It was not to be. In 1894, at the age of seventeen, Plaatje abandoned education for a job as a messenger at the Kimberley post office. He lived in the Malay Camp, a mixed area of town, and became involved with the newly formed South Africans’ Improvement Society, which hosted regular talks, concerts and events. In 1898, he married the sister of a friend, Elizabeth Lilith M’belle – the woman he had courted with Romeo and Juliet. Later that year, he left to take up a job in Mafikeng as an interpreter in the legal courts. By now, he could speak and write in Setswana, Sesotho, English and Dutch, and speak isiXhosa and German.
The second Anglo-Boer War had followed soon afterwards, and in the Cullen was the manuscript of the diary he’d kept during the Mafikeng siege: a thin wodge of yellowing foolscap, one of the few surviving texts in Plaatje’s hand. Written in rapid but legible script – mainly English, with a few Afrikaans and Setswana words thrown in – it was a surprisingly larky read, telling of daring escapes from Boer bullets and giving valuable eyewitness detail on what life was really like in a British encampment under fire.
What there wasn’t anywhere at the Cullen, at least anywhere I could see, was evidence of Plaatje’s passion for Shakespeare: no manuscripts, no notes on his translations. Aside from the diary, the only hint that Plaatje had any interest at all in that direction was a letter dated 17 January 1931, seventeen months before his death, appealing for funds to help publish ‘native literature’.
The photographs, however, were eloquent. One showed a young man, perhaps in his mid-twenties, wearing a dark jacket and white bow-tie, his watch-chain shining, holding what appeared to be a piece of sheet music. Though he was a little plump, his features were finely formed: square jaw, broad forehead. His posture was alert; his eyes, directed at the camera, were bold and cool.
The other picture was later, and sadder: a small print of an old man, exhausted-looking, sitting at a typewriter. A homburg sat jauntily on his head and a tie was neatly knotted at his throat, but his pale linen jacket was too big. His shoulders were slumped, his gaze unfocused. He looked substantially older than his fifties. I wondered what forces had transformed one Solomon Plaatje into the other.
There was something else in the library. Passing through London on a speaking tour, Plaatje had visited the Zonophone record company at Hayes in Middlesex, where he had recorded three discs of African music, presumably to aid his consciousness-raising efforts. They were in Setswana and isiXhosa, a combination of hymns and folk songs, sung by Plaatje himself with Sylvia Colenso (granddaughter of the Bishop of Natal) accompanying. The shellac originals were now too fragile to play, but the Wits librarians had digitised them.
Sitting on my own in the library, the red late-afternoon sunlight burning into the wall behind, I strained my ear to the tiny speakers of an antique PC. Through a thick soup of hiss I could just about pick out hymn-like piano chords and a man’s thin voice. ‘Singa Mawela’, a gently lilting song, was suited to their talents: Miss Colenso’s rippling arrangement gave it a pleasant touch of the Edwardian salon, with the unexpected addition of the pops and clicks of the isiXhosa language, produced by Plaatje with obvious enjoyment. At last, a voice to match the face.
I selected another track. There was a whoosh of static and Plaatje’s voice soared high above, sounding easy and smooth. It only took me a few moments to recognise the words and tune, whose jaunty optimism I had always found deeply moving:
Nkosi sikelel’ iAfrika
Maluphakanyis’ uphondo Iwayo …
Lord, bless Africa, may her spirit rise up … It was the South African national anthem, the first time in history it had been recorded. At the chorus, a female voice joined in–Miss Colenso, I guessed. She and Plaatje sang in harmony before the music faded into crackle and silence.
Soon after composing his account of the Mafikeng siege, Plaatje’s interest in politics had hardened into direct campaigning. In 1901, he took over the editorship of a new Setswana-language newspaper, Koranta ea Becoana (‘The Tswana Gazette’). His tone intensified; in one fire-brand editorial published in September 1902, he tried to reason with the British, under the pointed headline ‘Equal Rights’. ‘We do not hanker after social equality with the white man,’ it read. ‘We do not care for your parlour, nor is it our wish to lounge on couches in your drawing rooms … All we claim is our just dues; we ask for our political recognition as loyal British subjects.’
But British influence over this part of the world was waning. Following an uneasy victory in the Anglo-Boer War, the British government came to a compromise with Afrikaner nationalists. In 1910, the former British colonies in the Cape and Natal joined with the Boer republics of Transvaal and the Orange Free State to form the Union of South Africa. The interests of the overwhelming majority of South Africans – those South Africans who were black – were excluded from the deal.
Plaatje sensed his own people being sold down the river. In 1909, a group of black delegates had come together in Waaihoek, Bloemfontein, and agreed to create a permanent organisation to fight for black legal and political rights. Three years later, in January 1912, when the South African Native National Congress was finally formed, the Zulu John Dube was elected president. Plaatje became secretary general.
In 1913, the nascent SANNC faced its rubicon: the passing of the Natives Land Act, which at a stroke outlawed black South Africans from either owning or renting eight tenths of the land in the Union – anywhere outside ‘reserves’ set aside for their use. Black landowners were evicted and tenants forced off land they had farmed for generations. Millions became refugees in their own country. Denied representation in the South African parliament, the SANNC made frantic plans to send a delegation to London. When they made the trip the following year, Plaatje would be among them.
In the meantime, though, he responded more characteristically, as a reporter, picking up a bicycle and heading out on the road to see the effects of the Land Act for himself. What Plaatje witnessed in these journeys of July 1913, in the middle of the cold South African winter, became the essence of Native Life in South Africa, the book that would make his name.
That evening, back in my room in Melville, I read Native Life from cover to cover. It begins with a sentence that has since been etched deep into the history of apartheid: ‘Awaking on Friday morning, June 20, 1913, the South African native found himself, not actually a slave, but a pariah in the land of his birth.’ The book goes on to cover in meticulous and unsparing detail how four and a half million black South Africans found themselves made ‘pariahs’ by the Land Act.
Native Life in South Africa also makes harrowing use of eyewitness material, retelling journeys Plaatje took through the length and breadth of South Africa, from his homeland in the north to far south in the Cape. One of its most distressing passages describes the moment Plaatje encountered twenty-four women who had taken part in protests against a law requiring them to carry passes proving they were on the payroll of a white employer – a foreshadowing of the Pass Laws imposed by the government from the 1910s onwards. ‘Tears rolled down our cheeks,’ Plaatje wrote, ‘as we saw the cracks on their bare feet, the swellings and chronic chilblains, which made them look like sheep suffering from foot-and-mouth disease.’
Critics have drawn attention to the echoes in Plaatje’s text of Daniel Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year (1722) and William Cobbett’s Rural Rides (1830) – likewise a journey around a people in the process of being dispossessed. But another writer seemed to me to underpin the movement and energy of Native Life in South Africa, at some points directly, at other times just beneath the surface: Shakespeare.
About halfway through the book, stepping back from the catastrophe convulsing his country, Plaatje permits a few shafts of autobiography to penetrate. His and Elizabeth’s young son, named Johann Gutenberg after the inventor of moveable type, had been born in September 1912; he died in January 1914, at the age of just sixteen months. With spareness and gravity, Plaatje describes Johann’s funeral procession winding
around the streets of Kimberley, and is suddenly taken back to the image of a young family he had seen on the road. ‘What have our people done to these colonists,’ he asks, ‘that is so utterly unforgivable, that this law should be passed?’
These thoughts on land and ownership, on need, on loss, on family, on fatherhood, take him to one play in particular:
Are not many of us toiling in the grain fields and fruit farms, with their wives and their children, for the white man’s benefit? Did not our people take care of the white women … whose husbands, brothers and fathers were away at the front [during the first world war] – in many cases actively engaged in shattering our own liberty? But see their appreciation and gratitude! Oh, for something to
Strike flat the thick rotundity o’ the world!
Crack Nature’s moulds, all germens spill at once!
That makes ingrateful man!
The play is, of course, King Lear. Though most often interpreted as a harrowing psychological study, there is another side to Shakespeare’s tragedy, less often explored by contemporary directors: its politics. For its earliest audiences the play contained cruel echoes of the Enclosure movement, which – like the Natives Land Act – saw entire populations dispersed or dispossessed. As the landowning Shakespeare well knew, Jacobean England was full of Lears and Poor Toms, masterless men forced to wander the countryside after being ejected from fields that were rightfully theirs.
Plaatje, so it seemed to me, drew on this older, deeper aspect of the play – figuring himself as a monarch who has been ejected from his own country, left to call for retribution against a bitterly unfair world. To demand justice increasingly seemed like a form of madness.
One afternoon I sat on a sofa in the middle of a private garden in the middle of Johannesburg, trying to keep out of the fierce sun high overhead. Rugs were spread across the lawn; all around me the trees cut blocks of dark shadow into the dusty grass. It had rained the night before: early spring rain, much-needed. The scent in the air was of dry concrete and damp earth. By the wall, a jacaranda tree was blossoming in a fizz of purple petals. Birds shrieked somewhere in the distance.
Around the garden men and women stood in pockets of two and three, chicly dressed, picking at finger food and frowning at their iPhones. A man nearby was having a vehement conversation with his neighbour about the prospects for the African art market. His mirrored shades sent scatters of light across the cushions.
‘We’re next after India, heh? India is totally over. People are fucking hungry for this stuff.’
The neighbour was nodding intently.
‘India is over, man, I tell you. Over.’
I had wangled an invitation to a lunchtime reception at a Johannesburg arts festival on the basis that I was a journalist visiting town. These grounds were spurious: my attention was actually focused on the other end of the garden, where a group of men – nine or ten, all of them black, a mixture of ages from their early twenties through to fifties – huddled.
In a moment, they had turned to face us. One man stepped out, and began to speak in a low voice, his hands bunched by his sides like a boxer willing himself into the fight. His accent was strong, and it took me several seconds to place what he was saying:
If there were reason for these miseries,
Then into limits could I bind my woes.
When heaven doth weep, doth not the earth o’erflow?
If the winds rage, doth not the sea wax mad,
Threat’ning the welkin with his big-swoll’n face?
And wilt thou have a reason for this coil?
I am the sea. Hark how her sighs doth blow.
She is the weeping welkin, I the earth.
It was perhaps Shakespeare’s first truly great tragic speech, spoken by the Roman soldier Titus Andronicus in the third act of the early play named after him. The words are of desperation and incipient insanity, at a moment in the action when – Titus’s daughter having been raped and mutilated, his sons arrested, Titus’s own hand cut off – it seems as if things cannot get worse. The play being Titus Andronicus, they do. This tragedy is sometimes interpreted as a rehearsal for King Lear.
I glanced around. The crowd looked suitably dumbfounded. Even the man in mirrored shades had shut up.
After the performance, I made my way over. A small, bullet-shaped woman with long, reddish-dark hair was fussing the group back into the corner. Her name was Dorothy Ann Gould. An actor, she was something of a legend in South Africa. As well as maintaining a busy career in teaching, on television and stage, she ran a weekly workshop in the deprived inner-city neighbourhood of Hillbrow. Her weapon in this campaign was Shakespeare.
‘You liked it, heh? The Titus?’ she said, shielding her eyes against the sun.
I said I had never seen anything like it.
She sniffed at the surroundings. ‘Not really our usual setting, but it’s good experience. Plus it’s a useful audience, all these arts folk. Good for the project, getting it known.’
The scheme had been running just over a year; it had begun as a drop-in centre for men and women (mostly men) who were homeless or struggling with addiction, or both. She’d suggested the idea of drama training, and the participants had eagerly agreed. Rehearsals were held weekly by Dorothy and her assistant Marcus Mabusela. The participants had chosen their own name: Johannesburg Awakening Minds, JAM for short. It sounded good; and it was time, they figured, that they had a little sweetness in their lives.
Gould was determined not to patronise them. ‘Right from the beginning, we started on Shakespeare. The first thing was “No longer mourn for me when I am dead”, Sonnet 71, you know. I took them through what Patsy Rodenburg, the voice coach at the Royal Shakespeare Company, did with me in Stratford.’ She thrust a bundle of scripts decisively into a bag. ‘They loved it.’
Just nine people had come to their debut performance. But then some of the group had got gigs as film extras, and small fees; they started to build a reputation. They were trying to workup to something fully staged. She had her eye on Hamlet: they’d been rehearsing a group rendition of the Prince’s ‘What a piece of work is a man!’ speech.
I thought of its troubling, ragged early line (‘I have of late – but wherefore I know not – lost all my mirth’) and was struck that she’d focused on tragedies. Titus especially: it seemed an obscure choice.
She shook an accusatory finger at the city beyond. ‘Well, they’re not shocked by Lavinia having her tongue cut up and her hands cut off, and being raped, if that’s what you mean. In Johannesburg that’s what happens every day. Every single phrase in that Titus speech means something to them. Yes, it develops their voice, it develops their breath production, it forces them to be still and powerful and discipline their bodies. But it’s also because in real life they can’t shout, “Why am I unemployed, why is there such poverty in South Africa?” Through Titus, they can. They can be in tears. It makes it OK to cry.’
She looked as if she was daring me to disbelieve her. ‘It’s powerful stuff. They don’t want woozy stuff. It wouldn’t … make any sense.’
After we’d finished the interview, I helped carry her bag and some equipment back to the car. As I turned to go in, I heard the sound of an electric window winding down. Gould was leaning out, silhouetted against the glare of the city beyond.
‘Come see for yourself,’ she bellowed as the wheels churned in the dirt. Behind her there was only red dust.
Before leaving Britain I’d arranged to visit Pretoria, forty miles north, to keep an appointment with an academic, Daniel Matjila, who taught in the African Languages department at the University of South Africa (Unisa). Matjila had a special interest in Solomon Plaatje and had recently co-edited a biography. He was also of Tswana heritage and fluent in the language. I hoped he would be able to give me some insight into how Plaatje had translated Shakespeare’s words. I also hoped he could help me answer a deeper question, harder to fathom: why Plaatje had decided to translate Shakespeare at all.
/> The story seemed to begin in June 1914, when Plaatje was sent to London as part of that SANNC delegation. In between meetings with British civil-rights activists (who did their best to exploit the delegates for their own ends) and British civil servants (who worked tirelessly to ensure they would never meet anyone of influence) Plaatje mingled with the liberal intelligentsia of London. When the rest of the delegation hurried back to South Africa after Britain declared war on Germany that August – all but burying their campaign – Plaatje decided to remain. In the two and a half years he ended up staying in Britain, he would address over three hundred public meetings up and down the country, educating Britons about the injustices of the Land Act, and trying to finish and find a publisher for Native Life in South Africa.
It was around this time that he had come into contact with Daniel Jones, a young phonetics expert at University College London who was (among much else) George Bernard Shaw’s inspiration for the character of Professor Higgins in Pygmalion. Jones was fascinated by African languages, and the two developed the idea of compiling a book of Setswana proverbs, capturing the spoken language in all its vividness, and also some kind of reader-cum-teaching-manual. Their collaborations soon bore fruit. A slim collaborative volume, Sechuana Proverbs with Literal Translations and their European Equivalents, was published, rapidly followed by Plaatje’s own A Sechuana Reader in International Phonetic Orthography. It was also around this time that Plaatje met Israel Gollancz and made his short Setswana-language contribution to the Book of Homage to Shakespeare. All three books would come out in 1916 – plus, once funds had finally been raised to publish it, the first edition of Native Life in South Africa.
Worlds Elsewhere Page 37
