Worlds Elsewhere (49 page)

Once the television light had been extinguished, I introduced myself and explained my project. Venkatrathnam was warm and courteous and listened to my questions with quiet concentration. Sitting on a bench near the gift shop, we talked briefly about his experiences on Robben Island and his battles with the prison authorities to acquire reading materials and education. But he was plainly exhausted: it had been a long flight, he had been doing interviews back to back. The museum staff were hovering. He apologised profusely; he wasn't as young as he was.

‘You're coming to South Africa?' he asked. That was the plan, I replied.

‘Sorry we didn't get much time. I'm in Durban. Come and see me. We can talk some more. I'll show you the book.'

In truth, another book was on my mind that summer. I'd come across it before departing for India. It was a compendium of tributes to Shakespeare, compiled by the former chairman of the Shakespeare Association in Britain, Israel Gollancz. Its title was
A Book of Homage to Shakespeare.
Other than the fact that the great Bengali writer Rabindranath Tagore had contributed, all I really knew about it was that it had been published in 1916 in honour of the 300th anniversary of Shakespeare's death, and that – 1916 being the depths of the first
world war – German and Austrian writers had not been invited to join the party. On a slow afternoon I snuck off work and cycled down to Gollancz's alma mater, King's College London, to take a look.

Nearly 600 pages long and three inches thick, dauntingly hefty in the hand, the
Book of Homage
was less a book than a monument. It was expensively bound in cream and gold, and gorgeously printed on thick, luxurious paper. Physically at least, it was considerably more impressive than the Robben Island Bible. On the contents page I counted 165 tributes in over twenty languages, from nations including the United States, France, Greece, Belgium, Denmark, China, Russia, Persia, Japan and Armenia. Apparently I was far from the first to wonder about how Shakespeare's work had been received and understood in other countries and cultures. In fact I was nearly a century late.

Team GB was well represented – Thomas Hardy, John Galsworthy and Rudyard Kipling had contributed, backed by a veritable squad of dons: A. C. Bradley, E. K. Chambers, W. W. Greg, A. W. Pollard, their initials giving them the pleasing appearance of a batting order in an Edwardian cricket team. A platoon of diplomats were also present (the Spanish ambassador writing ‘To Shakespeare, from a Spaniard'; His Majesty's man in Rome offering an Italian ‘Thought'), alongside various lords spiritual and temporal, and several leading thesps.

But the
Book of Homage
was not, as I had expected, a tub-thumping piece of patriotism in honour of the British Bard. Colonies and former colonies such as India and Canada were present, but so too were countries far beyond the scope of the Empire. Scholarly lectures mingled promiscuously with rococo panegyrics, in a babel of different languages. The Egyptian neoclassicist Muhammad Hafiz Ibrahim volunteered an Arabic poem pointedly reminding everyone of the cultural politics behind celebrating a white, western writer (‘if justice were done to the Oriental authors, there would be feasts in their honour in both East and West', as the English summary put it). Gollancz's decision to present non-English contributions in their original form had the effect of making this supposedly universal, transcendent being called ‘Shakespeare' (or
, or
) seem stranger and more thrillingly unusual than his readers can ever have expected.

One name on the contents page snagged my eye – or, rather, one absence of a name. The essay was entitled ‘William Tsikinya-Chaka'; its author was simply described as ‘A South African'. It was the only
piece from sub-Saharan Africa. It was also the only piece in the book to be anonymous.

I read it, and was immediately taken. In contrast to the elephantine braggartism on display elsewhere, this South African essay was crisp and concise, a masterpiece of cool wit. Just four pages long – a main text in the southern African language Setswana with an English translation alongside – it related the story of how its author had first encountered Shakespeare, and been remade by him.

The writer told of growing up in the remote mining town of Kimberley in the Northern Cape, and of seeing a performance of
Hamlet
in the mid-1890s, when he was eighteen. Impressed, he acquired a copy of the complete works, and read
The Merchant of Venice
from beginning to end, marvelling at its realism and dramatic force, and the vigour of Shakespeare's language.

But it was while reading
Cymbeline,
with its complex and fraught journeys of discovery and near-loss, that something more momentous happened: the author met ‘the girl who afterwards became my wife'. Shakespeare was not merely present at this burgeoning romance – the poet's language made it possible:

‘It may be depended upon,' he added slyly, ‘that we both read
Romeo and Juliet.'

It was the essay's homespun clarity, its lack of idolatry, that I found appealing. Whereas so many of Gollancz's contributors offered prolix generalisations about the Bard's ineffable appeal, this nameless, Setswana-speaking South African was attempting to work out what Shakespeare might mean in the here and now. Here and
then,
in the South Africa of 1916.

His homage seemed all the more meaningful because it suggested equivalence. More than equivalence: equality. Shakespeare was a fine storyteller, the writer suggested; but then so too were his own people, the Tswana. It was possible that Shakespeare's plays and Setswana
stories shared similar folkloric origins. The essay's title, ‘William Tsikinya-Chaka', was a playful free translation of the poet's name, meaning ‘William Shake-the-Sword'.

That is not to say the essay avoided politics. In fact the closer one looked, the more loaded those politics seemed. It was far from accidental that the ‘language of educated people' in South Africa at the time was English: it had been imposed by the British administration in what was then the Cape Colony. As in India, educationalists who had brought English to Africa also brought Shakespeare; courtesy of mission schools, his plays had been part of the colonial education system almost from the beginning.

But the way the writer described Shakespeare wasn't, as I had encountered in so many Indian accounts, as a tool of colonial oppression. He was a bridge of translation, of connection. Shakespeare was the writer who enabled two young people – one Tswana, the other Xhosa – to romance each other in the words of immortal lovers, just as his works enabled communication between European cultures and those of Africa.

One issue haunted the essay: that of race. Marrying a woman from a different language and culture, the author wrote, had been challenging enough to their respective families; but it was as nothing to the way white people had become accustomed to regard blacks. He described going to see a screening of a film that depicted the crucifixion of Jesus:

I checked up: the second film referred to was almost certainly D. W. Griffith's silent epic,
The Birth of a Nation,
which even in its day, 1915, caused uproar for casting white actors in blackface and lionising the Ku Klux Klan. It was against this ‘gorgeous' entertainment that Shakespeare's plays stood as potent rebuke: ‘nobility and valour, like depravity and cowardice, are not the monopoly of any colour'. This was one of the earliest accounts I'd discovered to argue that Shakespeare
was colour-blind; all the more striking if – as seemed likely – the writer himself was black.

That evening I cycled back from the library, my brain busy with questions. Who on earth was this anonymous ‘South African'? And why was he the only sub-Saharan African who contributed to Gollancz's book? One of his final lines on Shakespeare kept ringing around my head: ‘We of the present age have not yet equalled his acumen.' Given what would happen to South Africa in the decades after 1916, they struck a bleak and baleful note.

LYING AWAKE ON MY SECOND NIGHT IN JOHANNESBURG,
I reflected that there was one stubborn problem with my scheme to research Shakespeare in this part of the world: Johannesburg itself.

I'd visited South Africa once before as a student, a few years after the optimism of the 1994 elections, the first in which all black South Africans could vote, and been shocked by what appeared to be a society still in a state of war. Arriving in the otherwise picturesque town of Plettenberg Bay in the Western Cape, all I'd seen was razor wire and electric fences, erected (I was told) by security-obsessed Jo'burgers who'd retired there. The Afrikaner landlady I'd been billeted with spent most of breakfast complaining – in full hearing of the live-in black maid – about the price of domestic help. This democracy business was all very well, she said, her voice rising querulously, but
what
did I think about
that
?

Fourteen years later, if the razor wire and electric fences were any indication, things seemed to have got worse. Melville, the area where I was staying, was an upmarket, slightly boho neighbourhood only a couple of miles from the centre of Johannesburg. But even Melville appeared to lead a double life as an open prison: fences with spikes, electric gates, guard huts, prowling utility vehicles emblazoned with fearsome names (24/7 Security, Stallion Security, SOS Protec, Night Guard). The 86 per cent of Johannesburg's population who were black or mixed-race seemed to spend most of their time guarding the 14 per cent who were white.

I CAN MAKE IT TO THE FENCE IN
2.8
SECONDS,
read a sign down the street, next to a silhouette of a German Shepherd.
CAN YOU?

When I'd arrived, I'd asked where would be safe to walk – I was
keen to stretch my legs from the flight and see the
koppies,
the stone outcrops for which Johannesburg was celebrated.

I was met with blank looks. Walk? Up there? On my own?

‘Maybe during the day, with a guide,' said the owner of the guesthouse. ‘Maybe.
Buuut
early evening …' He whistled through his teeth.

How about the city centre? Was it safe to walk there?