I thumbed through. Some selections were surprisingly light, given the context – both Kwede Mkalipi and Elias Motsoaledi had marked their names on the last page of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, near the famous epilogue spoken by Puck:
If we shadows have offended,
Think but this, and all is mended:
That you have but slumbered here,
While these visions did appear;
And this weak and idle theme,
No more yielding but a dream …
Might there be a hint of dreamy wish-fulfilment, of waking up to find the living nightmare of apartheid over? Perhaps they were simply attracted to Puck’s tripping, fleet-footed rhymes. Or maybe they were just filling an inviting blank space in a book full of dense print. (Mkalipi, given the opportunity to choose again, went for a different passage entirely.)
Other passages seem to have been singled out largely because they were famous. Govan Mbeki had selected the first page of Twelfth Night, most likely for Orsino’s ‘If music be the food of love’, while Joseph Vusani had marked his name and the date (2 January 1978) in neat copperplate, placing an asterisk next to Jaques’s ‘All the world’s a stage, | And all the men and women merely players’. A day later, the Botswanan activist and ANC member Michael Dingake had planted his own signature under the ‘precepts’ offered to Laertes by Polonius in Hamlet:
Give thy thoughts no tongue,
Nor any unproportioned thought his act.
Be thou familiar but by no means vulgar.
Those friends thou hast, and their adoption tried,
Grapple them to thy soul with hoops of steel …
‘To thine own self be true,’ Polonius concludes, a piece of advice that was corny even when Shakespeare wrote it. Had it attracted Dingake because it seemed comfortingly familiar, or because being imprisoned for the colour of your skin made the idea of being ‘true’ seem passionately important? I thought of what Eddie Daniels had said: he just liked the sound of the words. Maybe this was the case here too.
Not all the inscriptions seemed circumstantial. I was interested by the prisoners who had chosen sonnets, perhaps because they were more rigidly self-contained (the word stanza literally means ‘room’), maybe also because the narrative ‘I’ of each poem – though slippery and unreliable over the course of 154 sonnets – seems more directly applicable to a solitary reader in a solitary cell:
Since brass, nor stone, nor earth, nor boundless sea,
But sad mortality o’ersways their power,
How with this rage shall beauty hold a plea,
Whose action is no stronger than a flower?
O how shall summer’s honey breath hold out
Against the wrackful siege of battering days
When rocks impregnable are not so stout,
Nor gates of steel so strong, but time decays?
O fearful meditation! Where, alack,
Shall time’s best jewel from time’s chest lie hid?
Or what strong hand can hold his swift foot back,
Or who his spoil of beauty can forbid?
O none, unless this miracle have might:
That in black ink my love may still shine bright.
Sonnet 65 had been one of Neville Alexander’s choices. It struck me as a potent choice, summoning both the island prison (‘sea’, ‘battering days’, ‘rocks impregnable’, ‘gates of steel’) and reiterating the sonnets’ great obsession, the erosive workings of ‘time’. Time was also the subject of Alexander’s first selection, Sonnet 60 (‘Like as the waves make to the pebbled shore, | So do our minutes hasten towards their end’), one of the few poems that plays knowingly with its position in the sequence that make up the quarto of 1609.
The theme seemed to make sense. Sentenced to ten years during the island’s most brutal first period, Alexander and other prisoners had plentiful opportunity to ponder the unremitting power of time, particularly as wrist watches and other time pieces were banned. Mandela himself had written in Long Walk to Freedom, his autobiography, how ‘time slows down in prison; the days seem endless …’ It also reminded me of Solomon Plaatje’s translations; perhaps Shakespeare was a way of keeping loneliness at bay.
But there was an irony here, too, of which Alexander must have been aware: that what Feste in Twelfth Night nicely calls the ‘whirligig of time’ also brought in its revenges. Nothing would outlast time – not apartheid, not the prison in which he marked up these words, not himself. After years of ill-health Alexander died in 2012, just after Sonny Venkatrathnam’s book went on display in London. Kathrada may have been right that his colleague had been dubious about the hype surrounding the Robben Island Bible; but Alexander had clearly thought long and wisely about Shakespeare. I dearly wished I could have asked him.
By now our group was in the leadership section, a long corridor with a white ceiling and surgical-green walls. There were strip lights above, identical wooden outer doors with scuffed barred gates behind, bars on windows inner and outer. A single metal light switch and alarm bell were next to each. A crush had formed outside cell 5, Mandela’s for eighteen years; silently we jockeyed to see Mandela’s blankets, bedroll, stool, slops bucket, meal tin. Was I being too suspicious, wondering if they were Mandela’s? When I got to the front, the cell looked bare and monkish, unrecognisable from the photographs I had seen, when it had been crowded with books and prints.
Similar complexities surrounded the question of Mandela’s own engagement with Shakespeare, on which the real fame of the Robben Island Bible hung. Aside from scattered references in his correspondence and later speeches – written, of course, by professionals – the only hint of Shakespeare to make it into Long Walk to Freedom was Mandela’s account of the night before sentencing at Rivonia. Expecting to hear he would be executed, he claimed to have recalled ‘Be absolute for death’, Duke Vincentio’s stoical words to the imprisoned Claudio in Measure for Measure, a speech that advises the condemned man to regard life as ‘a thing | That none but fools would keep’.
It was a neat reference – if anything, I thought, too neat. Claudio is also facing legal but wrongful execution; he, too, will eventually be saved. Though Long Walk to Freedom was begun on the island, it was heavily edited and tidied up for publication many years later. Like much else about Mandela, it is not always what it appears to be.
There were also ambiguities about his selection from Julius Caesar in Venkatrathnam’s book, the lines beginning ‘Cowards die many times before their deaths’. On the face of it this was a straightforward assertion of bravery (‘death … will come when it will come’), but it was also something more shadowy, given that the words are spoken by a leader about to be assassinated. Was Mandela making subtle reference to the real dangers he faced, or was this a meditation on the fragile nature of leadership? Both? It was a fine conundrum.
But perhaps this was the lesson to draw from Sonny’s book and its inscriptions. The South African critic David Schalkwyk has called the book a ‘palimpsest’ because of its openness to interpretation, its accreted layers of meanings (and the meanings others have placed on it). This is surely right: there is no single code. There is no right or wrong way to interpret it, much as there is no right or wrong way of interpreting Shakespeare’s text itself, or for that matter the history of Robben Island.
Some of the prisoners’ signatures were undeniably casual, done on the spur of the moment as a favour to a departing cellmate. A stray line or thought appealed, or illuminated a distant memory. A favourite passage already bagged, a hurried riffling through for other options, a quick signature scribbled. Others reflected a deeper and more involved engagement with Shakespeare, whether encountered in school or here on the island. Some choices were escapist, fantastical; others seemed to catch the dreary realities of prison life. Two prisoners, Justice Mpanza and Mohamed Essop, both chose the mournful final words of Edgar in King Lear, ‘The weight of this sad time we must obey, | Speak what we feel, not what we ought to say’.
In
some cases, the fact that these words were written by Shakespeare must have been largely irrelevant – the book was simply a storehouse of commonplace wisdoms, as it has been for generations of readers. On other occasions, as perhaps for Venkatrathnam himself, the fact that they were composed by the greatest poet and playwright in history was the only thing about them that mattered. Every prisoner had his reasons, whether in the moment or deeply felt; perhaps, even, the two were inextricable.
As we were hustled towards the exit, our tour complete (‘Same gift shop back on the mainland, madam,’ a staff member announced), I thought about two other passages from the book. Walter Sisulu had selected a speech from The Merchant of Venice, the only prisoner to choose anything from that play. The words were Shylock’s, and here at least the sentiments were not hard to map on to the experience of apartheid South Africa:
Signor Antonio, many a time and oft
In the Rialto you have rated me
About my money and my usances.
Still have I borne it with a patient shrug,
For suff’rance is the badge of all our tribe.
You call me misbeliever, cut-throat, dog,
And spit upon my Jewish gaberdine,
And all for use of that which is mine own.
I wondered whether Sisulu had known that Solomon Plaatje, his great predecessor in the ANC, had translated the play, and scribbled a version of a different but equally famous speech (‘Hath not a Jew eyes …?’) in his notebook. Perhaps it didn’t matter. The resonances were plain to see.
The thought brought me back to one of the very first signatures in the book, left by the Indian Congress member Billy Nair on 14 December 1977. It marked a short speech in act one, scene two of The Tempest, spoken by Caliban. Had Nair, who died in 2008, known the words already, or read them for the first time on the island that Christmas?
This island’s mine, by Sycorax my mother,
Which thou tak’st from me. When thou cam’st first,
Thou strok’st me and made much of me, wouldst give me
Water with berries in’t, and teach me how
To name the bigger light, and how the less,
That burn by day and night; and then I loved thee,
And showed thee all the qualities o’th’ isle,
The fresh springs, brine-pits, barren place and fertile—
Cursed be I that did so!
This island’s mine … Cursed be that I did so … The words leapt off the page, not simply for their incantation of this particular ‘isle’, but for the near-inexpressible anguish that lay beneath them. A little rocky piece of land, stolen from its rightful owners and then turned into a prison; a place of inexpressible beauty and also of inexpressible torments. Deeper still, the bewilderment and stunned humiliation of betrayal.
As I took my seat on the boat, a sentence spoken by Caliban later in the scene came to mind: ‘You taught me language, and my profit on’t | Is I know how to curse.’
Back on the mainland, I checked for news of Mandela: still no news. I wondered if he’d slip away while I was in South Africa, and offer my story a gravid, Lear-like conclusion: old ruler dies, kingdom stands (or falls). Sad stories of the death of kings, et cetera.
Thankfully, though, he was still hanging on, and rumours were that he’d improved. That section in Julius Caesar he’d highlighted should have been issued by the ANC press office, attention all media: ‘death, a necessary end, | Will come when it will come.’ Or will come, I thought cynically, when the ANC decides it will come.
Speaking of the ANC, I had failed to get clarification on whether the party really did have a view about the significance or otherwise of the Robben Island Bible. Repeated petitions to their national spokesman came to nothing. I supposed that was my answer. There was a rumour that the book, after returning from Washington, would soon be off again – this time to Glasgow, for an exhibition celebrating the 2014 Commonwealth Games.
I was waiting for a final appointment. Back in England, an academic contact who was doing research into South African education emailed me details of something called the Shakespeare Schools Festival South Africa. It had been founded by an energetic and enthusiastic high-school teacher from Cape Town called Kseniya Filinova-Bruton. Set up in 2011, the SSF SA had expanded rapidly into a nationwide festival with outposts in four of the country’s nine provinces. The first year, 20 students had participated; 850 were scheduled for this year. While most of the South African theatre I’d encountered was struggling to find its way – no funding, declining audiences, a loss of purpose following the end of the struggle – here was something that seemed to be genuinely alive and kicking.
Filinova-Bruton and I had met briefly at an SSF SA event back in Johannesburg; she was ardent and talkative, with the no-nonsense manner of a big-firm lawyer and dark blonde hair cut in a smartly tailored bob. She suggested we meet up again here in her home town. She’d be happy to take me out to the township of Khayelitsha, where one of the keenest participants in the SSF SA programme, Chris Hani Secondary School, was based.
As we drove east out of the city, ducking behind Table Mountain and on to the broad expanse of the Cape Flats, Filinova-Bruton explained how the project had started. She was Russian, born in St Petersburg to parents who were actors; she emigrated to South Africa in her twenties and began teaching. She set up a drama society before hearing about the British Shakespeare Schools Festival, which had been running since 2000. Surprised to discover that South Africa had no equivalent, she resolved to set one up. Even she seemed astonished by how fast it had grown.
‘I had no idea it would take off,’ she said in rapid-fire English, her newly acquired South African accent not entirely obscuring the occasional hint of Slavic. ‘It was just one school, one class of my boys, me on my kitchen table with all these spreadsheets and scripts.’ She pointed at the programme in my lap, which listed their numerous activities. ‘Now look where we are!’
It remained a cottage industry; this year’s festival had been done on R100,000, approximately £6,000. Filinova-Bruton was still teaching full-time. Schools paid a registration fee of R550 (£30), which gave teachers tuition in directing and a half-day workshop for the class, plus cut-down scripts and resources. Each team was invited to perform in a professional venue. She was proud that many less well-off schools had signed up; even if money had to be begged or borrowed, no one should be turned away. It was the first time many had collaborated, or even met: private schools next to government schools, kids from prosperous suburbs performing alongside kids from the townships.
‘It’s a great leveller. You see them when they arrive in the morning, they’re nervous, they don’t know each other, but by the end of the day, it’s like one big happy family, it really is.’
After three weeks in South Africa I had grown doubtful about such claims on the rainbow nation. But Filinova-Bruton’s optimism was hard to resist. I kept my doubts to myself.
Why had she chosen Shakespeare? Why not Athol Fugard – or, for that matter, Chekhov?
We swerved past a small fleet of minibus taxis trailing diesel fumes and spray.
‘He wrote about everything, and for everyone. Everyone can approach him. I really believe that. I think that’s a good thing to have in South Africa right now.’
We passed through the garden suburbs of Pinelands and Rondebosch towards the run-down outpost of Athlone, which under the Group Areas Act became a dumping ground – along with most of the Cape Flats – for communities the apartheid state wanted to forget. Tidy villas and gated, tree-lined estates gave way to industrial estates and business parks, then sandy scrub and trees crouching beneath the wind. In the wing mirrors, impossible to escape, was the squat shadow of Table Mountain, its top bruising a heavy, lead-grey sky.
Gradually the houses reappeared, progressively more dilapidated: at first boxy bungalows and apartment blocks that looked like prison accommodation, then, past the airport, the townships – hectic collages of tin and corrugated steel, tumble
down wooden shacks painted yellow and salmon and sea-green against the sandy grey of the earth. Some were little larger than garden sheds with bright-blue portable toilets outside.
People reappeared: women, mainly, wearing thick fleeces and hats and carrying shopping bags, or sitting in plastic garden chairs in front of stalls selling live chickens. A few streets on, across the lane that divided two shacks, someone had hung their washing out to dry: six identical blue shirts and two Babygros, hanging within inches of a tangle of power cables.
If one were in search of an essay on how much still needed to be done in South Africa, I thought, one could do worse than drive for twenty minutes out of Cape Town.
Located on Govan Mbeki Road and named for another ANC martyr, Chris Hani Secondary School, recently rebuilt, was in a better state than I’d feared – three cheerful storeys of orange brick lording it over the shipping containers converted into shops and dwellings that surrounded it. Its 1,370 pupils were some of the most active at music and drama in the Western Cape. In the impoverished and almost entirely black township of Khayelitsha, where over half the population was living in what was eupehmistically called ‘informal’ accommodation, it was an unlikely and cheering beacon of success.
I was bustled inside the principal’s office and shown the school’s precious trophy haul: a plaque from the Safe School Project, citations from the Western Cape education department. In a cabinet was a yellow certificate from the inaugural SSF SA festival. Next to an image of Shakespeare’s head were words from Twelfth Night: ‘be not afraid of greatness.’ In the play they were a warning not to get above one’s station – in a snobbish practical joke the steward Malvolio discovers them in a forged letter he thinks is from Olivia, his mistress. Here they had a braver ring. Anything is possible, they said. Wilton Mkwayi had marked exactly the same lines in Sonny Venkatrathnam’s copy of Shakespeare.
Worlds Elsewhere Page 45
