Martin Orkin
SHAKESPEARE AND SOUTH AFRICA by David Johnson (Clarendon, R450)
SHAKESPEARE and South Africa is a provocative and important attempt not only to relate the political mission of English studies in the past 200 years to its historical context, but to debate its future.
David Johnson traces the origins in the 19th century of what presented itself in South Africa as a tradition of liberal and humanist education and explores the intersection of this tradition with the segregationist and apartheid structures within which it functioned. What he finds is a relation ”complicated by unacknowledged complicities and particularly an ignorance of class dynamics”, as well as a disturbing connection between European and South African brands of humanism and racism.
In astute chapters on segregationist and apartheid phases in South African history, he explores the conservative influence of writers such as ACBradley, George Wilson Knight and FR Leavis on South African critics as well as the steady withdrawal from political concerns by writers such as Geoffrey Durrant, Derek Marsh and Christina van Heyningen.
At the same time, Johnson stresses that even Durrant’s earlier, distinctly left version of the Scrutiny analysis in the 1940s nevertheless reproduces an older tradition: ”Durrant’s exclusion of black people from the citizenry of South Africa reflects not only on how he as settler critic perceives native subjects as an absence of white adult citizens, but also on the inscribed limits of the left-liberal discourse he reproduces: democratic participation for everybody does not actually mean everybody.”
Here Johnson puts his finger on what might be said to have been the unspoken truth about South African English literature departments from before the 1930s well into the 1990s, accounting for the present flurry, in what still remains most tellingly a largely white preserve, to make belated ”affirmative action” appointments.
As far as Shakespeare in secondary education is concerned, Johnson’s study shows staggeringly little change from the 19th century. Shakespeare, for mostly white pupils, is trivialised into character study, plot and themes of order and harmony. Education for black children, increasingly designed to supply unskilled labour, reduces the study of Shakespeare even further, to elemental recall of plot.
Johnson carefully delineates the theoretical positions of some of the relatively enlightened figures whom he discusses. This seems accurate, and is the point of his study. His attempt not only to read history through ”theoretical lenses”, but to read theory itself historically, however, regrettably comes unstuck on more than one occasion.
For instance, he collocates South African 19th-century Romanticism and Albie Sachs, and then situates them, in almost the same breath, in opposition to the interests of ”migrant workers, children, prisoners”, which seems unfair.
Of the other examples of this, the most provocative is his treatment of Sol Plaatje. Without much qualification, Johnson sees the author of Native Life in South Africa – published before VI Lenin’s Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism – and a founder of what became the African National Congress as an agent of foreign capital to be positioned alongside the metropolitan and colonialist bardolaters of the day. Despite his initial gestures Johnson pays relatively little attention to what Plaatje was up against, and the enormous odds against which he struggled to find some (admittedly limited) space.
Moreover, Johnson’s deliberate looseness with the term ”Shakespeare”, by which he sometimes means ”English studies” and ”English culture”, makes it easier to install ”Shakespeare” as imperialist master-script. Yet, curiously, his book bears eloquent testimony to a powerful alternative to this ”Shakespeare”.
The list of colonial subjects or opponents of apartheid he describes as having appropriated Shakespeare includes not only Plaatje and Henry Dhlomo, but ZK Matthews (though he omits AC Jordan), Peter Abrahams, Can Themba, Bloke Modisane, Es’kia Mphahlele, Chris Hani, Mzwakhe Mbuli and John Matshikiza. Can it be that every one of these is merely an instance of false consciousness?
Recent work by Belinda Bozzoli and Carolyn Hamilton argues for more attention to the colonial encounter as one of interaction and not simply mimicry – as one in which the colonial subject uses a variety of strategies. Johnson’s investigation invites more work on each of them, within their specific situations and moment, and their use of Shakespeare.
This leads, finally, to Johnson’s discussion of theories used in South Africa which come from other places. This implicitly raises the question of the hybrid nature of post- colonial countries and of cultural work, and Johnson is right to underline the dangers of domesticating or depoliticising such theories. But whether we can in the foreseeable future, as Johnson occasionally in his book seems to hope, discover a purer, more homogenised alternative is debatable.
Johnson’s own work, written mostly in Britain and drawing on travelling materialist theory, stands as testimony to the inescapable condition of hybridity within which we are at present located, and have been throughout the period with which Shakespeare and South Africa is concerned.
But from this point of view, and given this condition, his final call for commitment may be said to be like the rest of his book, even where controversial, impressive and important.
Martin Orkin is the author of Shakespeare Against Apartheid and Drama and the South African State