Worlds Elsewhere (54 page)

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:

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:

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':

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 wheel 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.'

By now we were on the outskirts of town, a road fringed with gum trees, their ragged outlines wavering in the heat. The light was blinding. Silhouettes tramped past, women mainly, carrying heavy bags or balancing bundles on their heads. A little group of boys in shorts lingered in front of a corner supermarket, sheltering under the shade of an umbrella. The outlines of everything were razor-sharp; the land looked dry enough to combust.

We came through the cemetery gates, raising a rough cloud of grey dust. Mokae parked the car and we stepped out: a flat expanse of scrub-grass and gravel, pockmarked with stubby cypresses and cacti.

Here the graves were fitfully spaced, some little more than piles of broken stone, cluttered with rubbish. The wind sent an empty Coke bottle and a torn ice-cream wrapper skittering along the path. Other than the crunch of our shoes on the gravel, the only noise was the faint sighing of traffic on the highway.

Mokae pointed to a thin obelisk, a little distance from the others. I
recognised it from a photograph of a visit by Mandela, years before: the monument at Plaatje's grave, raised in 1935, three years after his death. It looked painfully small.

I read out the inscription: ‘To the Sacred Memory of Solomon Tshekisho Plaatje, Journalist, Author, Temperance Organiser, Social Worker and founder of the Brotherhood Movement of SA.' Below was a small note in Setswana,
I Khutse Morolong: Modiredi Wa Afrika.
Mokae translated: ‘Rest in peace, Morolong, Servant of Africa.'

I bent down and lifted a wreath lying upside-down a few feet away. The fine dust stuck to my hands.

Mokae leaned down beside me. He was running his fingers along the script.

‘See? They got the date wrong.'

I looked more closely: it was true. Plaatje had died on 19 June 1932; this said 18 July. Whoever carved the memorial got mixed up, and no one had bothered to correct it.

Perhaps things weren't as grim as they looked. In recent years the powers that be had woken up to the power of Solomon Plaatje. There was now a Sol Plaatje institute at Rhodes University in Grahamstown, and several literary awards in his name. Most momentously, Kimberley was about to get a university, its first – also the first South African university of the post-apartheid era. The aim was to attract students from poor, non-urban backgrounds who might not otherwise be able to attend. Zuma had announced that it, too, would be named after Sol Plaatje.

Plaatje's Shakespeare had not entirely evaporated either.
Diphosho-phosho
was still awaiting a debut performance, as far as I could find out, but in 2001 a Johannesburg-born theatre director, Yaël Farber, had placed sections of his
Julius Caesar
into a reimagining of the play called
SeZaR.
Staged during a time when some were debating whether Shakespeare should be removed from the South African curriculum altogether – that same year, the advisory board for the Gauteng education department had decreed
Julius Caesar
‘sexist' and
Lear
‘full of violence and despair', as well as recommending that Plaatje's own
Mhudi
should be dropped –
SeZaR
was a bold assertion that Shakespeare was an unnegotiable part of South African history.

Nor was this was the only production of
Julius Caesar
to re-engage in the linguistic battles fought so fervently by Plaatje. Back in Johannesburg, talking to an academic at Wits University, I discovered that a student company had recently been working on their own version of the text along remarkably similar lines. It had begun as a kind of research workshop, but had mutated into a semi-professional performance touring schools and townships. They were playing a fringe space. Apart from that, all I really knew was the show's name, which gave little enough away:
The Julius Caesar Project.

As I sat there in the auditorium on a Sunday afternoon, there didn't seem anything especially unusual about the performance, at least at first. Eight cast members came silently on, four women and four men, a mix of ethnicities, dressed in identikit white vests and khaki combat fatigues. The set was sparse to the point of non-existence: three wood-framed panels suspended in the air, likewise khaki, mottled with what looked dubiously like blood.

The students were good, and conjured the scene almost instantly. A Roman street; wise-cracking carpenters and cobblers; two tribunes, nervily trying to keep a lid on things. Everyone on stage was multitasking: crossing genders, playing senators, commoners, conspirators.

The scene changed. Cassius – a thin, urgent boy, black, with sharp, precise movements – began to put pressure on Brutus, a female student with dark blonde hair and a faint Afrikaans accent. Brutus confessed his/her doubts to Portia, another woman. The crowd muttered, in a combination of Shakespeare's English and what sounded like isiXhosa. Death was in the air.

But during the meeting of the conspirators to plot the assassination, things began to go awry. Someone else seemed now to be playing Cassius, and Brutus had transmogrified into Casca; or was it the other way around? Muddled after ten days on the move, I tried to remember the plot: surely Antony should have come on by now?

By now we were back with the crowd of plebeians, this time turning on the poet Cinna – hounded to death for unluckily having the same name as one of the conspirators. Wasn't that meant to happen after Caesar was killed? Come to think of it, what had happened to the assassination scene? Caesar appeared to have gone awol.