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CHAPTER 2

‘Through Shakespeare’s Africa’: ‘Terror and murder’?

In South Africa, the desire to make connections between Shakespeare’s time and a contemporary local reality has a history that goes back to, at least, the work of Solomon Plaatje in the early twentieth century. The apparent parallels between the conditions of life in South Africa and Elizabethan England generated comment also in the 1950s, the 1980s, and post-apartheid in the 1990s. This chapter will discuss some of the different motivations for, and effects of, making a connection between South Africa and Shakespeare’s England.

There are at least two ways in which such a comparison functions. On the one hand, as Plaatje’s oeuvre demonstrates, and as the writing of the Drum staffers discussed below indicates, pointing to a connection between Shakespeare and Africanness can authorise the human and political ‘relevance’ and worth of African experience. On the other hand, as the reference later in this chapter to Antony Sher and Gregory Doran’s production of Titus Andronicus in post-apartheid South Africa seeks to point out, the need to find connections between the two times and places can indicate a problematic understanding of relevance, the ideological implications of which belie the attempt at recognition encoded in the act of comparison.¹

The question of relevance encodes specific strategies of identification that reveal the workings of cultural politics, and not of a literary universality. Shakespeare is not uniquely ‘relevant’ to South Africa because ‘his’ works offer us life lessons we cannot do without, or cannot access in other ways. As explored in chapter 1, Shakespeare is ‘relevant’ because of the role ‘he’ has played in the development of writing in English in the region, and the links between this cultural history and the political and psychic histories of South Africa. As such, Shakespeare has a meaning and a presence here that exceeds, even as it arises out of, colonial constructions of cultural worth. Shakespeare is also ‘relevant’ to South Africa because all culture belongs to everyone. Nevertheless, we need to continue to be cognisant of the politics of the desire for Shakespearean relevance. As I will argue in this chapter, making connections between Shakespeare and South Africa can function in a range of ways.

If Shakespeare informs what it means to be a coconut through what ‘he’ stands for as an icon of Englishness, of universal culture, of privilege, then ‘his’ value as an authorising force and a figure of identification can be as fraught as the identity of the coconut itself. Given – or in spite of – ‘his’ fraught history, how important is Shakespeare to the ‘new’ South Africa, and hence to our emerging cultural formations? Matlwa’s novel suggests ‘he’ is worthless, that the mission-school history from which ‘he’ emerged has taken us to a place of post-apartheid cultural dispossession. Coconut’s coconuts are deprived and cheated by what Shakespeare stands for, not enriched by it. But Shakespeare’s coconuttiness has a more complex applicability. The racial and class politics of this applicability pull in different directions depending on the moment in South African history when they are activated, and by whom.

‘Watching an Elizabethan play’: Drum’s Shakespeare

Englishman Anthony Sampson was editor of the famous Drum magazine, which, in the 1950s, developed into a forum for expressing the experiences and constructing the identities of men and women living in the urban slum community of Sophiatown in Johannesburg.² In the process, Drum established the careers of a group of writers who developed the short story and the autobiography as key South African genres, before and during the time that most of them went into exile following amendments to the 1950 Suppression of Communism Act. Sampson made numerous comparisons between Elizabethan England and the ghettos of Johannesburg, in order to explain the quality of the lifestyles he saw there. This analogy was taken up by some of the Drum writers: in passing, by Lewis Nkosi; in an article, by Can Themba; and in extended form in his autobiography, by Bloke Modisane.³

Sampson’s analogy was different in kind to those made by his staff members. The latter’s mobilisations illustrate the potential in the analogy for resistance against racist policies, which deny the humanity of those they seek to subjugate. Like Plaatje’s strategic use of Shakespeare’s signifying potential, the Drum writers also rely on the fact that if apparently less civilised Africans can deploy the exemplar of English culture, and can point to similarities between what it meant to be African and the time that produced Shakespeare, then the connection is proof of the worth of the denigrated African experience of, or approach to, life.

Oxford-educated Sampson had a degree in Elizabethan drama. He overlaid his understanding of the conditions of Shakespeare’s time onto what he saw happening in Sophiatown. This enabled him to enjoy and romanticise ghetto life in early apartheid South Africa: ‘[A]ll that frenzied activity… seemed to me to be every bit a Shakespearean play with terror and murder waiting in the wings.’⁴ ‘It was wildly romantic.’⁵ In his autobiography, he wrote:

It came to me suddenly that I was watching an Elizabethan play. It was as if the characters had tripped straight from the stage of the Globe, lugging their dead bodies with them. Sophiatown had all the exuberant youth of Shakespeare’s London. It was the same upstart slum, with people coming from a primitive country life to the tawdry sophistication of the city’s fringes. Death and the police state were round the corner: and there was the imminent stage direction: Exeunt with bodies.⁶

It is true that the responses of those who lived under the increasingly difficult conditions of the times – gangsters, good-time girls, shebeen queens (brewers and sellers of liquor, usually from their homes, at a time when it was illegal for black people to drink alcohol), and more conventional workers – were inventive, colourful, innovative, and energetic. Sophiatown was also a violent, hectic, squalid place, ‘surrounded by a surface of uncertainty and hostility, epitomized by the threat of removal which hung over it from 1939 … a huge generosity of spirit coexisted with conditions that made it a “deplorable, sickening slum”’.⁷