Inside, 32 Angel Street was, if possible, even more dispiriting. A largeish central room had been lined with bookshelves and turned into a small library, with a melamine table in the centre and a scattering of chairs. A sizeable crack ran down one wall. Despite two strip lights buzzing noisily above, it was dark and smelt strongly of damp. Above the desk was a painting of Plaatje, in dark suit and wing collar, clutching a sheaf of books. Gingerly, I lifted open the visitors’ book. I was the only visitor so far that month.
Perhaps I shouldn’t have been surprised by the state of the house. It was simply the last pausing place in a remorselessly peripatetic life. Though Plaatje made his way back from England in 1917, once Native Life in South Africa was safely in print, he only stayed another two years before he was off again – at first back to England, on a second SANNC deputation and another round of speaking tours, then to Canada and the United States.
It dawned on me that perhaps another reason he had translated Shakespeare, often at sea, was as a way of evading loneliness. Shakespeare was someone knowable, a companion on all those ocean voyages, when his wife and children were thousands of miles away and the cause of black South Africans looked as impossibly remote as ever. Maybe it wasn’t pure happenstance that he’d been drawn to The Comedy of Errors. Themes that seemed so strong when I’d seen the play in London – madness, separation anxiety – must have had tangible force for a man who was on the move for the best part of fifteen years.
It didn’t help that he was permanently broke. In August 1923, stranded in London and lacking the money to pay his passage home, Plaatje had been forced to appear in a stage production supporting a film about Africa called The Cradle of the World. There were two photographs in the front room at 32 Angel Street: one a group shot of seven performers clad in leopardskins standing stiffly behind pot plants; the other of Plaatje himself, sporting a necklace and a feather hat that looked as though it had been dug out of a jumble sale. Though Plaatje was characteristically chipper, writing to a friend that ‘I learnt a lot during the month’, it must have been a humiliation.
By the time he made it back to South Africa in November 1923, having completed his version of Othello on the voyage, the political situation in South Africa had changed beyond all recognition. Despite the SANNC’s attempts to appeal directly to Britain, the Union government made it abundantly clear that it had no intention of letting its erstwhile colonial masters meddle in South Africa’s affairs. Earlier that year, the Native Urban Areas Act had come into force, clamping down on black immigration into cities and laying the groundwork for racial segregation. The SANNC had been reborn as the African National Congress, but in all other respects it was in disarray, hobbled by lack of funds, outflanked by new, more militant organisations. The older and more moderate generation of activists began to lose their influence. Plaatje in particular felt he was being sidelined.
Private tragedies echoed public ones. Plaatje had been in the US in July 1921 when he received news about his beloved daughter Olive; she had been taken ill during a train journey back from Natal with the after-effects of rheumatic fever. Prevented from entering a whites-only waiting room, or resting on the whites-only seats, she had died on the platform.
Plaatje himself had been ill for many years with a chronic heart problem. In June 1932, during yet another frantic journey from Kimberley to Johannesburg to push for the publication of yet another book, this time of Bantu folk tales, he caught influenza. On 17 June, determined to keep an appointment with the printers, he collapsed on the way back. Two days later, at the age of fifty-five, he, too, was dead.
The Shakespeare translation project all but died with him. According to his biographer Brian Willan, only a few scraps of Romeo and Juliet survived in manuscript – a couple of pages at most, dug out decades later from boxes of his papers. Of Much Ado About Nothing and Othello there was now no sign whatsoever. Whatever Plaatje’s true thoughts on Shakespeare’s study of a black man striving to find his place in white society, it was likely that no one would ever know them.
Julius Caesar was eventually published, though in conditions that made a mockery of Plaatje’s struggles for his culture. In 1937, five years after his death, a white professor at the university of Cape Town, Gérard Lestrade, was handed the manuscript of Dintshontsho tsa bo-Juliuse Kesara (‘The Death of Julius Caesar’). He edited with zeal, abandoning Plaatje’s carefully constructed phonetic system and taking it upon himself to ‘correct’ the text. Lestrade’s introduction argued that Plaatje
diminished what Shakespeare had written by omitting words, lines, dialogues or verses. More often than not the omissions had altered the meaning of Shakespeare’s words. In some cases, Plaatje added his own words; most often these additions had nothing to do with the original. At times Plaatje committed outright errors of translation, possibly because he did not understand English very well, or else he was not paying close attention to what he was doing. Again, most often than not, these mistakes had altered the meaning and diminished the beauty of Shakespeare’s words.
Even disregarding the supercilious dismissal of Plaatje’s expertise and intentions – adding his ‘own words’ was surely the point – one didn’t have to look far to see another motive behind Lestrade’s attack. A black man was surely incapable of translating the greatest white writer there was.
Plaatje’s translation of The Merchant of Venice had likewise disappeared, but on a shelf at the museum I found an earlier and fuller edition of Native Life than the one I’d been using. At the top of the same chapter in which he’d quoted King Lear, Plaatje had originally placed lines from Merchant, in English and lightly adapted:
He hath disgraced me and laughed at my losses, mocked at my gain, scorned my nation, thwarted my bargains, cooled my friends, heated mine enemies; and what is his reason? I am a Kaffir. Hath not a Kaffir eyes? Hath not a Kaffir hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions? Is he not fed with the same food, hurt by the same weapons, subject to the same diseases, healed by the same means, warmed and cooled by the same summer and winter as a white Afrikander? If you prick us, do we not bleed? If you tickle us, do we not laugh? If you poison us, do we not die? And if you wrong us shall we not revenge? If we are like you in the rest, we will resemble you in that.
The speech is Shylock’s, an anguished appeal for tolerance to the Christians of Venice. For ‘Jew’ Plaatje had written ‘Kaffir’, a deeply offensive term for a black South African; for ‘Christian’, ‘Afrikander’, a variant spelling of ‘Afrikaner’. In the play, as in the South Africa of his day, the words fell on deaf ears.
At Plaatje’s death in June 1932, Kimberley turned out to mourn him. Zaccheus Richard Mahabane, the president general of the ANC, conducted the service. Newspapers across South Africa lamented the passing of a great scholar and statesman. The London Times carried a brief but respectful obituary, declaring him ‘a prominent figure in the South African Native Congress’. Later, I searched the Times archive: despite Plaatje’s extensive connections with Britain, this was the only time Britain’s newspaper of record had thought to acknowledge his existence. Clearly it was safer to praise a black South African activist while burying him.
But then British journalists weren’t the only ones unsure of Plaatje’s place in history. Hearing of his Shakespeare translation project, Clement Doke, a pioneering South African linguist, wondered whether ‘other types of literature are not at present much more urgently needed in Setswana than this’. The critic and playwright Stephen Black told a friend that he had written to Plaatje warning him off entirely: ‘Instead of wasting his time on translating Shakespeare, he should translate something which contains humanity, the one quality of which Shakespeare is entirely devoid … What in God’s name the Tswana want to read Shakespeare for I don’t know, unless it is that they want to feel more like worms than ever.’
In literature as in politics, by attempting to bridge two cultures, Plaatje had trapped himself in no man’s land. His novel Mhudi had suffered
a similar fate when it was eventually published in 1930. A courageous attempt to tell the story of his own people in a form that owes much to the historical epics of Walter Scott and with language that borrows from the King James Bible and Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress, it, too, was an attempt to bridge cultures. It, too, was judged a failure. According to an anonymous review in the Times Literary Supplement in 1933, Plaatje should have abandoned his pretensions to ‘Europeanisin’:
One wonders what secret fountain of African art might not have been unsealed if, in interpreting his people, a writer of Plaatje’s insight had thought and written ‘like a Native’. That might well have been the first authentic utterance out of the aeons of African silence.
No matter that this was the first novel published in English by a black South African: Plaatje’s problem was that he was not ‘authentic’ enough, not enough ‘like a Native’. In presuming to write a novel – or wear a suit, or meet with Lloyd George, or translate Shakespeare into Setswana – he had exceeded the position allotted him by the hue of his skin.
Plaatje’s wider ambitions lay unrealised. His hopes for South African education were bulldozered by the Bantu Education Act of 1953, which enforced a discriminatory curriculum in schools across South Africa: Hendrik Verwoerd, its architect, said the Act’s intention was to shoo the ‘Native’ off ‘the greener pastures of European Society where he is not allowed to graze’. Every major political battle Plaatje fought, from the 1913 Land Act to his attempts to reason with Union prime minister Jan Smuts, ended in failure. In 1936, four years after his death, the non-racial Cape franchise he had fought so fervently to keep was abolished. Within fifteen years a hard-line nationalist government would take charge and formalise the policy Plaatje and his colleagues feared more than anything else: apartheid.
Perhaps most devastating of all, as the situation in South Africa became ever more intractable, the ANC grew distinctly uncomfortable with its founding fathers. In the radical heat of the 1960s and 1970s, to be a ‘native intellectual’ – a phrase popularised by the anti-colonial philosopher and activist Frantz Fanon – was tantamount to being complicit with the racist colonial power. In the face of outrages like the Sharpeville Massacre of 1960, when police fired on township protestors without warning and killed at least sixty-nine people, who wanted to celebrate a Shakespeare-loving egghead? Plaatje was buried all over again.
While I was in California, I met the expatriate South African scholar Natasha Distiller. Distiller had written perceptively about Plaatje as a ‘coconut’ – a derogatory word for someone who was ‘black’ on the outside and ‘white’ on the inside. Far from being a term of casual abuse, Distiller argued, in Plaatje’s case it touched something precise: his attempts to forge a hybrid persona that borrowed aspects from European culture while promoting his own heritage and language. In a multicultural, twenty-first-century world of hyphenated identities (African-American, British-Indian), it didn’t seem such a difficult balance to strike. But the world in which Plaatje lived regarded the concept of hybridity as a dangerous affront to the principles on which it was organised.
And what if the universality of Shakespeare was an illusion? What if it really was a Eurocentric fantasy to think that Shakespeare naturally had relevance everywhere? In my hotel that night, I looked up a famous encounter between Shakespeare’s works and African storytelling traditions that posed exactly these questions. It had occurred in West Africa sixty-odd years ago, and been reported by an American anthropologist named Laura Bohannan. The article appeared in Natural History magazine in 1966.
The story began in the early 1950s, when Bohannan left her adopted home in Britain to travel to West Africa. Her aim was to study the Tiv people, who still live flanking the great Benue river, the longest tributary of the Niger, in what was in the process of becoming the Federation of Nigeria after nearly seventy years of British colonial rule.
Although this was serious research, Bohannan was also fulfilling a bet. Back in Oxford, an Englishman had taunted her with an old libel – that Yanks don’t get the Bard:
‘You Americans,’ said a friend, ‘often have difficulty with Shakespeare. He was, after all, a very English poet, and one can easily misinterpret the universal by misunderstanding the particular.’
I protested that human nature is pretty much the same the whole world over; at least the general plot and motivation of the greater tragedies would always be dear – everywhere – although some details of custom might have to be explained and difficulties of translation might produce other slight changes.
The two of them agreed to a wager. Bohannan would take Hamlet to Africa, and see if her theories held water.
The play indeed became an object of fascination, though not in the way she intended. As the swamps rose after the harvest, the Tiv ceremonies she’d come to observe ceased – to her immense frustration – and the boozing commenced:
People began to drink at dawn. By mid-morning the whole homestead was singing, dancing, and drumming. When it rained, people had to sit inside their huts: there they drank and sang or they drank and told stories. In any case, by noon or before, I either had to join the party or retire to my own hut and my books. ‘One does not discuss serious matters when there is beer. Come, drink with us.’ Since I lacked their capacity for the thick native beer, I spent more and more time with Hamlet.
After a while, her hosts admitted they were confused – wondering what this weird American woman was doing, sitting alone staring at ‘paper’ rather than joining in the fun and games. Bohannan tried to explain.
The account of her storytelling occupies the rest of the article. The Tiv, as it turns out, have no time for Hamlet: are bewildered by its premises, perplexed by its plot, alienated by its bizarre belief systems, at odds with its moral compass. The ghost of Hamlet’s father cannot be a ghost, they say; he must be an omen sent by a witch. Gertrude’s marriage to Claudius is not ‘o’er-hasty’; it is a prudent move that guarantees the security of the family. They don’t share Hamlet’s queasiness about his aunt-mother, but, operating in a polygamous culture, are scornful that Old Hamlet was so neglectful as to have had only one wife. They are horrified by the death of Polonius, but – experienced hunters with hair-trigger reactions – largely because he allowed himself to be taken by surprise behind the arras. They are openly stricken that Hamlet should avenge himself on an uncle who has so generously taken him in.
Rereading Bohannan’s essay that night, I realised this wasn’t simply a narrative of mutual incomprehension. It challenged the idea that Shakespeare had central significance in global culture, was relevant wherever you travelled. If, as Solomon Plaatje had suggested, Shakespeare was just one storyteller among many, perhaps he didn’t even matter all that much. There were plenty of storytellers out there. And it reflected back on us: why did we think the story of Hamlet said so much? Did we really have any clue what it was about, this 400-year-old version of a millennium-old text?
Once Bohannan finally reaches the end of her storytelling session, beaten down by her sceptical audience, the old men who have been listening seem satisfied with the outcome of their transcultural dialogue. ‘Some time,’ one of them remarks, ‘you must tell us some more stories of your country’:
We, who are elders, will instruct you in their true meaning, so that when you return to your own land your elders will see that you have not been sitting in the bush, but among those who know things and who have taught you wisdom.
I admired the style of literary criticism practised by the Tiv. I copied the lines into my notebook and reminded myself to look at them more often.
On my last afternoon in Kimberley, I met up with Sabata-mpho Mokae. As well as co-founding a literary festival in Plaatje’s name, Mokae was a journalist, biographer, novelist and writer of short stories. He was also a historian, a translator, a curator and an aspiring film-maker. He seemed busier than the rest of Kimberley combined.
On the stroke of midday a small silver car creaked up. At the whe
el was a young man in his mid-thirties, dressed in a crisp orange T-shirt and jeans, with shoulder-length braids and thick, square glasses that were a little askew. He had a serious, bookish air and a habit of frowning when he talked.
He wanted to show me something. After driving past a monument to Cecil Rhodes, Kimberley’s great robber baron, he edged us into a nondescript car park in front of the city police headquarters. It took me a moment to realise where he was pointing: at a squat block of stone, a few metres high, with two holes incised into the top. I had passed it the day before and assumed it was a particularly cryptic piece of public art.
It was actually a plinth: a few years back the ANC-dominated provincial government had commissioned a statue of Plaatje, but the family and many others objected.
Mokae lifted his fist out of the car window in the black-power salute. ‘He was standing, with his arm raised like this, you know? Totally inauthentic. That symbol didn’t even exist when Plaatje was alive. It was typical; they wanted to make him something he was not.’
The government had the statue installed in 2009, only to be forced to remove it again a few weeks later. An older statue was hurriedly taken out of storage and placed at another site in the centre of town. It was a more fitting representation, depicting Plaatje seated in front of his books, but the ANC still made sure to dominate proceedings, dispatching President Zuma to administer the unveiling.
Mokae smiled wryly, and straightened his glasses. ‘The first statue is now in a storeroom in the town museum. They’re too embarrassed to melt him down.’
As he swung the car round and drove us towards the cemetery where Plaatje was buried, I wondered where he stood on the question of identity politics. Was Plaatje really a ‘coconut’, a traitor to the cause for having believed so fervently in Shakespeare?
Mokae looked to be concentrating hard on the traffic. ‘I think he wants to see beyond colour, he genuinely believes that,’ he said eventually. ‘He had black and white friends, he exchanged letters with people in Europe and America, he wrote to the prime minister in South Africa. People could say that he aspired to whiteness, but I think that’s not right. Plaatje was ahead of his time.’
Worlds Elsewhere Page 39
