Worlds Elsewhere (50 page)

No, even during the day. OK, maybe some streets, but as a tourist – safer just to take cash with me, no cards, and leave my mobile phone.

But I needed my phone for work, I bleated.

‘Get a local one. A cheap one.'

It went on. Public transport a no-no. Trains especially. Best to hire a driver. Not expensive – get one for the day if need be.

What if I didn't want to be ferried around like a white lording? What if I wanted to be spontaneous? Surely it was safe to walk around Melville itself?

His expression was flat. ‘You look like a tourist a mile off. Stick to being
spontaneous
somewhere else.'

Piece by piece, I put flesh on my mysterious South African. It wasn't just me who was foxed by his identity: several accounts named him as William Tsikinya-Chaka, mistaking the subject of the essay for its author.

Eventually an article gave me what I wanted, and a small trail of breadcrumbs besides. He was a man called Solomon Tshekisho Plaatje, a journalist, linguist and political activist. For all that I'd never heard of him until a few months before, Plaatje was one of the most important figures in twentieth-century South African history. He was the founding secretary general of the South African Native National Congress (SANNC), the organisation that became the African National Congress, a leading light in the early struggle for equal rights in South Africa.

I combed through reference books, databases and secondhand bookshops in search of him, each morsel of information more enticing than the last. Plaatje had a name that was Dutch in origin, given by an Afrikaans settler to his grandfather (it was pronounced
Ply-kee,
I was told), but he was indeed a black South African, part of the Tswana tribe.

Born in 1876 on a mission station outside Kimberley, the Northern Cape town where the colonialist and diamond magnate Cecil Rhodes had made his fortune, Plaatje lived through the early mining booms that transformed South Africa from a loose cluster of African kingdoms to a profitable piece of the British Empire. As a young man he had experienced at first hand the Siege of Mafeking – now Mafikeng/Mahikeng – during the second Boer War of 1899–1902, composing a memoir of the experience, the only one by a black eyewitness. He became a crusading journalist, founding one of the few South African newspapers in the control of a black editorial team, and, scandalised by what he perceived as Britain's betrayal after the foundation of the Union of South Africa in 1910, joined the campaign for native rights.

It was here that Plaatje came to wider attention.
Native Life in South Africa,
his caustic account of the cruelties of the 1913 Natives Land Act, the first grim step towards apartheid, alerted the world to the injustices being perpetrated in his homeland. In the 1910s and 1920s he toured Europe and the United States, rabble-rousing for the SANNC and meeting civil-rights pioneers, among them one of America's greatest campaigners for racial equality, W. E. B. Du Bois. By the time of his death in 1932, back in Kimberley, Plaatje was perhaps the most widely read black writer on the African continent.

The tales related by his more enthusiastic biographers strained credibility: could he really memorise entire books at a glance? Recite whole plays after only one hearing? But other stories, which sounded equally far-fetched, were well documented. Despite only having received an elementary education, Plaatje was proficient in eight languages. Prime minister David Lloyd George, who met him, confessed himself ‘greatly impressed'. He had written a bestselling pamphlet on sexual relations between the races, as well as a novel in English, the first in history by a black South African. There appeared to be nothing the man couldn't do.

And then, of course, there was Shakespeare. The playwright was entangled in Plaatje's life in ways that were especially enticing. After he had seen
Hamlet
as a teenager, the plays seemed to shadow his every move. His journalism repeatedly quotes Shakespeare;
Mhudi,
the novel, is saturated by references. And then there were the translations, six of them:
The Comedy of Errors, Julius Caesar, Othello, The Merchant of Venice, Much Ado About Nothing
and
Romeo and Juliet.
If my sources were
accurate, these were not only the first full translations of Shakespeare plays into Setswana; they were the earliest translations into any African language at all. Plaatje deserved a place in the pantheon simply for this.

And yet information was maddeningly hard to come by. None of the standard Shakespeare reference works mentioned him.
Mhudi
excepted, his books were on the hazy fringes of out-of-print. His biography and a selection of his journalism – both fine scholarly works by a British researcher called Brian Willan – were almost impossible to find. Back in Britain I'd asked Shakespeare experts for leads on Plaatje; none were even aware of his existence.

It was a conundrum. As I scanned the haphazard pile of volumes by or about Solomon Plaatje that had filled my suitcase, I thought: when it came to the global history of Shakespeare, who had written him out?

A graceful classical portico menaced on every side by brutalist concrete faculties and labs, the William Cullen library at the University of the Witwatersrand, known locally as ‘Wits', looked painfully out of place, as if someone had lifted an orangerie from Versailles and placed it in the middle of a high-security penitentiary. The university's most precious collections are housed at the Cullen, including the papers of Solomon Plaatje. I had booked an appointment for the day after I arrived in Johannesburg, hoping it might answer at least some of my questions.

As I came near, the place looked closed. The lights were off. Strange – it was 3 p.m., definitely opening time. Then I noticed a small sign pinned to the wall, in a looping and haphazard hand: ‘Library Closed No Power'. There had been electricity outages on and off all winter, a combination of South Africa's creaking network and rumbling union disputes. The previous week gold miners had walked out. The atmosphere was sour, full of mutterings that the ANC government under president Jacob Zuma was crumbling.

But there was really only one story in South Africa that September: the ailing Nelson Mandela. A few weeks earlier, the former president had been rushed into hospital in Pretoria. Crowds had massed in the street, expecting the worst, but Mandela had rallied and, to widespread rejoicing, had made it to his ninety-fifth birthday. Three days before I landed, he'd been brought back home to the exclusive suburb of Houghton, a few miles away. The Mandela compound had been one of
those hit by the power cut the previous night; an emergency generator had to be used to keep his intensive-care equipment online. The papers were full of outraged headlines:
MADIBA POWER SCARE.
For once, it wasn't a metaphor.

An hour and a half later, once the lights had finally gone back on, I got inside the Cullen. The Africana reading room was a genial clutter of books, pot plants, posters and murals. Over the banisters leading up to the mezzanine there was a huge banner, reading
THE PEOPLE SHALL GOVERN! –
a relic of the university's history as a bulwark of the anti-apartheid movement. Across every inch of wall were black-and-white photos of protests and rallies on campus. It seemed fitting that this was where Plaatje – some parts of him, at least – had ended up.

Plaatje was born on a farm some 30 miles away from Kimberley, about 280 miles south-west of Johannesburg: a quick hop on the plane I was scheduled to take early the following week, but many hours by dirt and dust track.

The mission station where he received an education was run by a German, the Reverend Gotthilf Ernst Westphal, and at school Plaatje seems to have been a remarkably talented and responsive pupil. As well as speaking his own Setswana and learning other local tongues, he would have been taught German and learned ‘Cape Dutch', the language that became Afrikaans. He received extra tuition from Reverend Westphal's wife, Elizabeth, who introduced him to literature and music. There was talk of him going to secondary school – a rare privilege for a black child in South Africa at that time.

It was not to be. In 1894, at the age of seventeen, Plaatje abandoned education for a job as a messenger at the Kimberley post office. He lived in the Malay Camp, a mixed area of town, and became involved with the newly formed South Africans' Improvement Society, which hosted regular talks, concerts and events. In 1898, he married the sister of a friend, Elizabeth Lilith M'belle – the woman he had courted with
Romeo and Juliet.
Later that year, he left to take up a job in Mafikeng as an interpreter in the legal courts. By now, he could speak and write in Setswana, Sesotho, English and Dutch, and speak isiXhosa and German.

The second Anglo-Boer War had followed soon afterwards, and in the Cullen was the manuscript of the diary he'd kept during the Mafikeng siege: a thin wodge of yellowing foolscap, one of the few surviving texts in Plaatje's hand. Written in rapid but legible script – mainly
English, with a few Afrikaans and Setswana words thrown in – it was a surprisingly larky read, telling of daring escapes from Boer bullets and giving valuable eyewitness detail on what life was really like in a British encampment under fire.

What there wasn't anywhere at the Cullen, at least anywhere I could see, was evidence of Plaatje's passion for Shakespeare: no manuscripts, no notes on his translations. Aside from the diary, the only hint that Plaatje had any interest at all in that direction was a letter dated 17 January 1931, seventeen months before his death, appealing for funds to help publish ‘native literature'.

The photographs, however, were eloquent. One showed a young man, perhaps in his mid-twenties, wearing a dark jacket and white bow-tie, his watch-chain shining, holding what appeared to be a piece of sheet music. Though he was a little plump, his features were finely formed: square jaw, broad forehead. His posture was alert; his eyes, directed at the camera, were bold and cool.

The other picture was later, and sadder: a small print of an old man, exhausted-looking, sitting at a typewriter. A homburg sat jauntily on his head and a tie was neatly knotted at his throat, but his pale linen jacket was too big. His shoulders were slumped, his gaze unfocused. He looked substantially older than his fifties. I wondered what forces had transformed one Solomon Plaatje into the other.

There was something else in the library. Passing through London on a speaking tour, Plaatje had visited the Zonophone record company at Hayes in Middlesex, where he had recorded three discs of African music, presumably to aid his consciousness-raising efforts. They were in Setswana and isiXhosa, a combination of hymns and folk songs, sung by Plaatje himself with Sylvia Colenso (granddaughter of the Bishop of Natal) accompanying. The shellac originals were now too fragile to play, but the Wits librarians had digitised them.

Sitting on my own in the library, the red late-afternoon sunlight burning into the wall behind, I strained my ear to the tiny speakers of an antique PC. Through a thick soup of hiss I could just about pick out hymn-like piano chords and a man's thin voice. ‘Singa Mawela', a gently lilting song, was suited to their talents: Miss Colenso's rippling arrangement gave it a pleasant touch of the Edwardian salon, with the unexpected addition of the pops and clicks of the isiXhosa language, produced by Plaatje with obvious enjoyment. At last, a voice to match the face.

I selected another track. There was a whoosh of static and Plaatje's
voice soared high above, sounding easy and smooth. It only took me a few moments to recognise the words and tune, whose jaunty optimism I had always found deeply moving:

Lord, bless Africa, may her spirit rise up …
It was the South African national anthem, the first time in history it had been recorded. At the chorus, a female voice joined in–Miss Colenso, I guessed. She and Plaatje sang in harmony before the music faded into crackle and silence.

Soon after composing his account of the Mafikeng siege, Plaatje's interest in politics had hardened into direct campaigning. In 1901, he took over the editorship of a new Setswana-language newspaper,
Koranta ea Becoana
(‘The Tswana Gazette'). His tone intensified; in one fire-brand editorial published in September 1902, he tried to reason with the British, under the pointed headline ‘Equal Rights'. ‘We do not hanker after social equality with the white man,' it read. ‘We do not care for your parlour, nor is it our wish to lounge on couches in your drawing rooms … All we claim is our just dues; we ask for our political recognition as loyal British subjects.'

But British influence over this part of the world was waning. Following an uneasy victory in the Anglo-Boer War, the British government came to a compromise with Afrikaner nationalists. In 1910, the former British colonies in the Cape and Natal joined with the Boer republics of Transvaal and the Orange Free State to form the Union of South Africa. The interests of the overwhelming majority of South Africans – those South Africans who were black – were excluded from the deal.

Plaatje sensed his own people being sold down the river. In 1909, a group of black delegates had come together in Waaihoek, Bloemfontein, and agreed to create a permanent organisation to fight for black legal and political rights. Three years later, in January 1912, when the South African Native National Congress was finally formed, the Zulu John Dube was elected president. Plaatje became secretary general.

In 1913, the nascent SANNC faced its rubicon: the passing of the Natives Land Act, which at a stroke outlawed black South Africans from either owning or renting eight tenths of the land in the Union – anywhere outside ‘reserves' set aside for their use. Black landowners were evicted and tenants forced off land they had farmed for generations. Millions became refugees in their own country. Denied representation in the South African parliament, the SANNC made frantic plans to send a delegation to London. When they made the trip the following year, Plaatje would be among them.