historically, archaeologically — the oldest musical instruments ever found are in Africa. The oldest evidence of rhythm is in Africa. The human capacity for music, which appears to be universal and hardwired, evolved in Africa. When Elvis moved his hips, when Michael Jackson glided backward across a stage, when Beyoncé performs the kind of concert that makes people describe it in religious terms — they are all drawing from the same deep well.

The well was dug in Africa.

The Religious Experience We Never Named

I want to return to that moment at the beginning of The Lion King.

The chant rises. The sun comes over the horizon. Something happens in the chest that does not have a name in English.

I grew up Catholic. I sat through Mass for years. I watched the priest's back, listened to the organ, heard the words I'd heard so many times they had stopped meaning anything. I waited for the feeling I was told would come. It mostly didn't.

The first few notes of "Circle of Life" did more for my understanding of the sacred than most of what happened inside a church.

That is not an accident. That is information.

The music that moves people most — that stops them in traffic, that makes them cry without knowing why, that makes them feel for four minutes that they are part of something larger than themselves — is almost never music that came from institutional religion. It comes from the blues. From gospel. From jazz. From the traditions that developed in the most constrained and brutal circumstances imaginable, by people who had everything taken from them except the capacity to make sound.

That capacity could not be legislated away. It could not be beaten away, banned away, or bought away for ten shillings.

Solomon Linda died without a headstone. His song circles the planet still.

The lion was never sleeping.

What We Owe

This is not a story about blame. It is a story about accounting.

When we hear "The Lion Sleeps Tonight" on the radio, we are hearing a man who died in poverty in 1962 singing about a power that was waiting to wake. When we hear Elvis and don't hear Big Mama Thornton, something is missing from the picture. When we watch Michael Jackson and reduce him to tabloid, we miss what his body was saying. When we watch The Lion King and don't know it is a Praise Imbongi — when we think it's just a lion — we are living inside the erasure without knowing it.

Music is not entertainment. It never was.

It is how a people survive. It is how meaning travels across distance and through suppression. It is how the body remembers what the mind has been told to forget.

The opening chant of The Lion King brings people to tears because it is touching something ancient in them — something that predates the categories we have been given, predates the religions that tried to silence it, predates the industry that tried to package it.

The word for that something is African.

The door to that recognition has been told to stay shut for a very long time.

It never quite closed.

And every time the music plays — in a church transformed by the people it once tried to exclude, in a movie theater where a Disney logo precedes a Zulu ceremony, in a bar where someone plays a song they don't know was stolen — the lion opens one eye.

It was never asleep.

It was waiting.

The Closed Door: Why Some Ancient Connections Are Accepted — and Others Dismissed

There was a 2024 lawsuit over The Lion King's opening chant. Seems trivial at first, until you understand the context.

The Grammy-winning South African composer Lebo Morake, who wrote the Grammy-winning ballad, sued a comedian for $27 million after a viral joke reduced the opening chant of "Circle of Life" as just meaning "Oh look, there's a lion.”

In reality, the connection ties lion imagery with royalty itself. It was sacred and royal praise poetry in the African Languages of isiZulu and isiXhosa, which meant something more like"All hail the king, we all bow in the presence of the king".

Eventually the African American comedian apologized, then came out with t-shirts that said, “Oh look, theres a lawsuit.”

• Video of the original statement saying “Look, Theres a lion! That’s exactly what it means”.

• Seth Rogan said something similar when promoting the movie back in 2019:

  • He reduced the opening chant to just saying “lion” on repeat, illustrating a broader pattern: the flattening of culturally rich language.

• Video of the song. Listen to it and ask yourself it it just doesn’t FEEL like there is much more there.

  • I remember tearing up watching this as a child. There’s a reason it won a Grammy. It taps into an ethos we are missing.

This is not a story about a lawsuit. It is a story about erasure. And the Lion King is just where we begin.

Other songs gave no credit to the orginal African writers - like that of “A Lion Sleeps Tonight”. The original song is called “Mbube” which means “Lion” in Zulu, recorded in 1939. The writer, Solomon Linda received no credit or royalty for decades, even after the 1961 American version topped the charts. Linda sold the rights for 10 shillings (approx. $1.50) in 1939 and died in poverty in 1962. After a 2004 lawsuit over the use of the song in The Lion King, Linda's descendants settled for a share of future royalties (Possibly around $1.6M split between 3 daughters). The significance lies in the systematic extraction from a creative foundation, while excluding the creators from the revenue and social power that come with it. The interpretation gets skewed and trivial, when it once may have held much deeper meaning. I argue much of our music, culture, and religion has followed the same path.

There is often missed symbolism. In Zulu culture, the lion represents kingship, strength, and authority. The lyrics "the lion sleeps" or "the lion is quiet" were interpreted as a coded message that the power of the Zulu nation was not dead, but merely sleeping—waiting for the right moment to wake up and reclaim its land.

Linda helped define a whole genre called Isicathamiya (there’s that Isi sound again). This style was born out of the harsh conditions of South African labor:

• Migrant Workers: Men from rural villages moved to cities like Johannesburg to work in mines.

• Nightlife: Because they lived in cramped, monitored hostels, they would hold singing competitions late at night.

• "Step Lightly": The word Isicathamiya means "to walk like a cat" or "to step lightly." The men sang and danced on their tiptoes so they wouldn't wake the white guards or disturb the peace, turning their movements into a graceful, quiet art form.

It went from a song about reclaiming power to a song about a lion being passive and harmless in the jungle—a shift that many critics argue "tamed" the original African defiance of the song.

The Rule That Only Applies to Some

There is a quiet principle operating inside historical and linguistic scholarship. It goes something like this: connections must be proven through strict, traceable chains. Ancient contact must be documented. Influence must be demonstrated, not merely suggested.

On the surface, this sounds rigorous. Scientific, even.

But look at where it is actually applied.

When scholars say that Greek thinkers learned from Egypt — Herodotus says so directly, Plato studied there, Pythagoras is placed in Egypt by multiple sources — this is cited as historical fact. When Rome absorbed the Isis religion into its state religious apparatus, paid for temples, incorporated her festival into the official calendar, and named the port city of Ostia "the gateway" while her followers sailed under her protection — this is acknowledged. When the Julian calendar reform of 46 BCE is credited to Alexandrian astronomy, to the Egyptian astronomer Sosigenes — accepted.

But when we follow the same threads further — when we notice that the name Ēostre, the Germanic spring goddess whose month gave us the word Easter, shares a phonetic and semantic family with Aset (Isis), Queen of the Rising Star — suddenly the standard changes. Now we need certainty. Now we need a signed document. Now any connection is "speculative" and the door closes.

The question worth asking: why does the door only close in certain directions?

What We Actually Know About Easter

The Venerable Bede, a Christian German historian writing around 725 CE, is the only ancient source to name the goddess Ēostre. He writes that the month of April — Ēosturmōnaþ — was named after her, and that Christian missionaries replaced her festivals with the celebration of Christ's resurrection. He had no reason to invent her. She complicated his narrative.

Scholars initially dismissed Bede. Probably made it up. An etymological fancy.

Then, in 1958, more than 150 Roman-era votive inscriptions were found near Morken-Harff, Germany — dedicated to the Matronae Austriahenae. Female divine figures. Worshipped in Roman territory, in the first two centuries CE, carrying a name linguistically cognate with Ēostre. Predating Bede by 500 years.

Did the scholars who had confidently said "no goddess, no connection" come back to revise their conclusions?

You already know the answer.

The old certainty passed down unchanged. New evidence opened in the ground. The closed door stayed closed.

Now: the standard etymology of Ēostre traces through Proto-Indo-European h₂éwsōs — the dawn goddess, connected to Sanskrit Uṣás, Greek Ēṓs, Latin Aurora. The direction of light. The rising. The east.

And Aset — the Egyptian Isis — was the goddess of the brightest star in the sky, Sirius. Queen of the rising. Her heliacal return after 70 days of darkness heralded the Nile flood, the new year, the return of life. She was literally "She of the East" in her aspect as Sopdet. The Egyptians called her the star that comes before. The one who rises first.

The scholars say: no connection between Ēostre and Aset. Different language families. Coincidence.

But we are asked to believe that the word for east, the word for dawn, the word for a spring goddess of return — all cluster together in the Germanic world with no memory of the civilization that for a thousand years organized its entire sacred year around exactly those ideas, whose religion traveled on every ship in the Mediterranean, whose festivals opened the sailing season every March, whose influence in Rome lasted 600 years, who was called by Roman senators Regina — the queen — and whose temple at Philae was not closed until 535 CE, when Christianity had already been official Roman religion for two centuries?

We are asked to believe all of that is coincidence?

The more honest position is: we don't know that it is.

The Month of March and the Sacred That Was Buried

Before Caesar's blood stained it, the Ides of March was a celebration.

On March 15 — the full moon, the old Roman new year — the common people gathered at the sacred grove of Anna Perenna on the Via Flaminia. They lay in the grass with their sweethearts. They drank wine and prayed for as many years as cups consumed. They sang, danced, and celebrated the goddess of the annual ring — per annum, through the year, forever cycling.

Her name: Anna Perenna. The annual one. The perennial.

Five days earlier, on March 5: the Navigium Isidis. The Ship of Isis. A grand procession from the temple of Isis to the harbor, white-robed priests bearing her sacred instruments, the sistrum ringing, the crowd following to the sea, where a beautiful ship was loaded with offerings and set adrift to open the sailing season. Her name encoded in the festival title — Isidis, the genitive of Isis — the goddess's own sound, carried in the name of the ceremony.

Both festivals: early March. Both feminine. Both connected to water, renewal, the return of life after winter.

After Caesar was killed on the Ides of March in 44 BCE, something happened to that date in cultural memory. The sacred became cursed. The celebration became an omen.

Shakespeare crystallized it in 1599: "Beware the Ides of March."

And the older memory — Anna Perenna dancing by the river, Isis's ship setting sail toward open water — disappeared beneath it.

This is how erasure works. Not always through burning. Sometimes through replacement. Through allowing one story to grow so large that the older story beneath it can no longer be seen.

On Calling Things "Cults"

Let us be direct about something.

The word cult in academic language technically means "a system of religious veneration." But its use is not neutral. The Isis religion — practiced by senators and sailors, funded by the Roman state, embedded in official festivals, worshipped in temples from London to Damascus for over 600 years — is routinely called "the Isis cult" in scholarship.

Christianity, practiced by a small persecuted minority for its first 300 years and built substantially on the theological architecture of what preceded it, is called a "religious tradition."

If you want to apply the technical definition evenhandedly, Christianity in its first century — small, underground, organized around devotion to a single figure, demanding complete loyalty and offering salvation through initiation into secret knowledge — fits the definition at least as well.

No one calls it that.

The language we use to describe ancient religions encodes a conclusion before the examination begins. It ranks what deserves to be taken seriously. And when the religion in question is African in origin, the ranking drops another level.

The Lion King Is Africa's Story

The opening chant of The Lion King — "Nants'ingonyama bagithi Baba" — is not decoration. It is not background. It is a Praise Imbongi, a form of royal proclamation in isiZulu and isiXhosa whose tradition goes back thousands of years. The very languages that carry it — isiZulu, isiXhosa — bear in their names the ancient prefix isi-, a grammatical marker in the Bantu language family that clusters around concepts of language, abstract principle, and origin.

The word ingonyama means lion. But in the tradition of royal praise poetry, it means king. The lion is a royal metaphor. The chant is not announcing an animal. It is announcing a sovereign. All hail the king.

The composer Lebo M understood this. He encoded it. He gave Disney an African cosmology wrapped in melody, and for thirty years millions of people around the world sang it without knowing what they were saying — which is to say, without knowing they were participating in a ceremony of African royal address thousands of years old.

The joke that reduces it to "look, there's a lion" is not just bad comedy. It is the long habit of stripping meaning from African expression and leaving only the surface. The sound without the depth. The spectacle without the philosophy.

And this is why the lawsuit matters beyond its legal dimensions. Lebo M is not just protecting a song. He is insisting that African meaning has the right to remain intact. That it does not exist to be emptied out for entertainment.

The real joke — the one nobody is laughing at — is that an African story about kingship, filmed in Hollywood with lions speaking American accents, was the highest-grossing animated film of its decade. African cosmology, packaged and sold back to the world. African performers asked why the lions sound like Americans. African composers suing to protect what they created from being called nothing.

That is the circle of life, as currently practiced.

The Question Nobody Wants to Ask

Islam, Christianity, and Judaism are treated in Western scholarship and popular culture as three distinct and sequential religions. The successor model. Each emerging from and superseding what came before.

But walk the geography. Canaan sat at the crossroads of Egypt and Mesopotamia. Hebrew scripture mentions Egypt over 700 times. The compilation of the Bible — both testaments — happened in Alexandria. In Africa. The formation of early Christian theology, the Council of Nicaea, the translation of sacred texts — all of this occurred in or adjacent to a world saturated with Egyptian religious thought.

The name Israel itself: IS-RA-EL. Isis. Ra. El — the Semitic word for god. Three divine principles from the Nile Valley and Canaan compressed into a single name. Whether this is etymology or poetry, it is not nothing. It is a map.

The word Amen — said at the end of every Christian and Jewish prayer — is the name of Amun, the hidden god of the Egyptian pantheon, the supreme deity of the New Kingdom empire. Amun-Ra. The hidden sun. His name echoed in the throat of every congregation that ever closed a prayer, in every language, on every continent, for two thousand years.

The question is not whether these religions are the same. They are not. The question is whether we are allowed to trace the thread from which they were all woven — or whether the door must be closed because the thread leads somewhere that makes certain people uncomfortable.

What Honest Scholarship Looks Like

This article is not arguing that every word connects to every other word. It is not claiming that all roads lead to Egypt in a simple, linear way.

It is arguing for cumulative evidence honestly evaluated.

When we have: documented trade routes, physical objects traveling thousands of miles, religious ideas spreading along those routes, goddess names carrying similar phonetic clusters, spring festivals organized around the same sacred logic, a 600-year period of Egyptian religious dominance in the Mediterranean, and the explicit testimony of respected ancient historians — then the honest position is not "no connection."

The honest position is: the door should stay open.

Science does not begin with refusal. It begins with what if.

And the history of scholarship on this question includes too many moments where the what if was closed down not by evidence — but by the discomfort of what the answer might mean. By the need to keep Africa peripheral. By the habit of calling its religious expressions primitive, its languages decorative, its royalty incidental.

The chant at the opening of The Lion King is royal praise poetry thousands of years old.

The month of April carries a goddess in its bones.

The word we say at the end of every prayer was once the name of an African sun god.

The door has never really been closed. It has only been told to stay shut.

It never listened.