For him, was the play about combatting racism?
‘If this play avoids racism, I’m not in it. It has to deal with racism, but also go beyond racism, go to human attitudes, human deficiencies, moral degradation, lies, expediency, betrayal. Everything. It’s not the only play to deal with race. Merchant of Venice, “If you prick us, do we not bleed?” Titus Andronicus, where Aaron is with his child, who is black? That’s the most powerful black-is-beautiful speech there is.’
He had reunited with Suzman to do Claudius in Hamlet in 2005, and played a Mandela-ish Caliban opposite Antony Sher in 2009. He was optimistic that he and Suzman would work together again, this time on the big one: King Lear, with Kani in the lead. He’d also done Othello again in 2010, this time directing, with his son Atandwa – oh, to be a young man again …
I sneaked a look at my watch. We had been talking for nearly two hours. Maybe this was why Kani was permanently late: it was impossible to shut him up.
He looked sheepish. ‘I told my wife I would only be short.’
As he grabbed his car keys, I said I had one final question: whether performing Othello was a political act.
He patted me genially on the shoulder. ‘Andrew,’ he said, ‘I was going to ask what at that time was not a political act.’
Over dinner in Melville later that night, tussling in the pages of my notebook, I attempted to put everything I had seen in the last few weeks into some kind of order. Plaatje’s project to translate Shakespeare had come to almost nothing, dangerously ahead of its time. Yet finally (and with no small irony) his achievement was starting to be recognised – a model of what the multilingual, multi-ethnic, cosmopolitan new South Africa might achieve. For its part the Robben Island Bible was not what it had seemed to be, as far as I could make out, but equally Shakespeare had been dragooned into the struggle against apartheid – though the very play used for those purposes had often been accused of racism.
Perhaps it was myself I was struggling with. In contemporary Britain or America it often seemed anathema to talk about Shakespeare and politics in the same breath. Theatre directors might make a production ‘political’ – like that American Richard III – by setting the play, say, in fascist Europe or post-Saddam Iraq, but this was often a ruse designed to inject novelty into an otherwise off-the-peg interpretation. Politics was a design decision, like lighting or costume. When I was an English Literature student at Cambridge in the smooth and Blairite late 1990s, politics had been a tainted word, tinged with connotations of obsessiveness, careerism or (worse) both. In lecture halls we were trained to examine ideology with a scepticism verging on border-guard hostility. In the seminar rooms I haunted as a postgraduate, an approach to Shakespeare like that suggested by John Kani would have been heard with pained politeness, then placed on the slab where it could be butchered and deboned.
Johannesburg made such cool academic distance seem preposterous. Two decades after the end of apartheid, I had yet to see a single white person doing a job that could be described as menial. Cleaners were black, street-sweepers black, servers in fast-food restaurants black. Security guards were black: there were five of them right here outside the restaurant, ‘car guards’ who, for a few rand, watched your wheels while you sank your teeth into your wasabi-seared sirloin or nipped into the organic supermarket. Scrawny-looking men in fluorescent tabards, they loitered in packs, looking twitchy. I wondered where they slept at night.
News about Mandela seemed more depressing by the hour. The previous day a story had broken about a police investigation into fraud at several of his charities. South Africa’s Serious Economic Offences unit had attempted to investigate, but been called off because of the embarrassment it would cause the ANC. Mandela himself was still being kept alive by machines. Driving past his house in Houghton, I’d got the driver to stop near the caravanserai of satellite trucks and news vans parked outside the compound. I asked the CNN and SABC correspondents what waiting felt like. ‘Like Waiting for Godot,’ CNN deadpanned.
One thing I had worked out. In the same bookshop where I’d found Shakespeare Against Apartheid, I’d come across a book by the Johannesburg-based photographer David Goldblatt, who has been shooting scenes from South Africa since the 1960s. He’d begun by capturing apartheid – three National Party men on horseback, pig-snouted beneath their trekker’s hats; a touching photograph of a young white farmboy with his black nursemaid. More recently, he’d photographed the changing faces of democratic South Africa (mayors, councillors, municipal managers) in a wonderful 2005 series called Intersections.
But the photograph that resonated with me was an early one, taken at the Randfontein Estates Gold Mine in the Transvaal in 1966. The image, in stark monochrome, is of a man, black, in his twenties or perhaps older. It is impossible to be sure: Goldblatt crops out everything apart from his torso. A mine technician, his chest bristles with authority and the tools of his trade: steel rulers, notebooks in his pocket; jack knife and stopwatch at his belt. His fingers look powerful and assured. On his arm is a shining steel identity tag: BOSS BOY, it reads.
Boss boys were managers, responsible for running a team of black workers in the mine. Their authority was curtailed by having to answer to a white superior – something assured by the fact that they (like many other black servants) were always called ‘boy’, irrespective of their age. Garden boys, house boys, boss boys: one could be in one’s eighties and be a boy. Take on one of the most hazardous jobs in South Africa, be as qualified and as competent as any white man, and you were still a child.
I couldn’t see Boss Boy’s face, but I thought I recognised him nonetheless. He looked like Othello.
IN THE SHARP MORNING LIGHT Cape Town looked even more like a frontier settlement than usual. As I walked down the incline of Buitenkant Street towards the centre, the clapboard frames of colonial-style dwellings and red-brick warehouses glinted prettily in the sun. The day I arrived it had been raining hard, the city and its surrounds all but invisible beneath a porridgey blanket of mist and cloud. Now the air felt cool and apple-crisp; a week of late-winter storms had scrubbed Cape Town up and made it as fresh as paint.
I glanced behind me and saw the flat chiselled surface of Table Mountain, stark and dark and huge against a sky of pure, high blue. It was the first time I’d seen it since arriving. In the Khoikhoi language it had a much nobler name, Hoerikwaggo, ‘Mountain in the Sea’. If I lived here, I thought, I would never look at anything else.
I was bound for Robben Island. It seemed a strange destination on a day as beautiful and cheery as this, but at the quayside the crowds were out in force, in straggling lines that stretched from the ferry terminal to the Ethiopian gourmet coffee stand, past the joint selling organic banana muffins.
I had been forewarned about the Madiba effect. Up in Johannesburg, Mandela was still very much alive – on the internet and rolling news there were hourly bulletins on his health – but the nationwide obsession with his condition, and the realisation that these were surely his final days, had reminded South Africa about what it generally preferred to forget: the past. The Mandela museum in Soweto was thronged with visitors, and the same was true here in Cape Town. Places on the ferry out to the island had been booked up for weeks.
I joined the line, planting myself in the middle of a Christian spring camp from KwaZulu-Natal, boisterous teenagers in coordinated hoodies, and a group of elderly African American ladies from Alabama in fleeces and fawn pedal-pushers. Slowly we funnelled down a ramp towards a large white double-decker boat, past a glossy display on the island’s history.
‘Welcome to jail!’ shouted the crew. On the gangplank we grinned for the official photographer: merry temporary inmates.
Within a year of it finally being closed to prisoners, Robben Island’s journey into the realm of the symbolic had begun. In 1996 it was nominated a National Monument, then in 1999 a Unesco World Heritage Site. The decision was made to keep the prison exactly as it had been; former inmates, many of whom had str
uggled with life outside, were recruited as ‘EPP’ (ex-political prisoner) tour guides. A few months earlier, President Obama had come, one of 200,000 visitors a year, and been shown around by Ahmed Kathrada.
Sped across the sparkling blue bay, we were there in less than half an hour. Herded on to buses marked ‘Driven By Freedom’, we crept past the lime quarry, obediently taking photos of the ‘reunion cairn’ created by a thousand ex-prisoners. We took photos of the dog kennels, larger than the solitary-confinement cells. We took more photos at a viewing point at the edge of the island, facing on to the broad water of Table Bay, with the dark thunderhead of Table Mountain behind. After a while I stopped taking photos.
As we walked under the famous gate (‘We Serve With Pride, Ons Dien Met Trots’ still stencilled above), we were introduced to our EPP, Mncedisi Siswana. He was one of the angry young student radicals dispatched to the island in the late seventies – roughly the time Sonny Venkatrathnam was leaving. He served five years in Section E, reserved for the newest arrivals. Bull-necked, deliberate, he spent several days a week reliving one of the most painful pieces of his past.
‘Robben’, a derivation of the Dutch rob, ‘seal’, refers to the animals that still throng the bay. Identified by the Portuguese explorer Bartolomeu Dias in 1488, initially the island was a refuelling stop for ships on their way around the Cape, an easy calling point for fresh water and supplies. William Keeling’s East India Company expedition cast anchor here in December 1607 after stopping in Sierra Leone – a pleasing coincidence, but which still didn’t make the Shakespearian connection of Keeling’s voyage any more plausible.
When the Dutch East India Company representative Jan van Riebeeck founded the first permanent European settlement on the Cape in 1652, on land that had been variously settled by Xhosa, Zulu, San and Khoikhoi peoples, the island became a place of punishment. Legendarily, the first prisoner was a Khoihkoi man called Autshumato, who had the temerity to protest when the Dutch stole his cattle. Banished to the island in 1659, Autshumato and two followers managed to flee the following year by purloining a rowing boat. They are thought to be the only people ever to have mounted a successful escape.
Under the British, the island became a leper colony in the nineteenth century, then a military base. In 1960, following the violent protests that exploded after the Sharpeville Massacre, arrests soared. Faced with hundreds of black ‘terrorist’ convicts, the government decided it needed an ultra-high-security facility. The following year Robbeneiland became a prison once again, this time a political one.
Conditions for the first batch – among them Mandela, Ahmed Kathrada, Walter Sisulu and Govan Mbeki – were even tougher than those experienced by Sonny Venkatrathnam a few years later. Gang leaders on criminal sentences were encouraged to intimidate ‘politicals’. Hard labour – in the limestone or bluestone quarries, collecting seaweed – led to eye and respiratory problems because of the blinding light and omnipresent dust. Cell raids by guards – white, of course – were common, as were beatings, strip-searches and solitary confinement. Prisoners of different ethnicities were issued different diets (seven ounces of meat or fish a day for whites; six ounces for coloured inmates, four times a week; and five ounces for blacks), but the food was frequently inedible. The island’s topography, surrounded by icy Atlantic currents and buffeted by violent gales, offered cruelties all its own.
Yet, as always in South Africa, multiple ironies were in play on Robben Island. One was the fact that many inmates were better educated than their captors: a source of aggrieved resentment at first, but which helped build bridges. Another was that the government’s determination to keep these prisoners in a wind-blasted Atlantic hellhole had the effect of unifying them as never before. Rivalries between different groups – ANC versus PAC, elder statesmen versus youngsters who arrived in the seventies, Namibians versus the rest – softened in the face of a common enemy.
One fateful development stemmed from the apartheid state’s mania for classification, which led them to isolate the ‘Big Team’ of Mandela, Mbeki, Kathrada, Venkatrathnam and others in the leadership wing. Not only did this make it abundantly clear whom the authorities most feared and respected; it enabled communication along the line of solitary cells. Coordinated hunger strikes gradually produced a more acceptable regime. Even the hated lime quarry became a site for education.
Reading prison memoirs, I was struck above all by the passion for learning. It was reportedly Mandela who first appealed for ‘the atmosphere of a university [to] prevail here on the island’, and the trope was repeated in almost every account. From 1966 some prisoners were permitted to study via correspondence course for school certificates and degrees; others received informal tuition, or gave it. Govan Mbeki took part in a late-sixties literacy drive, teaching other prisoners to read in their own tongues or English. Some who arrived on the island with little more than basic primary education left it with degrees. In the words of Dikgang Moseneke, who took bachelor’s qualifications in English and Law, ‘many people have emerged to survive Robben Island largely because of their studying’.
It wasn’t just textbooks. As in any prison, sport became of obsessive interest. Mandela and others were permitted to run, and in the mid-1970s, clubs were set up for football, tennis and rugby. In the archives of the prison are hand-printed certificates issued by the ‘Robben Island Academy of Fine Arts’.
Mandela recalled concerts, chess and draughts tournaments, and cultivated a small patch of dusty ground as a vegetable garden. Nearly everyone piled into the makeshift cinema built during the 1970s to watch The Mask of Zorro, The King and I, Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s Cleopatra and, later, South African movies. Kathrada’s letters record that he became an unlikely devotee of The Cosby Show (despite earnest doubts about its representation of African American politics). According to the historian Fran Lisa Buntman, there were keenly fought ballroom-dancing competitions.
Many read as widely as possible. Neville Alexander, who had taken a PhD in the late nineteenth-century dramatist Gerhart Hauptmann before being sent to the island in 1964, relished the chance to broaden his already considerable horizons:
I read books in prison which I would never have had the time or the opportunity to read when I was outside: classics of European literature, Gibbon, Shakespeare, the authorised version of the Bible a few times, Dickens; also African history, international law, economics, languages …
Alexander’s reading list may have been unusually sophisticated, but he was by no means alone in his eagerness to use the prison library.
Before taking the ferry I’d managed to get hold of another former Robben Island prisoner on the phone: Eddie Daniels, a Cape Town native. Arrested in 1964 for sabotage, he was sentenced to fifteen years. Daniels was a contemporary of Kathrada and, despite being from a different political party, a friend of Mandela; he, too, had signed Sonny Venkatrathnam’s copy of Shakespeare.
His perspective was different again from theirs: as a kid from a working-class, mixed-race family (he detested the term ‘coloured’), he had left school after grade eight and been sent to get a job. He went to sea and worked for a time as a diamond miner, but his formal education had halted at the age of fourteen.
The island enabled Daniels to study, at first for high-school exams, then BA and BComm degrees. ‘To me prison was a blessing in disguise,’ he told me. ‘I met wonderful people – Mandela, Sisulu. And I got my education.’
His Unisa degree had indeed featured Shakespeare: he’d studied Romeo and Juliet and Macbeth. In Sonny’s book he’d signed his name next to a famous speech from the latter, ‘Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow, | Creeps in this petty pace from day to day …’
It seemed a powerful speech to choose, with its emphasis on entrapment and futility, I said. Did he feel it echoed his situation in prison?
He seemed surprised by the question: not especially. He had come across it as a set text, and simply thought the words were beautiful. ‘Reading Shakespeare, I loved i
t. To me it opened up a whole world. I just drank it in.’
So, like Kathrada, he didn’t feel there had been a special resonance between Shakespeare’s text and the struggle?
‘Not for me, no, I don’t think so. It was more that I had just never read anything like this before.’
One thing he did remember: the Section B prisoners had staged Julius Caesar, or part of it, in the yard. He was hazy on the details and couldn’t place the date or how long they’d rehearsed, but Neville Alexander had organised the performance. Daniels himself had played Mark Antony. He had strong memories of reciting ‘Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears …’
‘I was so emotional that at the end there were tears coming out of my eyes and they were saying, “Look, look, he’s crying.’” He chuckled softly. ‘But this is all a long time ago.’
He thought there might have been another production, of Waiting for Godot, but again the details were blurred. Drama performances had stopped soon afterwards. He’d love to help, but if Shakespeare had played other roles on Robben Island, he couldn’t recall.
When the group went into the Namibian wing, I lingered in the wind and sun with my notebook, thinking again about Sonny’s copy of Shakespeare and the scraps of text beside which thirty-three prisoners had inscribed their names.
Working from the transcription supplied by the Robben Island Museum, I had marked them up in my own complete works. In spare moments of my journey across South Africa I’d often returned to them, pondering the choices the prisoners had made.
It was conspicuous how many had gravitated towards the same plays – three signatures each beside passages from As You Like It, Julius Caesar, Hamlet and King Lear; two each for A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Twelfth Night, Richard II, Henry V and Macbeth. Five prisoner had selected sonnets (Neville Alexander had chosen two). Three signatories had selected quotations from, respectively, The Tempest, The Merchant of Venice and Antony and Cleopatra. Sonny Venkatrathnam had simply signed the book on its title page. One, Kadir Hassim, did the same on the first page of the introduction, with no apparent reference to Shakespeare’s words at all.
Worlds Elsewhere Page 44
