‘You’re coming to South Africa?’ he asked. That was the plan, I replied.
‘Sorry we didn’t get much time. I’m in Durban. Come and see me. We can talk some more. I’ll show you the book.’
In truth, another book was on my mind that summer. I’d come across it before departing for India. It was a compendium of tributes to Shakespeare, compiled by the former chairman of the Shakespeare Association in Britain, Israel Gollancz. Its title was A Book of Homage to Shakespeare. Other than the fact that the great Bengali writer Rabindranath Tagore had contributed, all I really knew about it was that it had been published in 1916 in honour of the 300th anniversary of Shakespeare’s death, and that – 1916 being the depths of the first world war – German and Austrian writers had not been invited to join the party. On a slow afternoon I snuck off work and cycled down to Gollancz’s alma mater, King’s College London, to take a look.
Nearly 600 pages long and three inches thick, dauntingly hefty in the hand, the Book of Homage was less a book than a monument. It was expensively bound in cream and gold, and gorgeously printed on thick, luxurious paper. Physically at least, it was considerably more impressive than the Robben Island Bible. On the contents page I counted 165 tributes in over twenty languages, from nations including the United States, France, Greece, Belgium, Denmark, China, Russia, Persia, Japan and Armenia. Apparently I was far from the first to wonder about how Shakespeare’s work had been received and understood in other countries and cultures. In fact I was nearly a century late.
Team GB was well represented – Thomas Hardy, John Galsworthy and Rudyard Kipling had contributed, backed by a veritable squad of dons: A. C. Bradley, E. K. Chambers, W. W. Greg, A. W. Pollard, their initials giving them the pleasing appearance of a batting order in an Edwardian cricket team. A platoon of diplomats were also present (the Spanish ambassador writing ‘To Shakespeare, from a Spaniard’; His Majesty’s man in Rome offering an Italian ‘Thought’), alongside various lords spiritual and temporal, and several leading thesps.
But the Book of Homage was not, as I had expected, a tub-thumping piece of patriotism in honour of the British Bard. Colonies and former colonies such as India and Canada were present, but so too were countries far beyond the scope of the Empire. Scholarly lectures mingled promiscuously with rococo panegyrics, in a babel of different languages. The Egyptian neoclassicist Muhammad Hafiz Ibrahim volunteered an Arabic poem pointedly reminding everyone of the cultural politics behind celebrating a white, western writer (‘if justice were done to the Oriental authors, there would be feasts in their honour in both East and West’, as the English summary put it). Gollancz’s decision to present non-English contributions in their original form had the effect of making this supposedly universal, transcendent being called ‘Shakespeare’ (or , or ) seem stranger and more thrillingly unusual than his readers can ever have expected.
One name on the contents page snagged my eye – or, rather, one absence of a name. The essay was entitled ‘William Tsikinya-Chaka’; its author was simply described as ‘A South African’. It was the only piece from sub-Saharan Africa. It was also the only piece in the book to be anonymous.
I read it, and was immediately taken. In contrast to the elephantine braggartism on display elsewhere, this South African essay was crisp and concise, a masterpiece of cool wit. Just four pages long – a main text in the southern African language Setswana with an English translation alongside – it related the story of how its author had first encountered Shakespeare, and been remade by him.
The writer told of growing up in the remote mining town of Kimberley in the Northern Cape, and of seeing a performance of Hamlet in the mid-1890s, when he was eighteen. Impressed, he acquired a copy of the complete works, and read The Merchant of Venice from beginning to end, marvelling at its realism and dramatic force, and the vigour of Shakespeare’s language.
But it was while reading Cymbeline, with its complex and fraught journeys of discovery and near-loss, that something more momentous happened: the author met ‘the girl who afterwards became my wife’. Shakespeare was not merely present at this burgeoning romance – the poet’s language made it possible:
I was not then as well acquainted with her language – the Xosa – as I am now; and although she had a better grip of mine … I was doubtful I could make her understand my innermost feelings in it, so in coming to an understanding we both used the language of educated people – the language which Shakespeare wrote – which happened to be the only official language of our country at the time.
‘It may be depended upon,’ he added slyly, ‘that we both read Romeo and Juliet.’
It was the essay’s homespun clarity, its lack of idolatry, that I found appealing. Whereas so many of Gollancz’s contributors offered prolix generalisations about the Bard’s ineffable appeal, this nameless, Setswana-speaking South African was attempting to work out what Shakespeare might mean in the here and now. Here and then, in the South Africa of 1916.
His homage seemed all the more meaningful because it suggested equivalence. More than equivalence: equality. Shakespeare was a fine storyteller, the writer suggested; but then so too were his own people, the Tswana. It was possible that Shakespeare’s plays and Setswana stories shared similar folkloric origins. The essay’s title, ‘William Tsikinya-Chaka’, was a playful free translation of the poet’s name, meaning ‘William Shake-the-Sword’.
That is not to say the essay avoided politics. In fact the closer one looked, the more loaded those politics seemed. It was far from accidental that the ‘language of educated people’ in South Africa at the time was English: it had been imposed by the British administration in what was then the Cape Colony. As in India, educationalists who had brought English to Africa also brought Shakespeare; courtesy of mission schools, his plays had been part of the colonial education system almost from the beginning.
But the way the writer described Shakespeare wasn’t, as I had encountered in so many Indian accounts, as a tool of colonial oppression. He was a bridge of translation, of connection. Shakespeare was the writer who enabled two young people – one Tswana, the other Xhosa – to romance each other in the words of immortal lovers, just as his works enabled communication between European cultures and those of Africa.
One issue haunted the essay: that of race. Marrying a woman from a different language and culture, the author wrote, had been challenging enough to their respective families; but it was as nothing to the way white people had become accustomed to regard blacks. He described going to see a screening of a film that depicted the crucifixion of Jesus:
According to the pictures, the only black man in the mob was Judas Iscariot. I have since become suspicious of the veracity of the cinema and acquired a scepticism which is not diminished by a gorgeous one now exhibited in London which shows, side by side with the nobility of the white race, a highly coloured exaggeration of the depravity of the blacks. Shakespeare’s dramas, on the other hand, show that nobility and valour, like depravity and cowardice, are not the monopoly of any colour.
I checked up: the second film referred to was almost certainly D. W. Griffith’s silent epic, The Birth of a Nation, which even in its day, 1915, caused uproar for casting white actors in blackface and lionising the Ku Klux Klan. It was against this ‘gorgeous’ entertainment that Shakespeare’s plays stood as potent rebuke: ‘nobility and valour, like depravity and cowardice, are not the monopoly of any colour’. This was one of the earliest accounts I’d discovered to argue that Shakespeare was colour-blind; all the more striking if – as seemed likely – the writer himself was black.
That evening I cycled back from the library, my brain busy with questions. Who on earth was this anonymous ‘South African’? And why was he the only sub-Saharan African who contributed to Gollancz’s book? One of his final lines on Shakespeare kept ringing around my head: ‘We of the present age have not yet equalled his acumen.’ Given what would happen to South Africa in the decades after 1916, they struck a bleak and baleful
note.
LYING AWAKE ON MY SECOND NIGHT IN JOHANNESBURG, I reflected that there was one stubborn problem with my scheme to research Shakespeare in this part of the world: Johannesburg itself.
I’d visited South Africa once before as a student, a few years after the optimism of the 1994 elections, the first in which all black South Africans could vote, and been shocked by what appeared to be a society still in a state of war. Arriving in the otherwise picturesque town of Plettenberg Bay in the Western Cape, all I’d seen was razor wire and electric fences, erected (I was told) by security-obsessed Jo’burgers who’d retired there. The Afrikaner landlady I’d been billeted with spent most of breakfast complaining – in full hearing of the live-in black maid – about the price of domestic help. This democracy business was all very well, she said, her voice rising querulously, but what did I think about that?
Fourteen years later, if the razor wire and electric fences were any indication, things seemed to have got worse. Melville, the area where I was staying, was an upmarket, slightly boho neighbourhood only a couple of miles from the centre of Johannesburg. But even Melville appeared to lead a double life as an open prison: fences with spikes, electric gates, guard huts, prowling utility vehicles emblazoned with fearsome names (24/7 Security, Stallion Security, SOS Protec, Night Guard). The 86 per cent of Johannesburg’s population who were black or mixed-race seemed to spend most of their time guarding the 14 per cent who were white.
I CAN MAKE IT TO THE FENCE IN 2.8 SECONDS, read a sign down the street, next to a silhouette of a German Shepherd. CAN YOU?
When I’d arrived, I’d asked where would be safe to walk – I was keen to stretch my legs from the flight and see the koppies, the stone outcrops for which Johannesburg was celebrated.
I was met with blank looks. Walk? Up there? On my own?
‘Maybe during the day, with a guide,’ said the owner of the guesthouse. ‘Maybe. Buuut early evening …’ He whistled through his teeth.
How about the city centre? Was it safe to walk there?
No, even during the day. OK, maybe some streets, but as a tourist – safer just to take cash with me, no cards, and leave my mobile phone.
But I needed my phone for work, I bleated.
‘Get a local one. A cheap one.’
It went on. Public transport a no-no. Trains especially. Best to hire a driver. Not expensive – get one for the day if need be.
What if I didn’t want to be ferried around like a white lording? What if I wanted to be spontaneous? Surely it was safe to walk around Melville itself?
His expression was flat. ‘You look like a tourist a mile off. Stick to being spontaneous somewhere else.’
Piece by piece, I put flesh on my mysterious South African. It wasn’t just me who was foxed by his identity: several accounts named him as William Tsikinya-Chaka, mistaking the subject of the essay for its author.
Eventually an article gave me what I wanted, and a small trail of breadcrumbs besides. He was a man called Solomon Tshekisho Plaatje, a journalist, linguist and political activist. For all that I’d never heard of him until a few months before, Plaatje was one of the most important figures in twentieth-century South African history. He was the founding secretary general of the South African Native National Congress (SANNC), the organisation that became the African National Congress, a leading light in the early struggle for equal rights in South Africa.
I combed through reference books, databases and secondhand bookshops in search of him, each morsel of information more enticing than the last. Plaatje had a name that was Dutch in origin, given by an Afrikaans settler to his grandfather (it was pronounced Ply-kee, I was told), but he was indeed a black South African, part of the Tswana tribe.
Born in 1876 on a mission station outside Kimberley, the Northern Cape town where the colonialist and diamond magnate Cecil Rhodes had made his fortune, Plaatje lived through the early mining booms that transformed South Africa from a loose cluster of African kingdoms to a profitable piece of the British Empire. As a young man he had experienced at first hand the Siege of Mafeking – now Mafikeng/Mahikeng – during the second Boer War of 1899–1902, composing a memoir of the experience, the only one by a black eyewitness. He became a crusading journalist, founding one of the few South African newspapers in the control of a black editorial team, and, scandalised by what he perceived as Britain’s betrayal after the foundation of the Union of South Africa in 1910, joined the campaign for native rights.
It was here that Plaatje came to wider attention. Native Life in South Africa, his caustic account of the cruelties of the 1913 Natives Land Act, the first grim step towards apartheid, alerted the world to the injustices being perpetrated in his homeland. In the 1910s and 1920s he toured Europe and the United States, rabble-rousing for the SANNC and meeting civil-rights pioneers, among them one of America’s greatest campaigners for racial equality, W. E. B. Du Bois. By the time of his death in 1932, back in Kimberley, Plaatje was perhaps the most widely read black writer on the African continent.
The tales related by his more enthusiastic biographers strained credibility: could he really memorise entire books at a glance? Recite whole plays after only one hearing? But other stories, which sounded equally far-fetched, were well documented. Despite only having received an elementary education, Plaatje was proficient in eight languages. Prime minister David Lloyd George, who met him, confessed himself ‘greatly impressed’. He had written a bestselling pamphlet on sexual relations between the races, as well as a novel in English, the first in history by a black South African. There appeared to be nothing the man couldn’t do.
And then, of course, there was Shakespeare. The playwright was entangled in Plaatje’s life in ways that were especially enticing. After he had seen Hamlet as a teenager, the plays seemed to shadow his every move. His journalism repeatedly quotes Shakespeare; Mhudi, the novel, is saturated by references. And then there were the translations, six of them: The Comedy of Errors, Julius Caesar, Othello, The Merchant of Venice, Much Ado About Nothing and Romeo and Juliet. If my sources were accurate, these were not only the first full translations of Shakespeare plays into Setswana; they were the earliest translations into any African language at all. Plaatje deserved a place in the pantheon simply for this.
And yet information was maddeningly hard to come by. None of the standard Shakespeare reference works mentioned him. Mhudi excepted, his books were on the hazy fringes of out-of-print. His biography and a selection of his journalism – both fine scholarly works by a British researcher called Brian Willan – were almost impossible to find. Back in Britain I’d asked Shakespeare experts for leads on Plaatje; none were even aware of his existence.
It was a conundrum. As I scanned the haphazard pile of volumes by or about Solomon Plaatje that had filled my suitcase, I thought: when it came to the global history of Shakespeare, who had written him out?
A graceful classical portico menaced on every side by brutalist concrete faculties and labs, the William Cullen library at the University of the Witwatersrand, known locally as ‘Wits’, looked painfully out of place, as if someone had lifted an orangerie from Versailles and placed it in the middle of a high-security penitentiary. The university’s most precious collections are housed at the Cullen, including the papers of Solomon Plaatje. I had booked an appointment for the day after I arrived in Johannesburg, hoping it might answer at least some of my questions.
As I came near, the place looked closed. The lights were off. Strange – it was 3 p.m., definitely opening time. Then I noticed a small sign pinned to the wall, in a looping and haphazard hand: ‘Library Closed No Power’. There had been electricity outages on and off all winter, a combination of South Africa’s creaking network and rumbling union disputes. The previous week gold miners had walked out. The atmosphere was sour, full of mutterings that the ANC government under president Jacob Zuma was crumbling.
But there was really only one story in South Africa that September: the ailing Nelson Mandela. A few weeks ear
lier, the former president had been rushed into hospital in Pretoria. Crowds had massed in the street, expecting the worst, but Mandela had rallied and, to widespread rejoicing, had made it to his ninety-fifth birthday. Three days before I landed, he’d been brought back home to the exclusive suburb of Houghton, a few miles away. The Mandela compound had been one of those hit by the power cut the previous night; an emergency generator had to be used to keep his intensive-care equipment online. The papers were full of outraged headlines: MADIBA POWER SCARE. For once, it wasn’t a metaphor.
An hour and a half later, once the lights had finally gone back on, I got inside the Cullen. The Africana reading room was a genial clutter of books, pot plants, posters and murals. Over the banisters leading up to the mezzanine there was a huge banner, reading THE PEOPLE SHALL GOVERN! – a relic of the university’s history as a bulwark of the anti-apartheid movement. Across every inch of wall were black-and-white photos of protests and rallies on campus. It seemed fitting that this was where Plaatje – some parts of him, at least – had ended up.
Plaatje was born on a farm some 30 miles away from Kimberley, about 280 miles south-west of Johannesburg: a quick hop on the plane I was scheduled to take early the following week, but many hours by dirt and dust track.
The mission station where he received an education was run by a German, the Reverend Gotthilf Ernst Westphal, and at school Plaatje seems to have been a remarkably talented and responsive pupil. As well as speaking his own Setswana and learning other local tongues, he would have been taught German and learned ‘Cape Dutch’, the language that became Afrikaans. He received extra tuition from Reverend Westphal’s wife, Elizabeth, who introduced him to literature and music. There was talk of him going to secondary school – a rare privilege for a black child in South Africa at that time.
Worlds Elsewhere Page 36
