Worlds Elsewhere (61 page)

Reading prison memoirs, I was struck above all by the passion for learning. It was reportedly Mandela who first appealed for ‘the atmosphere of a university [to] prevail here on the island', and the trope was repeated in almost every account. From 1966 some prisoners were permitted to study via correspondence course for school certificates and degrees; others received informal tuition, or gave it. Govan Mbeki took part in a late-sixties literacy drive, teaching other prisoners to read in their own tongues or English. Some who arrived on the island with little more than basic primary education left it with degrees. In the words of Dikgang Moseneke, who took bachelor's qualifications in English and Law, ‘many people have emerged to survive Robben Island largely because of their studying'.

It wasn't just textbooks. As in any prison, sport became of obsessive interest. Mandela and others were permitted to run, and in the mid-1970s, clubs were set up for football, tennis and rugby. In the archives of the prison are hand-printed certificates issued by the ‘Robben Island Academy of Fine Arts'.

Mandela recalled concerts, chess and draughts tournaments, and cultivated a small patch of dusty ground as a vegetable garden. Nearly everyone piled into the makeshift cinema built during the 1970s to watch
The Mask of Zorro, The King and I,
Joseph L. Mankiewicz's
Cleopatra
and, later, South African movies. Kathrada's letters record that he became an unlikely devotee of
The Cosby Show
(despite earnest doubts about its representation of African American politics). According to the historian Fran Lisa Buntman, there were keenly fought ballroom-dancing competitions.

Many read as widely as possible. Neville Alexander, who had taken a PhD in the late nineteenth-century dramatist Gerhart Hauptmann
before being sent to the island in 1964, relished the chance to broaden his already considerable horizons:

Alexander's reading list may have been unusually sophisticated, but he was by no means alone in his eagerness to use the prison library.

Before taking the ferry I'd managed to get hold of another former Robben Island prisoner on the phone: Eddie Daniels, a Cape Town native. Arrested in 1964 for sabotage, he was sentenced to fifteen years. Daniels was a contemporary of Kathrada and, despite being from a different political party, a friend of Mandela; he, too, had signed Sonny Venkatrathnam's copy of Shakespeare.

His perspective was different again from theirs: as a kid from a working-class, mixed-race family (he detested the term ‘coloured'), he had left school after grade eight and been sent to get a job. He went to sea and worked for a time as a diamond miner, but his formal education had halted at the age of fourteen.

The island enabled Daniels to study, at first for high-school exams, then BA and BComm degrees. ‘To me prison was a blessing in disguise,' he told me. ‘I met wonderful people – Mandela, Sisulu. And I got my education.'

His Unisa degree had indeed featured Shakespeare: he'd studied
Romeo and Juliet
and
Macbeth.
In Sonny's book he'd signed his name next to a famous speech from the latter, ‘Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow, | Creeps in this petty pace from day to day …'

It seemed a powerful speech to choose, with its emphasis on entrapment and futility, I said. Did he feel it echoed his situation in prison?

He seemed surprised by the question: not especially. He had come across it as a set text, and simply thought the words were beautiful. ‘Reading Shakespeare, I loved it. To me it opened up a whole world. I just drank it in.'

So, like Kathrada, he didn't feel there had been a special resonance between Shakespeare's text and the struggle?

‘Not for me, no, I don't think so. It was more that I had just never read anything like this before.'

One thing he did remember: the Section B prisoners had staged
Julius Caesar,
or part of it, in the yard. He was hazy on the details and couldn't place the date or how long they'd rehearsed, but Neville Alexander had organised the performance. Daniels himself had played Mark Antony. He had strong memories of reciting ‘Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears …'

‘I was so emotional that at the end there were tears coming out of my eyes and they were saying, “Look, look, he's crying.'” He chuckled softly. ‘But this is all a long time ago.'

He thought there might have been another production, of
Waiting for Godot,
but again the details were blurred. Drama performances had stopped soon afterwards. He'd love to help, but if Shakespeare had played other roles on Robben Island, he couldn't recall.

When the group went into the Namibian wing, I lingered in the wind and sun with my notebook, thinking again about Sonny's copy of Shakespeare and the scraps of text beside which thirty-three prisoners had inscribed their names.

Working from the transcription supplied by the Robben Island Museum, I had marked them up in my own complete works. In spare moments of my journey across South Africa I'd often returned to them, pondering the choices the prisoners had made.

It was conspicuous how many had gravitated towards the same plays – three signatures each beside passages from
As You Like It, Julius Caesar, Hamlet
and
King Lear;
two each for
A Midsummer Night's Dream, Twelfth Night, Richard II, Henry V
and
Macbeth.
Five prisoner had selected sonnets (Neville Alexander had chosen two). Three signatories had selected quotations from, respectively,
The Tempest, The Merchant of Venice
and
Antony and Cleopatra.
Sonny Venkatrathnam had simply signed the book on its title page. One, Kadir Hassim, did the same on the first page of the introduction, with no apparent reference to Shakespeare's words at all.

I thumbed through. Some selections were surprisingly light, given the context – both Kwede Mkalipi and Elias Motsoaledi had marked their names on the last page of
A Midsummer Night's Dream,
near the famous epilogue spoken by Puck:

Might there be a hint of dreamy wish-fulfilment, of waking up to find the living nightmare of apartheid over? Perhaps they were simply attracted to Puck's tripping, fleet-footed rhymes. Or maybe they were just filling an inviting blank space in a book full of dense print. (Mkalipi, given the opportunity to choose again, went for a different passage entirely.)

Other passages seem to have been singled out largely because they were famous. Govan Mbeki had selected the first page of
Twelfth Night,
most likely for Orsino's ‘If music be the food of love', while Joseph Vusani had marked his name and the date (2 January 1978) in neat copperplate, placing an asterisk next to Jaques's ‘All the world's a stage, | And all the men and women merely players'. A day later, the Botswanan activist and ANC member Michael Dingake had planted his own signature under the ‘precepts' offered to Laertes by Polonius in
Hamlet
:

‘To thine own self be true,' Polonius concludes, a piece of advice that was corny even when Shakespeare wrote it. Had it attracted Dingake because it seemed comfortingly familiar, or because being imprisoned for the colour of your skin made the idea of being ‘true' seem passionately important? I thought of what Eddie Daniels had said: he just liked the sound of the words. Maybe this was the case here too.

Not all the inscriptions seemed circumstantial. I was interested by the prisoners who had chosen sonnets, perhaps because they were more rigidly self-contained (the word
stanza
literally means ‘room'), maybe also because the narrative ‘I' of each poem – though slippery
and unreliable over the course of 154 sonnets – seems more directly applicable to a solitary reader in a solitary cell:

Sonnet 65 had been one of Neville Alexander's choices. It struck me as a potent choice, summoning both the island prison (‘sea', ‘battering days', ‘rocks impregnable', ‘gates of steel') and reiterating the sonnets' great obsession, the erosive workings of ‘time'. Time was also the subject of Alexander's first selection, Sonnet 60 (‘Like as the waves make to the pebbled shore, | So do our minutes hasten towards their end'), one of the few poems that plays knowingly with its position in the sequence that make up the quarto of 1609.

The theme seemed to make sense. Sentenced to ten years during the island's most brutal first period, Alexander and other prisoners had plentiful opportunity to ponder the unremitting power of time, particularly as wrist watches and other time pieces were banned. Mandela himself had written in
Long Walk to Freedom,
his autobiography, how ‘time slows down in prison; the days seem endless …' It also reminded me of Solomon Plaatje's translations; perhaps Shakespeare was a way of keeping loneliness at bay.

But there was an irony here, too, of which Alexander must have been aware: that what Feste in
Twelfth Night
nicely calls the ‘whirligig of time' also brought in its revenges. Nothing would outlast time – not apartheid, not the prison in which he marked up these words, not himself. After years of ill-health Alexander died in 2012, just after Sonny Venkatrathnam's book went on display in London. Kathrada
may have been right that his colleague had been dubious about the hype surrounding the Robben Island Bible; but Alexander had clearly thought long and wisely about Shakespeare. I dearly wished I could have asked him.

By now our group was in the leadership section, a long corridor with a white ceiling and surgical-green walls. There were strip lights above, identical wooden outer doors with scuffed barred gates behind, bars on windows inner and outer. A single metal light switch and alarm bell were next to each. A crush had formed outside cell 5, Mandela's for eighteen years; silently we jockeyed to see Mandela's blankets, bedroll, stool, slops bucket, meal tin. Was I being too suspicious, wondering if they
were
Mandela's? When I got to the front, the cell looked bare and monkish, unrecognisable from the photographs I had seen, when it had been crowded with books and prints.

Similar complexities surrounded the question of Mandela's own engagement with Shakespeare, on which the real fame of the Robben Island Bible hung. Aside from scattered references in his correspondence and later speeches – written, of course, by professionals – the only hint of Shakespeare to make it into
Long Walk to Freedom
was Mandela's account of the night before sentencing at Rivonia. Expecting to hear he would be executed, he claimed to have recalled ‘Be absolute for death', Duke Vincentio's stoical words to the imprisoned Claudio in
Measure for Measure,
a speech that advises the condemned man to regard life as ‘a thing | That none but fools would keep'.

It was a neat reference – if anything, I thought, too neat. Claudio is also facing legal but wrongful execution; he, too, will eventually be saved. Though
Long Walk to Freedom
was begun on the island, it was heavily edited and tidied up for publication many years later. Like much else about Mandela, it is not always what it appears to be.

There were also ambiguities about his selection from
Julius Caesar
in Venkatrathnam's book, the lines beginning ‘Cowards die many times before their deaths'. On the face of it this was a straightforward assertion of bravery (‘death … will come when it will come'), but it was also something more shadowy, given that the words are spoken by a leader about to be assassinated. Was Mandela making subtle reference to the real dangers he faced, or was this a meditation on the fragile nature of leadership? Both? It was a fine conundrum.

But perhaps this was the lesson to draw from Sonny's book and its inscriptions. The South African critic David Schalkwyk has called the
book a ‘palimpsest' because of its openness to interpretation, its accreted layers of meanings (and the meanings others have placed on it). This is surely right: there is no single code. There is no right or wrong way to interpret it, much as there is no right or wrong way of interpreting Shakespeare's text itself, or for that matter the history of Robben Island.

Some of the prisoners' signatures were undeniably casual, done on the spur of the moment as a favour to a departing cellmate. A stray line or thought appealed, or illuminated a distant memory. A favourite passage already bagged, a hurried riffling through for other options, a quick signature scribbled. Others reflected a deeper and more involved engagement with Shakespeare, whether encountered in school or here on the island. Some choices were escapist, fantastical; others seemed to catch the dreary realities of prison life. Two prisoners, Justice Mpanza and Mohamed Essop, both chose the mournful final words of Edgar in
King Lear,
‘The weight of this sad time we must obey, | Speak what we feel, not what we ought to say'.