John Matshikiza
With The Lid Off
I met Danny Glover in the Sheraton hotel in Harare in 1986. It was a bitterly cold winter’s morning, the sun had not yet come up, and we were gathering in the lobby of the hotel, waiting to go on to the set to shoot a made-for-TV movie called Mandela.
Danny was playing Mandela. I was playing Walter Sisulu. It seems like a million light years away now. At the time, there was in our minds very little possibility that these two mythical figures we would be portraying for the American HBO network would ever be released. We were doing our bit, within the limits of our professional powers, to publicise the cause.
Anyway, this big man in a tracksuit, script under his arm, came up to me and said, “Hi, I’m Danny.” The voice was soft and gravelly, the smile almost shy. He was already a big international star, but he had no airs. It was almost scary. He was just another guy.
One of my teachers at drama school described acting as a process that brings you into relationships that are closer than marriage – for the short, intense periods that each job lasts. You get to know the people you’re working with very well. A communication develops between you that is about nothing less than survival.
Inhabiting other people’s personas, the team of actors is a unit alone, gladiators at the bottom of the pit, surrounded by the roar of a crowd that needs to satisfy its bloodlust. The director and his crew of sadistic acolytes are like the Roman soldiers prodding you towards your doom. Danny and I and the others were Spartacus and the slaves; us against the world.
It was one of those rare relationships that didn’t end when the final frame was shot. We had sunk into too many intense moments together, both on and off the set. There was the joint discovery of the power of Shona stone sculpture, a mythical extension of Great Zimbabwe and the balancing rocks of Mashonaland. There were deep conversations about African history, Marcus Garvey and Malcolm X, parallel landmarks of our upbringing on separate continents.
On set, there were the gruelling days under the sun, breaking big rocks into little rocks in a stone quarry, reliving from our imaginations the ordeal of the Robben Islanders.
Last Sunday, I spent the day on the real Robben Island with Danny Glover. It was an experience that was more unreal than our Zimbabwean re-creation all those years ago, when the world was a different place.
For a start there was our guide. It was the second time that I had been on to the Island with Ahmed Kathrada, but it was no less unnerving. Kathy has a dry quietness when he talks about the prison years that makes you feel very humble. The whole thing becomes bigger for being understated.
I could see that the African-Americans in Danny’s group were somewhat bemused by the whole experience. It was a bit like being taken round the island of Crete by Theseus himself, who casually points out the Minotaur’s maze in the same tone he uses to invite you to admire the view from the cliffs.
It was the first time on the Island for Danny. He said almost nothing, hardly asked any questions. He just looked, deep and long, and sighed, hunched over on a bench to listen to Kathy’s matter-of-fact descriptions of the grinding routine of prison life, and the moments of extraordinary triumph that punctuated those 25 wasted years.
Here we were, finally, in the prison yard. Here we were standing in the quarry, and in the passage that led to the cells. Even tinier and more cloying than the cells we’d acted in in Harare.
We followed in almost dumb silence until we came to Kathrada’s own cell. That was when the whole meaning of it hit home to one of the young Americans in our party. All through the journey, a strange coincidence had been ringing in his head: his birthday, June 13 1964, was the exact date on which the Rivonia prisoners had been sentenced, the start of their long journey to Robben Island. Now, standing outside Kathrada’s former cell with Kathrada himself, he broke down. He sobbed uncontrollably for long minutes while the rest of us stood helpless inside those ugly prison-grey walls.
Then we were out in the crystal air again, riding in a minibus round the pretty island with its exclusive views of Cape Town, hearing anecdotes about the more amusing moments of life on Robben Island – like the time a Taiwanese fishing trawler ran aground, and the warders went on panic alert because they thought it was the start of an invasion from Mao’s Red China.
Kathy bade us a quiet farewell back on the jetty at the Cape Town Waterfront. No fuss, no arrogance. Just another day of life.
Danny looked exhausted. He had been working to a punishing schedule, and his hip was giving him trouble, but the exhaustion was from a deeper source than that. I think it was like the end of a long journey – the one that had started in Harare on that morning when we first met.