Most of the material constituting this column is plagiarised. The difference between my plagiarism and that of the industry trendsetters, Bristow-Bovey/Pamela Jooste/St Antjie Krog et al, is that I am revealing where I stole the material from and not publishing it in the wild hope that no one notices.
What also distinguishes my literary theft from those of the above specialists is that it is of my own writing. Whether half-hinching your own material constitutes plagiarism is for finer minds than mine to decide; I believe it’s quite okay. No one ever accused me of plagiarism when I was on stage and repeated my feeble material night after night after night. Some sketches I even used in different shows — more laziness than theft. Indeed, it is because the stage has once again beckoned me that I got the idea of re-using the material below. (I’ve written a highly-offensive-to-political-correctness show, which opens at the Grahams-town festival later this month, an adaptation for the stage of some Secret Letters of Jan van Riebeeck. Commercial over, back to the column.)
Also a few years ago, I replied to a letter sent to me in my brief role as an ‘agony uncle” in that redoubtable newspaper, The Sunday Independent. I’ve exhumed the reply from a retired hard-drive because it touches on the subject of questions, currently being asked at the University of Cape Town, about the relevance of Shakespeare’s works in a ‘transformative” South Africa.
The overall term for the distrust of folk like Shakespeare is that love of or respect for their works is ‘Eurocentric” in nature. In case you’ve never heard of it, Eurocentric is a polysyllabic beast that lies around muttering to those among cultural workers envious enough to want to believe it. But now, with UCT’s recent insistence that Shakespeare’s works are nothing but a load of hoary old honky doggerel full of hate soliloquies, and probably human rights-unfriendly as well, Eurocentric has once again raised its gnarled head. I thought an overview might be useful. This is what I wrote.
‘The affliction of the condition of Eurocentricity may loosely be described as a morbid addiction to the cultural and intellectual legacies of what are known as DWEMs. The initials are a pejorative term and stand for Dead White European Males. Among DWEMs are such democratically spurious ninnies like Aristotle, Marlowe, Shakespeare, Mozart, Dickens, John Wayne, Goethe, James Watt, Brahms, Harpo Marx, Carlisle, TS Eliot and JG Strjdom.
‘Both purist and politically correct cultural tendencies in South Africa combine and bespeak a necessary shuffling off of irrelevant DWEM values, to be replaced by those of the DWEM’s nominal opposite which is the ABAF, or Alive Black African Female — not, by the way, to be confused with abafazi, an apartheid signage still to be seen on as-yet untransformed railway stations. Therefore, we look forward to stepping out across South Africa’s seething cultural hotbed where date-expired MDNM® Eurocentricity is to be superseded by what is now called Muticulturism.
‘A further argument states that when DWEM and ABAF traditions are blended, new and arousing art forms will emerge. In our professional theatre, of course, DWEM values have long since wilted. The Baxters, the Markets and even the Nico Malans have mounted many plays that proved to be sensational amalgams of continental disciplines. I think immediately of a recent Grahamstown festival and the safely condomised thriller Not the Midnight Garden Boy. The Tshwane Symphony Orchestra next week undertakes a perilous foray into this challenging new synthesis of the traditional and the new with its The Sarmcor Rubber Workers Choir Meets Hindemith series.
‘But the finest example we have of a blending of European and African cultures is, of course, that pleasure palace, Sol Kerzner’s Lost City — otherwise known as Kubla Cohen. What Kerzner did at the Lost City was to mingle the cerebral appetites of the average Sandton kugel with the midden residue of an ancient tribe of monkey worshippers. A spectacular aesthetic compromise was reached in an imaginative fusion of tribal mythology and blow-moulded fibreglass. The Lost City is a monument to Muticulturism.
‘There is a health warning. If you have an almost uncontrollable craving for Eurocentric culture, you are said to be suffering from AIDS, which stands for Artistic Import Dependency Syndrome. Like the other one, it is incurable.”
In closing off, I repeat a little tale that won’t go down at all well with the UCT coven. Ironically, it came from an ex-UCT academic, a woman of immaculate intellectual taste. A young black man she met told her that what he had most enjoyed in his matric year was the Shakespeare. He asked her where he could get a copy of the sonnets, published independently of the plays. She wondered why, especially, the sonnets, to which he replied: ‘They are all about love and that’s what we need in South Africa more than anything else.”
Humanities cauldron tenders at UCT will probably dismiss his reasoning as grossly sentimental, culturally materialistic and incapable of speaking to the intrinsic institutionalisation of current South African issues outside of the logic of the colonial system, which entrenched Shakespeare as the para-gon of English literature and, thus, human expression.
The frightening thing is that they’re probably right.