Worlds Elsewhere (51 page)

In the meantime, though, he responded more characteristically, as a reporter, picking up a bicycle and heading out on the road to see the effects of the Land Act for himself. What Plaatje witnessed in these journeys of July 1913, in the middle of the cold South African winter, became the essence of
Native Life in South Africa,
the book that would make his name.

That evening, back in my room in Melville, I read
Native Life
from cover to cover. It begins with a sentence that has since been etched deep into the history of apartheid: ‘Awaking on Friday morning, June 20, 1913, the South African native found himself, not actually a slave, but a pariah in the land of his birth.' The book goes on to cover in meticulous and unsparing detail how four and a half million black South Africans found themselves made ‘pariahs' by the Land Act.

Native Life in South Africa
also makes harrowing use of eyewitness material, retelling journeys Plaatje took through the length and breadth of South Africa, from his homeland in the north to far south in the Cape. One of its most distressing passages describes the moment Plaatje encountered twenty-four women who had taken part in protests against a law requiring them to carry passes proving they were on the payroll of a white employer – a foreshadowing of the Pass Laws imposed by the government from the 1910s onwards. ‘Tears rolled down our cheeks,' Plaatje wrote, ‘as we saw the cracks on their bare feet, the swellings and chronic chilblains, which made them look like sheep suffering from foot-and-mouth disease.'

Critics have drawn attention to the echoes in Plaatje's text of Daniel Defoe's
A Journal of the Plague Year
(1722) and William Cobbett's
Rural Rides
(1830) – likewise a journey around a people in the process of being dispossessed. But another writer seemed to me to underpin the movement and energy of
Native Life in South Africa,
at some points directly, at other times just beneath the surface: Shakespeare.

About halfway through the book, stepping back from the catastrophe convulsing his country, Plaatje permits a few shafts of autobiography to penetrate. His and Elizabeth's young son, named Johann Gutenberg after the inventor of moveable type, had been born in September 1912; he died in January 1914, at the age of just sixteen months. With spareness and gravity, Plaatje describes Johann's funeral procession winding around the streets of Kimberley, and is suddenly taken back to the image of a young family he had seen on the road. ‘What have our people done to these colonists,' he asks, ‘that is so utterly unforgivable, that this law should be passed?'

These thoughts on land and ownership, on need, on loss, on family, on fatherhood, take him to one play in particular:

The play is, of course,
King Lear.
Though most often interpreted as a harrowing psychological study, there is another side to Shakespeare's tragedy, less often explored by contemporary directors: its politics. For its earliest audiences the play contained cruel echoes of the Enclosure movement, which – like the Natives Land Act – saw entire populations dispersed or dispossessed. As the landowning Shakespeare well knew, Jacobean England was full of Lears and Poor Toms, masterless men forced to wander the countryside after being ejected from fields that were rightfully theirs.

Plaatje, so it seemed to me, drew on this older, deeper aspect of the play – figuring himself as a monarch who has been ejected from his own country, left to call for retribution against a bitterly unfair world. To demand justice increasingly seemed like a form of madness.

One afternoon I sat on a sofa in the middle of a private garden in the middle of Johannesburg, trying to keep out of the fierce sun high overhead. Rugs were spread across the lawn; all around me the trees cut blocks of dark shadow into the dusty grass. It had rained the night before: early spring rain, much-needed. The scent in the air was of dry concrete and damp earth. By the wall, a jacaranda tree was blossoming in a fizz of purple petals. Birds shrieked somewhere in the distance.

Around the garden men and women stood in pockets of two and three, chicly dressed, picking at finger food and frowning at their iPhones. A man nearby was having a vehement conversation with his neighbour about the prospects for the African art market. His mirrored shades sent scatters of light across the cushions.

‘We're next after India, heh? India is totally over. People are fucking
hungry
for this stuff.'

The neighbour was nodding intently.

‘India is
over,
man, I tell you. Over.'

I had wangled an invitation to a lunchtime reception at a Johannesburg arts festival on the basis that I was a journalist visiting town. These grounds were spurious: my attention was actually focused on the other end of the garden, where a group of men – nine or ten, all of them black, a mixture of ages from their early twenties through to fifties – huddled.

In a moment, they had turned to face us. One man stepped out, and began to speak in a low voice, his hands bunched by his sides like a boxer willing himself into the fight. His accent was strong, and it took me several seconds to place what he was saying:

It was perhaps Shakespeare's first truly great tragic speech, spoken by the Roman soldier Titus Andronicus in the third act of the early play named after him. The words are of desperation and incipient insanity,
at a moment in the action when – Titus's daughter having been raped and mutilated, his sons arrested, Titus's own hand cut off – it seems as if things cannot get worse. The play being
Titus Andronicus,
they do. This tragedy is sometimes interpreted as a rehearsal for
King Lear.

I glanced around. The crowd looked suitably dumbfounded. Even the man in mirrored shades had shut up.

After the performance, I made my way over. A small, bullet-shaped woman with long, reddish-dark hair was fussing the group back into the corner. Her name was Dorothy Ann Gould. An actor, she was something of a legend in South Africa. As well as maintaining a busy career in teaching, on television and stage, she ran a weekly workshop in the deprived inner-city neighbourhood of Hillbrow. Her weapon in this campaign was Shakespeare.

‘You liked it, heh? The
Titus
?' she said, shielding her eyes against the sun.

I said I had never seen anything like it.

She sniffed at the surroundings. ‘Not really our usual setting, but it's good experience. Plus it's a useful audience, all these arts folk. Good for the project, getting it known.'

The scheme had been running just over a year; it had begun as a drop-in centre for men and women (mostly men) who were homeless or struggling with addiction, or both. She'd suggested the idea of drama training, and the participants had eagerly agreed. Rehearsals were held weekly by Dorothy and her assistant Marcus Mabusela. The participants had chosen their own name: Johannesburg Awakening Minds, JAM for short. It sounded good; and it was time, they figured, that they had a little sweetness in their lives.

Gould was determined not to patronise them. ‘Right from the beginning, we started on Shakespeare. The first thing was “No longer mourn for me when I am dead”, Sonnet 71, you know. I took them through what Patsy Rodenburg, the voice coach at the Royal Shakespeare Company, did with me in Stratford.' She thrust a bundle of scripts decisively into a bag. ‘They loved it.'

Just nine people had come to their debut performance. But then some of the group had got gigs as film extras, and small fees; they started to build a reputation. They were trying to workup to something fully staged. She had her eye on
Hamlet
: they'd been rehearsing a group rendition of the Prince's ‘What a piece of work is a man!' speech.

I thought of its troubling, ragged early line (‘I have of late – but
wherefore I know not – lost all my mirth') and was struck that she'd focused on tragedies.
Titus
especially: it seemed an obscure choice.

She shook an accusatory finger at the city beyond. ‘Well,
they're
not shocked by Lavinia having her tongue cut up and her hands cut off, and being raped, if that's what you mean. In Johannesburg that's what happens every day. Every single phrase in that
Titus
speech means something to them. Yes, it develops their voice, it develops their breath production, it forces them to be still and powerful and discipline their bodies. But it's also because in real life they can't shout, “Why am I unemployed, why is there such poverty in South Africa?” Through
Titus,
they can. They can be in tears. It makes it OK to cry.'

She looked as if she was daring me to disbelieve her. ‘It's powerful stuff. They don't want
woozy
stuff. It wouldn't … make any sense.'

After we'd finished the interview, I helped carry her bag and some equipment back to the car. As I turned to go in, I heard the sound of an electric window winding down. Gould was leaning out, silhouetted against the glare of the city beyond.

‘Come see for yourself,' she bellowed as the wheels churned in the dirt. Behind her there was only red dust.

Before leaving Britain I'd arranged to visit Pretoria, forty miles north, to keep an appointment with an academic, Daniel Matjila, who taught in the African Languages department at the University of South Africa (Unisa). Matjila had a special interest in Solomon Plaatje and had recently co-edited a biography. He was also of Tswana heritage and fluent in the language. I hoped he would be able to give me some insight into how Plaatje had translated Shakespeare's words. I also hoped he could help me answer a deeper question, harder to fathom: why Plaatje had decided to translate Shakespeare at all.

The story seemed to begin in June 1914, when Plaatje was sent to London as part of that SANNC delegation. In between meetings with British civil-rights activists (who did their best to exploit the delegates for their own ends) and British civil servants (who worked tirelessly to ensure they would never meet anyone of influence) Plaatje mingled with the liberal intelligentsia of London. When the rest of the delegation hurried back to South Africa after Britain declared war on Germany that August – all but burying their campaign – Plaatje decided
to remain. In the two and a half years he ended up staying in Britain, he would address over three hundred public meetings up and down the country, educating Britons about the injustices of the Land Act, and trying to finish and find a publisher for
Native Life in South Africa.

It was around this time that he had come into contact with Daniel Jones, a young phonetics expert at University College London who was (among much else) George Bernard Shaw's inspiration for the character of Professor Higgins in
Pygmalion.
Jones was fascinated by African languages, and the two developed the idea of compiling a book of Setswana proverbs, capturing the spoken language in all its vividness, and also some kind of reader-cum-teaching-manual. Their collaborations soon bore fruit. A slim collaborative volume,
Sechuana Proverbs with Literal Translations and their European Equivalents,
was published, rapidly followed by Plaatje's own
A Sechuana Reader in International Phonetic Orthography.
It was also around this time that Plaatje met Israel Gollancz and made his short Setswana-language contribution to the
Book of Homage to Shakespeare.
All three books would come out in 1916 – plus, once funds had finally been raised to publish it, the first edition of
Native Life in South Africa.

Although the British celebrations marking the tercentenary of Shakespeare's death in April and May that year were muted, they were far from non-existent. Schools up and down the country put on events, and at the Drury Lane theatre in London there was a gala performance of
Julius Caesar
attended by King George V. It ended with a pageant featuring tableaux from the plays performed by a cast some 200 strong, including the veteran Ellen Terry as Portia. The evening was capped in splendidly patriotic – not to say metatheatrical – fashion when Frank Benson (another of Gollancz's contributors) was knighted by His Majesty with a prop sword, still in bloodied toga as Caesar.

Plaatje was swept up in the Shakespeare fever. He might have attended that performance, or seen excerpts from
Julius Caesar
in Stratford-upon-Avon. Ever alert to the political ramifications, he also addressed a meeting of Stratford's Brotherhood movement, where he was billed as a ‘well-known Shakespeare scholar'.

Concluding his essay in the
Book of Homage,
Plaatje had expressed his fervent hope that ‘with the maturity of African literature, now still in its infancy, writers and translators will consider the matter of giving to Africans the benefit of some at least of Shakespeare's works'. 1916 seems to have reminded him that there were few people so qualified
as himself, and no time like the present. He began work the following year, as soon as he was on the ship back to South Africa, putting the play he had so recently seen,
Julius Caesar,
into Setswana.