Worlds Elsewhere (60 page)

Suddenly he looked serious. ‘But compared to Joanna Weinberg, the hate mail to her, being called a Jewish slut …'

For him, was the play about combatting racism?

‘If this play
avoids
racism, I'm not in it. It has to deal with racism, but also go beyond racism, go to human attitudes, human deficiencies, moral degradation, lies, expediency, betrayal. Everything. It's not the only play to deal with race.
Merchant of Venice,
“If you prick us, do we not bleed?”
Titus Andronicus,
where Aaron is with his child, who is black? That's the most powerful black-is-beautiful speech there is.'

He had reunited with Suzman to do Claudius in
Hamlet
in 2005, and played a Mandela-ish Caliban opposite Antony Sher in 2009. He was optimistic that he and Suzman would work together again, this time on the big one:
King Lear,
with Kani in the lead. He'd also done
Othello
again in 2010, this time directing, with his son Atandwa – oh, to be a young man again …

I sneaked a look at my watch. We had been talking for nearly two hours. Maybe this was why Kani was permanently late: it was impossible to shut him up.

He looked sheepish. ‘I told my wife I would only be short.'

As he grabbed his car keys, I said I had one final question: whether performing
Othello
was a political act.

He patted me genially on the shoulder. ‘Andrew,' he said, ‘I was going to ask what at that time was
not
a political act.'

Over dinner in Melville later that night, tussling in the pages of my notebook, I attempted to put everything I had seen in the last few weeks into some kind of order. Plaatje's project to translate Shakespeare had come to almost nothing, dangerously ahead of its time. Yet finally (and with no small irony) his achievement was starting to be recognised – a model of what the multilingual, multi-ethnic, cosmopolitan new South Africa might achieve. For its part the Robben Island Bible was not what it had seemed to be, as far as I could make out, but equally Shakespeare
had
been dragooned into the struggle against apartheid – though the very play used for those purposes had often been accused of racism.

Perhaps it was myself I was struggling with. In contemporary Britain or America it often seemed anathema to talk about Shakespeare and politics in the same breath. Theatre directors might make a production ‘political' – like that American
Richard III
– by setting the play, say, in fascist Europe or post-Saddam Iraq, but this was often a ruse designed to inject novelty into an otherwise off-the-peg interpretation. Politics was a design decision, like lighting or costume. When I was an English Literature student at Cambridge in the smooth and Blairite late 1990s, politics had been a tainted word, tinged with connotations of obsessiveness, careerism or (worse) both. In lecture halls we were trained to examine ideology with a scepticism verging on border-guard
hostility. In the seminar rooms I haunted as a postgraduate, an approach to Shakespeare like that suggested by John Kani would have been heard with pained politeness, then placed on the slab where it could be butchered and deboned.

Johannesburg made such cool academic distance seem preposterous. Two decades after the end of apartheid, I had yet to see a single white person doing a job that could be described as menial. Cleaners were black, street-sweepers black, servers in fast-food restaurants black. Security guards were black: there were five of them right here outside the restaurant, ‘car guards' who, for a few rand, watched your wheels while you sank your teeth into your wasabi-seared sirloin or nipped into the organic supermarket. Scrawny-looking men in fluorescent tabards, they loitered in packs, looking twitchy. I wondered where they slept at night.

News about Mandela seemed more depressing by the hour. The previous day a story had broken about a police investigation into fraud at several of his charities. South Africa's Serious Economic Offences unit had attempted to investigate, but been called off because of the embarrassment it would cause the ANC. Mandela himself was still being kept alive by machines. Driving past his house in Houghton, I'd got the driver to stop near the caravanserai of satellite trucks and news vans parked outside the compound. I asked the CNN and SABC correspondents what waiting felt like. ‘Like
Waiting for Godot
,' CNN deadpanned.

One thing I had worked out. In the same bookshop where I'd found
Shakespeare Against Apartheid,
I'd come across a book by the Johannesburg-based photographer David Goldblatt, who has been shooting scenes from South Africa since the 1960s. He'd begun by capturing apartheid – three National Party men on horseback, pig-snouted beneath their trekker's hats; a touching photograph of a young white farmboy with his black nursemaid. More recently, he'd photographed the changing faces of democratic South Africa (mayors, councillors, municipal managers) in a wonderful 2005 series called
Intersections.

But the photograph that resonated with me was an early one, taken at the Randfontein Estates Gold Mine in the Transvaal in 1966. The image, in stark monochrome, is of a man, black, in his twenties or perhaps older. It is impossible to be sure: Goldblatt crops out everything apart from his torso. A mine technician, his chest bristles
with authority and the tools of his trade: steel rulers, notebooks in his pocket; jack knife and stopwatch at his belt. His fingers look powerful and assured. On his arm is a shining steel identity tag:
BOSS BOY,
it reads.

Boss boys were managers, responsible for running a team of black workers in the mine. Their authority was curtailed by having to answer to a white superior – something assured by the fact that they (like many other black servants) were always called ‘boy', irrespective of their age. Garden boys, house boys, boss boys: one could be in one's eighties and be a boy. Take on one of the most hazardous jobs in South Africa, be as qualified and as competent as any white man, and you were still a child.

I couldn't see Boss Boy's face, but I thought I recognised him nonetheless. He looked like Othello.

IN THE SHARP MORNING LIGHT
Cape Town looked even more like a frontier settlement than usual. As I walked down the incline of Buitenkant Street towards the centre, the clapboard frames of colonial-style dwellings and red-brick warehouses glinted prettily in the sun. The day I arrived it had been raining hard, the city and its surrounds all but invisible beneath a porridgey blanket of mist and cloud. Now the air felt cool and apple-crisp; a week of late-winter storms had scrubbed Cape Town up and made it as fresh as paint.

I glanced behind me and saw the flat chiselled surface of Table Mountain, stark and dark and huge against a sky of pure, high blue. It was the first time I'd seen it since arriving. In the Khoikhoi language it had a much nobler name,
Hoerikwaggo,
‘Mountain in the Sea'. If I lived here, I thought, I would never look at anything else.

I was bound for Robben Island. It seemed a strange destination on a day as beautiful and cheery as this, but at the quayside the crowds were out in force, in straggling lines that stretched from the ferry terminal to the Ethiopian gourmet coffee stand, past the joint selling organic banana muffins.

I had been forewarned about the Madiba effect. Up in Johannesburg, Mandela was still very much alive – on the internet and rolling news there were hourly bulletins on his health – but the nationwide obsession with his condition, and the realisation that these were surely his final
days, had reminded South Africa about what it generally preferred to forget: the past. The Mandela museum in Soweto was thronged with visitors, and the same was true here in Cape Town. Places on the ferry out to the island had been booked up for weeks.

I joined the line, planting myself in the middle of a Christian spring camp from KwaZulu-Natal, boisterous teenagers in coordinated hoodies, and a group of elderly African American ladies from Alabama in fleeces and fawn pedal-pushers. Slowly we funnelled down a ramp towards a large white double-decker boat, past a glossy display on the island's history.

‘Welcome to jail!' shouted the crew. On the gangplank we grinned for the official photographer: merry temporary inmates.

Within a year of it finally being closed to prisoners, Robben Island's journey into the realm of the symbolic had begun. In 1996 it was nominated a National Monument, then in 1999 a Unesco World Heritage Site. The decision was made to keep the prison exactly as it had been; former inmates, many of whom had struggled with life outside, were recruited as ‘EPP' (ex-political prisoner) tour guides. A few months earlier, President Obama had come, one of 200,000 visitors a year, and been shown around by Ahmed Kathrada.

Sped across the sparkling blue bay, we were there in less than half an hour. Herded on to buses marked ‘Driven By Freedom', we crept past the lime quarry, obediently taking photos of the ‘reunion cairn' created by a thousand ex-prisoners. We took photos of the dog kennels, larger than the solitary-confinement cells. We took more photos at a viewing point at the edge of the island, facing on to the broad water of Table Bay, with the dark thunderhead of Table Mountain behind. After a while I stopped taking photos.

As we walked under the famous gate (‘We Serve With Pride,
Ons Dien Met Trots
' still stencilled above), we were introduced to our EPP, Mncedisi Siswana. He was one of the angry young student radicals dispatched to the island in the late seventies – roughly the time Sonny Venkatrathnam was leaving. He served five years in Section E, reserved for the newest arrivals. Bull-necked, deliberate, he spent several days a week reliving one of the most painful pieces of his past.

‘Robben', a derivation of the Dutch
rob,
‘seal', refers to the animals that still throng the bay. Identified by the Portuguese explorer Bartolomeu Dias in 1488, initially the island was a refuelling stop for ships on their way around the Cape, an easy calling point for fresh
water and supplies. William Keeling's East India Company expedition cast anchor here in December 1607 after stopping in Sierra Leone – a pleasing coincidence, but which still didn't make the Shakespearian connection of Keeling's voyage any more plausible.

When the Dutch East India Company representative Jan van Riebeeck founded the first permanent European settlement on the Cape in 1652, on land that had been variously settled by Xhosa, Zulu, San and Khoikhoi peoples, the island became a place of punishment. Legendarily, the first prisoner was a Khoihkoi man called Autshumato, who had the temerity to protest when the Dutch stole his cattle. Banished to the island in 1659, Autshumato and two followers managed to flee the following year by purloining a rowing boat. They are thought to be the only people ever to have mounted a successful escape.

Under the British, the island became a leper colony in the nineteenth century, then a military base. In 1960, following the violent protests that exploded after the Sharpeville Massacre, arrests soared. Faced with hundreds of black ‘terrorist' convicts, the government decided it needed an ultra-high-security facility. The following year
Robbeneiland
became a prison once again, this time a political one.

Conditions for the first batch – among them Mandela, Ahmed Kathrada, Walter Sisulu and Govan Mbeki – were even tougher than those experienced by Sonny Venkatrathnam a few years later. Gang leaders on criminal sentences were encouraged to intimidate ‘politicals'. Hard labour – in the limestone or bluestone quarries, collecting seaweed – led to eye and respiratory problems because of the blinding light and omnipresent dust. Cell raids by guards – white, of course – were common, as were beatings, strip-searches and solitary confinement. Prisoners of different ethnicities were issued different diets (seven ounces of meat or fish a day for whites; six ounces for coloured inmates, four times a week; and five ounces for blacks), but the food was frequently inedible. The island's topography, surrounded by icy Atlantic currents and buffeted by violent gales, offered cruelties all its own.

Yet, as always in South Africa, multiple ironies were in play on Robben Island. One was the fact that many inmates were better educated than their captors: a source of aggrieved resentment at first, but which helped build bridges. Another was that the government's determination to keep these prisoners in a wind-blasted Atlantic hellhole had the effect of unifying them as never before. Rivalries
between different groups – ANC versus PAC, elder statesmen versus youngsters who arrived in the seventies, Namibians versus the rest – softened in the face of a common enemy.

One fateful development stemmed from the apartheid state's mania for classification, which led them to isolate the ‘Big Team' of Mandela, Mbeki, Kathrada, Venkatrathnam and others in the leadership wing. Not only did this make it abundantly clear whom the authorities most feared and respected; it enabled communication along the line of solitary cells. Coordinated hunger strikes gradually produced a more acceptable regime. Even the hated lime quarry became a site for education.