Lebo M, composer of The Lion King signature, “Circle of Life” is suing an Internet comedian for a whopping $27 million for allegedly misrepresenting the song’s meaning.
According to court documents reviewed by Complex, the South African composer, real name Lebohang Morake, filed a lawsuit against Zimbabwean stand-up comedian Learnmore Jonasi in California, alleging that the entertainer made “false statements” about the ‘Nants’ingonyama’ chant. While the Zulu phrase was previously believed to have translated to “Here comes a lion,” on an episode of podcast One54 Africa, Jonasi sang the lyrics and translated it to, “Look, there’s a lion. Oh my god.”
While Jonasi seemingly intended for the translation to be a joke, it wasn’t funny to Lebo M, who claimed that the comedian “presented this as authoritative fact, not comedy,” and “mocked the chant’s cultural significance with exaggerated imitations.”
“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,” the complaint reads. “The true meaning of Nants’ ingonyama bagithi Baba is ‘All hail the king, we all bow in the presence of the king.’”
The problem is, actor-comedian Seth Rogen might have done similar years before.
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One54 Africa co-host and comedian Godfrey has since defended Jonasi by pointing out similarities between his translation and one given by Rogan. In the clip, a reporter sang the translation in a press junket for the 2019 Lion King remake, which Rogen and co-star Billy Eichner jokingly repeated.
“They did it before us,” Godfrey said in an Instagram reel posted on Sunday (March 22). “So they’re saying the same thing. …So it’s white people saying that it’s just a lion, and it’s years before we did it.”
Jonasi has also responded to the lawsuit, revealing in an Instagram video that Lebo privately messaged him and claimed that he was “disrespecting” the song. “But the moment he called me a self-hating negro, that’s when everything changed for me,” Jonasi said. “This person is literally–not just attacking the joke–but my character.”
The former America’s Got Talent contestant also claimed that Lebo M called him an “idiot” and a “wannabe comedian.”
