Worlds Elsewhere (53 page)

How had he found the sessions?

‘It feels great, reading the pieces of Shakespeare. Dorothy is introducing us into Shakespeare. I learned a little Shakespeare in high school, but I didn't understand a lot. Here it is different.'

Was it hard, adjusting to the language? He scratched a scar above his nose. ‘I can say it's all in the mind. Even though the words are difficult,
bombastic words, you have to work on them with a dictionary.' He smiled. ‘It's good, man! It's inspiring. If you are angry and you perform the piece, it helps you get it out of the way.'

He clapped me on the back. ‘Anything is possible, man, you know? You have to believe and trust!'

Afterwards, we sat in rows as another actor stood, performing Titus's soliloquy once again. As he reached the final lines his body shook, breath shuddering in and out of his chest like a swimmer fighting for air:

As he finished, even the roar of the city seemed to fall quiet.

TWO DAYS LATER, I WAS IN KIMBERLEY.
An hour's flight south-west of Johannesburg over the barren, khaki-coloured stretches of the Highveld, it had seen better days. The epicentre of the nineteenth-century diamond industry and the first city in the southern hemisphere to install electric light, Kimberley now looked gaunt and dusty, as if the twenty-first century had given it the cold shoulder. The centre was filled with low cinderblock buildings from the 1960s and 1970s, a few grand Victorian facades the only hint of its illustrious past. Even the palm trees looked exhausted.
KIMBERLEY: THE CITY THAT SPARKLES!
read a sign. Not today it didn't.

I scuffed up and down the main road, dodging the huge mining trucks that lumbered and groaned through. My guidebook had devoted only a couple of pages to Kimberley, focusing on the former De Beers mine, now unpoetically known as the Big Hole: a yawning, seventeen-hectare gash in the townscape that, from the plane, made it look as though Kimberley had been hit by a meteor. The Big Hole
seemed all too symbolic of what would happen when the diamonds finally ran out.

Almost nothing from Plaatje's time here had survived, I'd been warned: the mixed area of town where he'd lived had been razed during the apartheid era, and the cityscape was almost unrecognisable. But there was a museum at 32 Angel Street, the house where he'd lived for the last decade of his life. Since 1992 it had been a national monument.

By 11 a.m., the sky looked like toughened glass, the sun an angry white glare. Attempting to keep to the shadows, I walked in the dust of the road past battered, tin-roofed houses fringed by high fences and straggling shrubs.

Number 32 was between a playground and a pawnshop. It wasn't much more than a shack: two barred windows facing the road, brick facade, a verandah and a corrugated-iron roof. The bell was broken, so I banged on the gate.
SOL PLAATJE MUSEUM AND LIBRARY
read the sign, above a terse note that viewing was by appointment only.

Inside, 32 Angel Street was, if possible, even more dispiriting. A largeish central room had been lined with bookshelves and turned into a small library, with a melamine table in the centre and a scattering of chairs. A sizeable crack ran down one wall. Despite two strip lights buzzing noisily above, it was dark and smelt strongly of damp. Above the desk was a painting of Plaatje, in dark suit and wing collar, clutching a sheaf of books. Gingerly, I lifted open the visitors' book. I was the only visitor so far that month.

Perhaps I shouldn't have been surprised by the state of the house. It was simply the last pausing place in a remorselessly peripatetic life. Though Plaatje made his way back from England in 1917, once
Native Life in South Africa
was safely in print, he only stayed another two years before he was off again – at first back to England, on a second SANNC deputation and another round of speaking tours, then to Canada and the United States.

It dawned on me that perhaps another reason he had translated Shakespeare, often at sea, was as a way of evading loneliness. Shakespeare was someone knowable, a companion on all those ocean voyages, when his wife and children were thousands of miles away and the cause of black South Africans looked as impossibly remote as ever. Maybe it wasn't pure happenstance that he'd been drawn to
The Comedy of Errors.
Themes that seemed so strong when I'd seen the play in London – madness, separation anxiety – must have had tangible
force for a man who was on the move for the best part of fifteen years.

It didn't help that he was permanently broke. In August 1923, stranded in London and lacking the money to pay his passage home, Plaatje had been forced to appear in a stage production supporting a film about Africa called
The Cradle of the World.
There were two photographs in the front room at 32 Angel Street: one a group shot of seven performers clad in leopardskins standing stiffly behind pot plants; the other of Plaatje himself, sporting a necklace and a feather hat that looked as though it had been dug out of a jumble sale. Though Plaatje was characteristically chipper, writing to a friend that ‘I learnt a lot during the month', it must have been a humiliation.

By the time he made it back to South Africa in November 1923, having completed his version of
Othello
on the voyage, the political situation in South Africa had changed beyond all recognition. Despite the SANNC's attempts to appeal directly to Britain, the Union government made it abundantly clear that it had no intention of letting its erstwhile colonial masters meddle in South Africa's affairs. Earlier that year, the Native Urban Areas Act had come into force, clamping down on black immigration into cities and laying the groundwork for racial segregation. The SANNC had been reborn as the African National Congress, but in all other respects it was in disarray, hobbled by lack of funds, outflanked by new, more militant organisations. The older and more moderate generation of activists began to lose their influence. Plaatje in particular felt he was being sidelined.

Private tragedies echoed public ones. Plaatje had been in the US in July 1921 when he received news about his beloved daughter Olive; she had been taken ill during a train journey back from Natal with the after-effects of rheumatic fever. Prevented from entering a whites-only waiting room, or resting on the whites-only seats, she had died on the platform.

Plaatje himself had been ill for many years with a chronic heart problem. In June 1932, during yet another frantic journey from Kimberley to Johannesburg to push for the publication of yet another book, this time of Bantu folk tales, he caught influenza. On 17 June, determined to keep an appointment with the printers, he collapsed on the way back. Two days later, at the age of fifty-five, he, too, was dead.

The Shakespeare translation project all but died with him. According to his biographer Brian Willan, only a few scraps of
Romeo and Juliet
survived in manuscript – a couple of pages at most, dug out decades later from boxes of his papers. Of
Much Ado About Nothing
and
Othello
there was now no sign whatsoever. Whatever Plaatje's true thoughts on Shakespeare's study of a black man striving to find his place in white society, it was likely that no one would ever know them.

Julius Caesar
was eventually published, though in conditions that made a mockery of Plaatje's struggles for his culture. In 1937, five years after his death, a white professor at the university of Cape Town, Gérard Lestrade, was handed the manuscript of
Dintshontsho tsa bo-Juliuse Kesara
(‘The Death of Julius Caesar'). He edited with zeal, abandoning Plaatje's carefully constructed phonetic system and taking it upon himself to ‘correct' the text. Lestrade's introduction argued that Plaatje

Even disregarding the supercilious dismissal of Plaatje's expertise and intentions – adding his ‘own words' was surely the point – one didn't have to look far to see another motive behind Lestrade's attack. A black man was surely incapable of translating the greatest white writer there was.

Plaatje's translation of
The Merchant of Venice
had likewise disappeared, but on a shelf at the museum I found an earlier and fuller edition of
Native Life
than the one I'd been using. At the top of the same chapter in which he'd quoted
King Lear,
Plaatje had originally placed lines from
Merchant,
in English and lightly adapted:

The speech is Shylock's, an anguished appeal for tolerance to the Christians of Venice. For ‘Jew' Plaatje had written ‘Kaffir', a deeply offensive term for a black South African; for ‘Christian', ‘Afrikander', a variant spelling of ‘Afrikaner'. In the play, as in the South Africa of his day, the words fell on deaf ears.

At Plaatje's death in June 1932, Kimberley turned out to mourn him. Zaccheus Richard Mahabane, the president general of the ANC, conducted the service. Newspapers across South Africa lamented the passing of a great scholar and statesman. The London
Times
carried a brief but respectful obituary, declaring him ‘a prominent figure in the South African Native Congress'. Later, I searched the
Times
archive: despite Plaatje's extensive connections with Britain, this was the only time Britain's newspaper of record had thought to acknowledge his existence. Clearly it was safer to praise a black South African activist while burying him.

But then British journalists weren't the only ones unsure of Plaatje's place in history. Hearing of his Shakespeare translation project, Clement Doke, a pioneering South African linguist, wondered whether ‘other types of literature are not at present much more urgently needed in Setswana than this'. The critic and playwright Stephen Black told a friend that he had written to Plaatje warning him off entirely: ‘Instead of wasting his time on translating Shakespeare, he should translate something which contains humanity, the one quality of which Shakespeare is entirely devoid … What in God's name the Tswana want to read Shakespeare for I don't know, unless it is that they want to feel more like worms than ever.'

In literature as in politics, by attempting to bridge two cultures, Plaatje had trapped himself in no man's land. His novel
Mhudi
had
suffered a similar fate when it was eventually published in 1930. A courageous attempt to tell the story of his own people in a form that owes much to the historical epics of Walter Scott and with language that borrows from the King James Bible and Bunyan's
The Pilgrim's Progress,
it, too, was an attempt to bridge cultures. It, too, was judged a failure. According to an anonymous review in the
Times Literary Supplement
in 1933, Plaatje should have abandoned his pretensions to ‘Europeanisin':

No matter that this was the first novel published in English by a black South African: Plaatje's problem was that he was not ‘authentic' enough, not enough ‘like a Native'. In presuming to write a novel – or wear a suit, or meet with Lloyd George, or translate Shakespeare into Setswana – he had exceeded the position allotted him by the hue of his skin.

Plaatje's wider ambitions lay unrealised. His hopes for South African education were bulldozered by the Bantu Education Act of 1953, which enforced a discriminatory curriculum in schools across South Africa: Hendrik Verwoerd, its architect, said the Act's intention was to shoo the ‘Native' off ‘the greener pastures of European Society where he is not allowed to graze'. Every major political battle Plaatje fought, from the 1913 Land Act to his attempts to reason with Union prime minister Jan Smuts, ended in failure. In 1936, four years after his death, the non-racial Cape franchise he had fought so fervently to keep was abolished. Within fifteen years a hard-line nationalist government would take charge and formalise the policy Plaatje and his colleagues feared more than anything else: apartheid.