Worlds Elsewhere (62 page)

In some cases, the fact that these words were written by Shakespeare must have been largely irrelevant – the book was simply a storehouse of commonplace wisdoms, as it has been for generations of readers. On other occasions, as perhaps for Venkatrathnam himself, the fact that they were composed by the greatest poet and playwright in history was the only thing about them that mattered. Every prisoner had his reasons, whether in the moment or deeply felt; perhaps, even, the two were inextricable.

As we were hustled towards the exit, our tour complete (‘Same gift shop back on the mainland, madam,' a staff member announced), I thought about two other passages from the book. Walter Sisulu had selected a speech from
The Merchant of Venice,
the only prisoner to choose anything from that play. The words were Shylock's, and here at least the sentiments were not hard to map on to the experience of apartheid South Africa:

I wondered whether Sisulu had known that Solomon Plaatje, his great predecessor in the ANC, had translated the play, and scribbled a version of a different but equally famous speech (‘Hath not a Jew eyes …?') in his notebook. Perhaps it didn't matter. The resonances were plain to see.

The thought brought me back to one of the very first signatures in the book, left by the Indian Congress member Billy Nair on 14 December 1977. It marked a short speech in act one, scene two of
The Tempest,
spoken by Caliban. Had Nair, who died in 2008, known the words already, or read them for the first time on the island that Christmas?

This island's mine … Cursed be that I did so …
The words leapt off the page, not simply for their incantation of this particular ‘isle', but for the near-inexpressible anguish that lay beneath them. A little rocky piece of land, stolen from its rightful owners and then turned into a prison; a place of inexpressible beauty and also of inexpressible torments. Deeper still, the bewilderment and stunned humiliation of betrayal.

As I took my seat on the boat, a sentence spoken by Caliban later in the scene came to mind: ‘You taught me language, and my profit on't | Is I know how to curse.'

Back on the mainland, I checked for news of Mandela: still no news. I wondered if he'd slip away while I was in South Africa, and offer my story a gravid,
Lear
-like conclusion: old ruler dies, kingdom stands (or falls). Sad stories of the death of kings, et cetera.

Thankfully, though, he was still hanging on, and rumours were that
he'd improved. That section in
Julius Caesar
he'd highlighted should have been issued by the ANC press office, attention all media: ‘death, a necessary end, | Will come when it will come.' Or will come, I thought cynically, when the ANC decides it will come.

Speaking of the ANC, I had failed to get clarification on whether the party really did have a view about the significance or otherwise of the Robben Island Bible. Repeated petitions to their national spokesman came to nothing. I supposed that was my answer. There was a rumour that the book, after returning from Washington, would soon be off again – this time to Glasgow, for an exhibition celebrating the 2014 Commonwealth Games.

I was waiting for a final appointment. Back in England, an academic contact who was doing research into South African education emailed me details of something called the Shakespeare Schools Festival South Africa. It had been founded by an energetic and enthusiastic high-school teacher from Cape Town called Kseniya Filinova-Bruton. Set up in 2011, the SSF SA had expanded rapidly into a nationwide festival with outposts in four of the country's nine provinces. The first year, 20 students had participated; 850 were scheduled for this year. While most of the South African theatre I'd encountered was struggling to find its way – no funding, declining audiences, a loss of purpose following the end of the struggle – here was something that seemed to be genuinely alive and kicking.

Filinova-Bruton and I had met briefly at an SSF SA event back in Johannesburg; she was ardent and talkative, with the no-nonsense manner of a big-firm lawyer and dark blonde hair cut in a smartly tailored bob. She suggested we meet up again here in her home town. She'd be happy to take me out to the township of Khayelitsha, where one of the keenest participants in the SSF SA programme, Chris Hani Secondary School, was based.

As we drove east out of the city, ducking behind Table Mountain and on to the broad expanse of the Cape Flats, Filinova-Bruton explained how the project had started. She was Russian, born in St Petersburg to parents who were actors; she emigrated to South Africa in her twenties and began teaching. She set up a drama society before hearing about the British Shakespeare Schools Festival, which had been running since 2000. Surprised to discover that South Africa had no equivalent, she resolved to set one up. Even she seemed astonished by how fast it had grown.

‘I had no idea it would take off,' she said in rapid-fire English,
her newly acquired South African accent not entirely obscuring the occasional hint of Slavic. ‘It was just one school, one class of my boys, me on my kitchen table with all these spreadsheets and scripts.' She pointed at the programme in my lap, which listed their numerous activities. ‘Now look where we are!'

It remained a cottage industry; this year's festival had been done on R100,000, approximately £6,000. Filinova-Bruton was still teaching full-time. Schools paid a registration fee of R550 (£30), which gave teachers tuition in directing and a half-day workshop for the class, plus cut-down scripts and resources. Each team was invited to perform in a professional venue. She was proud that many less well-off schools had signed up; even if money had to be begged or borrowed, no one should be turned away. It was the first time many had collaborated, or even met: private schools next to government schools, kids from prosperous suburbs performing alongside kids from the townships.

‘It's a great leveller. You see them when they arrive in the morning, they're nervous, they don't know each other, but by the end of the day, it's like one big happy family, it really is.'

After three weeks in South Africa I had grown doubtful about such claims on the rainbow nation. But Filinova-Bruton's optimism was hard to resist. I kept my doubts to myself.

Why had she chosen Shakespeare? Why not Athol Fugard – or, for that matter, Chekhov?

We swerved past a small fleet of minibus taxis trailing diesel fumes and spray.

‘He wrote about everything, and for everyone. Everyone can approach him. I really believe that. I think that's a good thing to have in South Africa right now.'

We passed through the garden suburbs of Pinelands and Rondebosch towards the run-down outpost of Athlone, which under the Group Areas Act became a dumping ground – along with most of the Cape Flats – for communities the apartheid state wanted to forget. Tidy villas and gated, tree-lined estates gave way to industrial estates and business parks, then sandy scrub and trees crouching beneath the wind. In the wing mirrors, impossible to escape, was the squat shadow of Table Mountain, its top bruising a heavy, lead-grey sky.

Gradually the houses reappeared, progressively more dilapidated: at first boxy bungalows and apartment blocks that looked like prison accommodation, then, past the airport, the townships – hectic collages
of tin and corrugated steel, tumbledown wooden shacks painted yellow and salmon and sea-green against the sandy grey of the earth. Some were little larger than garden sheds with bright-blue portable toilets outside.

People reappeared: women, mainly, wearing thick fleeces and hats and carrying shopping bags, or sitting in plastic garden chairs in front of stalls selling live chickens. A few streets on, across the lane that divided two shacks, someone had hung their washing out to dry: six identical blue shirts and two Babygros, hanging within inches of a tangle of power cables.

If one were in search of an essay on how much still needed to be done in South Africa, I thought, one could do worse than drive for twenty minutes out of Cape Town.

Located on Govan Mbeki Road and named for another ANC martyr, Chris Hani Secondary School, recently rebuilt, was in a better state than I'd feared – three cheerful storeys of orange brick lording it over the shipping containers converted into shops and dwellings that surrounded it. Its 1,370 pupils were some of the most active at music and drama in the Western Cape. In the impoverished and almost entirely black township of Khayelitsha, where over half the population was living in what was eupehmistically called ‘informal' accommodation, it was an unlikely and cheering beacon of success.

I was bustled inside the principal's office and shown the school's precious trophy haul: a plaque from the Safe School Project, citations from the Western Cape education department. In a cabinet was a yellow certificate from the inaugural SSF SA festival. Next to an image of Shakespeare's head were words from
Twelfth Night
: ‘be not afraid of greatness.' In the play they were a warning not to get above one's station – in a snobbish practical joke the steward Malvolio discovers them in a forged letter he thinks is from Olivia, his mistress. Here they had a braver ring. Anything is possible, they said. Wilton Mkwayi had marked exactly the same lines in Sonny Venkatrathnam's copy of Shakespeare.

Outside, in the chill wind gusting across the flats, boys in grey uniforms were scooting a football through the puddles. The sun flashed through a scrap of torn cloud, turning the water the colour of polished nickel and making the grass a vivid, sharp green.

I was escorted across into a drama studio. It was hardly luxurious – lime-coloured
walls with steel desks pushed up against them, mirrors and a dance barre down one side – but it looked well maintained. Waiting inside were two drama teachers, Lize-Marie Smalberger and Darlington Sibanda, and seven tenth-grade students aged fifteen and sixteen, bundled in coats and hats against the cold.

Chris Hani had been one of the first schools to sign up for the fledgling SSF SA. They'd taken their productions to Artscape, a professional venue in central Cape Town – the first time that many students had been into the city, just twenty miles away. The first year they had done
Macbeth,
following it up with
Julius Caesar
and
Romeo and Juliet.
They proudly showed me pictures: Macbeth's shock troops dressed like the ANC Youth League in black berets and yellow singlets, with the Witches robed like ancestral spirits.

Most had not even heard of Shakespeare before taking part; he wasn't on the curriculum. But they'd fallen greedily on the stories: a ruler wanting to seize power, a young couple falling in love against the wishes of their parents.

The words were hard, they admitted. Nearly all the students at Chris Hani were isiXhosa-speaking, which meant that English was a second language – Shakespeare a third.

‘The language, it was a big challenge to us,' said a girl, Zintle. ‘But it makes it easier to read it in the drama lesson.'

‘Ja,
that is a big help,' cut in Sesethu, another female student. ‘Our teacher explains the words to us – sometimes.' She dissolved into giggles.

Doing the texts as drama rather than literature was a help, Ms Smalberger explained: it meant the students had no preconceptions, and forced them to tease out what was really going on. ‘The language really helps them with their analytical skills. You have to work twice as hard. There was a huge transformation of understanding: you could see it happening.'

‘We were so nervous before we went on,' said a boy, Nzaba. ‘But when you're with an audience, you're talking to them. You are connected.'

On my mind was a grimmer fact, what one of the teachers had told me in the principal's office about the high rates of domestic and sexual violence in townships like Khayelitsha. One of last year's cast, a thirteen-year-old, was HIV-positive, having been raped by her stepfather; many parents were not involved in their children's lives, or were forced to live far away for work.

Did they feel the plays connected with their own experience?

Othello
did, a boy said solemnly: ‘We respect our ancestors. So if you marry a white girl there is going to be trouble.'

A girl, Azola, brought up
Romeo and Juliet.
‘It makes a problem about love,' she said. ‘Our parents choose for us, but sometimes we don't feel that. So we hope our parents give us a chance to choose.'

Someone mentioned
ukuthwala,
the practice of forced marriage prevalent among families in the Eastern Cape, many of whom were from poor rural backgrounds.

‘Your parents choose for you a husband,' she said. ‘Sometimes it can be an old man and you are fourteen – you have to marry, like, a fifty-year-old man, a sick man.'

So the theme of the play wasn't simply theoretical?

She sounded sad. ‘They will discuss these things without you. Those men just take you. We have to accept this.'

For all the obvious hardnesses of their lives, I thought them lucky in at least one regard: they encountered Shakespeare's words not in a textbook or on an exam paper, but as his first actors had encountered them – as speeches to be performed, pulses and sounds crackling with energy.