Lost in Translation
Sol Plaatje, William 'Shake-the-Sword', and South African culture¹

By Deborah Seddon

In my native village in Johannesburg, there is a song that we always sing when a young girl gets married, it is called 'The Click Song' by the English, because they cannot say Quonqothwane.²
Miriam Makeba

On June 15, 2000, in an address marking the occasion of renaming the Department of Education building in Pretoria as Sol Plaatje House the South African Minister for Education, Kader Asmal, suggested that with the new Education Department, established in 1994 as one for all South Africans, it was time to give the building a new name:

to remind us of where we have come from, and to inspire us on the road to our destination, to proclaim that we South Africans are proud of our extraordinary, diverse heritage, to show the world that our diversity is the source of our unity. That is why we have chosen to name our building in honour of a great South African with whom we can all identify, from whom we can all learn.³

Asmal’s address demonstrates the manner in which public, political recognition is being accorded to the role played in South African history by the politician, novelist and journalist Solomon Tshekisho Plaatje (1876-1932) – a man whose career reads as a series of firsts. In Mafeking, and later in Kimberley, he was the editor of some of the country’s first bilingual and trilingual newspapers.⁴

With his work also appearing in papers such as the Pretoria News and the Cape Argus Plaatje, among both black and white readers, was one of the most widely read black journalists of his day. His novel Mhudi (1930) was the first written in English by a black South African. As a founding member and general secretary of the South Africa Native National Congress, which became the ANC, Plaatje helped create the first political party seeking to represent the views of black South Africans as a whole. In 1914 Plaatje travelled to London with a SANNC delegation in an attempt to bring the suffering created by the 1913 Native Land Act of Louis Botha’s South African Union government to the attention of the British Colonial Office. The Act made it illegal for black South Africans to own or buy land except in designated ‘native areas’, created a racially based underclass overnight, and was the first legislative measure towards the formalised segregation that would, in 1948, become apartheid. The delegation’s appeal was fruitless and Plaatje stayed on in England for two and half years, in order to see his account of the effects of the Land Act brought to the attention of the British public. Native Life in South Africa, published in London in May 1916, is now recognised as ‘one of the most important works of African protest to have been published before the time of political decolonialization’. ⁵

As the naming of Sol Plaatje House suggests, Plaatje’s persistent campaigning for the civil rights and welfare of black South Africans, and his lifelong dedication to the ideal of a multi-racial and democratic nation, are now seen as embodying an exemplary political ethic within the new South Africa. Plaatje’s recent role within this new national identity illustrates the function of figures "with whom we can all identify" in the construction of the new South Africa’s self-image. The Sol Plaatje Educational Trust, set up in 1991 to administer the legacy projects and new schools set up in his name, operates from the house in Angel Street, Kimberley, where Sol Plaatje lived during his last years, and which has now become a museum. Plaatje’s political and intellectual contributions to South African history are being rewritten in academic texts, on websites, and in televised documentaries. His literary and political writings are now read as paradigmatic of the concerns of a multi-cultural South Africa. In the introduction to the 1996 edition of Mhudi, for instance, Tim Couzens suggests that Plaatje’s novel was one of the first books "to handle the idea of what constitutes South Africanness".⁶

But, if the "new South Africa" now means the characteristic of multi-cultural "unity in diversity" deployed to facilitate national self-definition in current political and cultural discourse, then what South Africans can "all learn" from Plaatje will be limited if our concentration on his political and literary contributions fails to take full account of his proficiency with South Africa’s languages. Nowhere was this capability more apparent than in his skills as a translator. Plaatje was a polyglot, his fluency in Setswana, isiXhosa, isiZulu, Sepedi, Sesotho, English, Dutch, and German, was crucial to his work as a court interpreter in Mafeking before the South African War, and to his role as newspaper editor, politician, and writer, in a career marked by trans-national and cross-cultural exchange. ⁷

Among his many achievements Plaatje was the first person to translate Shakespeare into an African language, he translated five plays into Setswana, translating the first, Julius Caesar, in 1917.⁸

It is indicative of the hegemony of English within the South African literary academy, and the continued inequities between languages in South Africa, however, that whilst Plaatje’s writings in English have been the subject of much literary critique, with Mhudi now considered an important part of the South African literary canon, there is relatively little critical consideration of his writings in other languages. David Schalkwyk and Lerothodi Lapula have argued, like his biographer Brian Willan before them, that Plaatje’s translations of Shakespeare were part of his efforts to protect and facilitate his mother tongue, Setswana.⁹

I wish to extend their insights here and explore the relationship between translation and orature that emerges in Plaatje’s repeated recourse to Shakespeare within his historical and political context. I would suggest that Plaatje is a prototypically "interdiscursive" South African writer, as defined by Ato Quayson, who uses this term to describe the interactive relationship between African literature and its indigenous oral context or "resource-base". Quayson stresses the strategic deployment of oral traditions, suggesting that the literary history of African writing needs not only to register the link with the conceptual resource base which orality provides, but to consider the historically contingent nature of such interdiscursive configurations and their function within what he calls a "will-to-identity" in African literature which seeks, often within the processes of nation-state formation, to recuperate a sense of self-worth for the African psyche.¹⁰

Plaatje’s deployment, both of the oral resources at his disposal, and of the Shakespearean text, was marked by his own unique kind of interdiscursivity. His translations were a product of his ability to move between languages and – in his fusions of orature and literature – between different, culturally specific, conceptual resource bases. Most importantly the translations took the form of a considered ‘will-to-identity’ – seeking to appropriate the figure of Shakespeare, and the language of the Shakespearean text, in the service of the threatened Setswana language and its orature. In Textual Power Robert Scholes argues that "translating aspects of one culture into another is never a simple semantic substitution. Rather, the self-images of two cultures come to bear on the matter and clash over it". Translation, therefore, can teach us much about certain aspects of a culture at certain stages of its evolution.¹¹ Plaatje’s translations of Shakespeare can themselves teach us much about the clash of South African cultures of which they were a symptom: in their critical afterlife they continue to function as a litmus test of where that political and cultural struggle has moved.

It was during his years in England that Plaatje began writing on Shakespeare. In 1916 he was asked to contribute an essay to the publication A Book of Homage to Shakespeare, produced by the British Academy in celebration of the tercentenary of Shakespeare’s death. In his essay, "A South African’s Homage", Plaatje described how he had found in Shakespeare something that specifically enabled the interaction of that text with an oral culture:

Besides being natural story-tellers the Bechuana ¹² are good listeners, and legendary stories seldom fail to impress them. Thus, one morning, I visited the Chief’s court at Mafeking and was asked the name of ‘the white man who spoke so well’. An educated Chieftain promptly replied for me; he said William Tsikinya-Chaka (William Shake-the-Sword). The translation, though perhaps more free than literal, is happy in its way, considering how many of Shakespeare’s characters met their death. Tsikinya-Chaka became noted among some of my readers [of his newspapers] as a reliable white oracle.¹³

As Plaatje noted, Tsikinya-Chaka, literally translated, means to shake or move a sword or battle-axe.¹⁴ The Setswana word for spear is ‘lerumô’ but the choice of ‘chaka’ is motivated by its alliterative relationship with the consonantal sounds of ‘tsikinya’, as well as by its association, as Plaatje noted, with the weaponry utilised in the action of some of the plays. Plaatje’s highlighting of the Tswana naming of Shakespeare suggested his recognition of the incorporation of William Tsikinya-Chaka into the cultural practices of a residually oral way of life.

The practice of naming is a creative and flexible practice for the Tswana. The giving of names, praise names, and nicknames associated with a person’s attributes is a common practice, one still observed amongst Setswana speakers today. This tendency towards creative appellation is most closely associated with praise-poems (called maboko in Setswana), which are an important form of orature throughout sub-Saharan Africa. In her comparison of the fundamental features of such praise-poetry, Karin Barber isolates a number of characteristics that are useful in illustrating the complexities of significance involved this Tswana naming of the poet Shakespeare. As described by Barber, oral poets in sub-Saharan African languages create much of the pleasure for their audience from their highly developed ability in performance to place extraordinary signifying pressure on words of similar sound. The conventions of praise poetry involve teller and listener in "a game of signification, in which meanings are generated, secreted, withheld and retrieved according to definite and specialised conventions".¹⁵ Moreover, in Tswana chiefly praise, as in most genres of sub-Saharan praise poetry, the attributions that are bestowed on the subject in such poems are rooted in names: there are ways in which "the grammar of ordinary speech can be extended to yield name-like forms of great length and internal complexity". Such utterances ‘belong’ to the recipient as much as to the composer. The public performance of such complex naming heightens the subject’s social standing and thus his role in the community.¹⁶

The name Tsikinya-Chaka was thus, as Plaatje noted, "more free than literal", imbued as it was with the naming practices derived from Tswana orature. Tsikinya-Chaka was a complex fusion of sound and concept: a poetic translation of Shakespeare’s name which drew on the individual sound of the words, the action of the plays themselves on the stage, and Shakespeare’s renowned power as a poet. The naming of Tsikinya-Chaka, in continuity with indigenous practices, thus formed a Tswana relationship with the celebrated English poet, which took the form of both appropriation and oratory ‘homage’. As well as noting the translation of Shakespeare’s name into a vernacular equivalent, Plaatje’s essay in A Book of Homage to Shakespeare highlighted two further instances of the oralising of Shakespeare’s texts: in the form of folktales and proverbs and as a lingua franca for communication within and between indigenous groups. Plaatje suggested that the translation of the plays themselves into African languages would be facilitated by the fact that "some of the stories on which [Shakespeare’s] dramas are based find equivalents in African folk-lore".¹⁷

Plaatje noted that he "had but a vague idea" of Shakespeare "until about 1896 when, at the age of 18", he went to see a performance of Hamlet at the Kimberley Theatre. As he began to read the plays he discovered a resource which could be fruitfully used in social interactions: "intelligence in Africa is still carried from mouth to mouth by means of conversations after working hours, and reading a number of Shakespeare’s works I always had a fresh story to tell". Even more significant, was Plaatje’s comment on the entry of Shakespeare’s language into the daily discourse of indigenous African speakers. As his knowledge of Shakespeare’s plays developed Plaatje discovered "that the current quotations used by educated natives to embellish their speeches, which I had always taken for English proverbs, were culled from Shakespeare’s works".¹⁸

Plaatje’s remark about the circulation of Shakespeare’s words in the form of proverbs or sayings explains his later plan, to produce a series of plays in Setswana under the collective title, Mabolelo a ga Tsikinya-Chaka, "The Sayings of Shakespeare".¹⁹ His sense of the equivalence of function between Shakespeare’s plays and Setswana orature was at the heart of his engagement with the poet. His translations were a remarkable reactivation of the oral elements of the Shakespearean text, a registering of their continuity with the oral tradition that was long absent from English assessments of the play-texts in the early 20th century. Plaatje’s sense that he could deploy Shakespeare for the political and personal empowerment of his own language and people was an appropriative method now recognised by Shakespearean scholars as a central aspect of the playwright’s afterlife.

In 1916, the same year he published his essay on Shakespeare and [Native Life in South Africa, Plaatje also produced two publications that centred on the Setswana language. The first, Sechuana Proverbs with Literal Translations and their European Equivalents, included 732 Setswana proverbs, alongside the literal English translation, as well as the closest European language equivalent, set out in three columns. The second, A Sechuana Reader in International Phonetic Orthography, produced with the linguist Daniel Jones of the University College London, was the first phonetic reader in Setswana, containing a section on the tonal pronunciation of the language, and a section of short reading texts for the pupil. These are mostly Setswana folk-tales, which appear in English, in a literal English version of the Setswana, and in phonetic script.²⁰ Both texts testify to Plaatje’s recognition of the threat to African orature presented by the dominance of English. Plaatje’s translations of Shakespeare took this project further, using the "Sayings of Tsikinya-Chaka" to both perform and disseminate the Tswana language and its rich heritage of proverbs – a cultural identity which he realised was vulnerable to extinction unless perpetuated by writers who could preserve its oral tradition in print.²¹

In the only translation of Shakespeare published during his lifetime, A Comedy of Errors, which he entitled Diphosho-phosho (Mistake-upon-Mistake), Plaatje’s introduction described a trajectory that deliberately provoked a comparison between the life of the Elizabethan playwright and his own:

the story that Plaatje tells of Shakespeare is of a village boy who moves to the great city to make good, bringing renown to the rural community of his birth, meeting and influencing influential people from all walks of life, including royalty. But, Plaatje assures his Tswana reader, "throughout his lifetime, the educated and accomplished writer never turned his back on his parents and the little village that had given him life" …[despite] his elevation in social position "while living in London Tsikinya-Chaka fought for the rights that his village of Stratford had been denied [and] many people from Stratford stayed over at his place while they were visiting London".²²

Schalkwyk and Lapula's discussion of Plaatje’s introduction allows us to understand the complex political motives of Plaatje's own translation project. Plaatje’s equation of Shakespeare with himself and visa versa, in his sketch of the poet’s life emerges as a gesture of identification and empowerment – a description of the English playwright’s life which strongly registered its affinity with contemporary African experiences. Plaatje reminded the Tswana people that they have made Shakespeare their own by giving him the popular name of Tsikinya-Chaka and suggested that "none of the Englishmen we know can match his fame and achievements".²³

In a 1990 review of the text of Diphosho-phosho S.J. Shole claims that, even today, very few works by Tswana writers "can equal its excellent, idiomatic style". The translation of the play remained faithful to the original only as far as plot is concerned: character names were phonologically adapted, typical Tswana expressions were used for forms of address, relationship terms, and salutations, and, most significantly, Shakespearean imagery was freely adapted so that, where appropriate, Plaatje utilised Setswana proverbs to convey the meaning of textual metaphors.²⁴ In an article in the newspaper Umteteli wa Bantu which appeared shortly after the publication of the translation in 1930, Plaatje’s friend and fellow linguist David Ramoshoana commented on the ability of the text to transgress temporal and cultural boundaries: "When reading Diphosho-phosho one feels as if one is reading a Mochuana who happened to live in England". He remarked that those who believed that Shakespeare’s language was "an impenetrable mystery" above the "intellectual scope" of "African tongues, notions and outlook" would have, in the light of this publication to "revise their conclusions".²⁵

Critical approaches to Shakespeare in the last decade have highlighted the ways in which both author and text have been "re-imagined", "re-invented", and "re-positioned" in particular historical moments and contexts to answer a specificity of aesthetic, emotional, and political needs.²⁶ Such projects have foregrounded the varied and proactive appropriation of a Shakespeare who is no longer the "exclusive possession of any one social group or cultural formation, but who has provided an enabling and empowering resource which has allowed ‘other’ voices to stake a claim to cultural centrality".²⁷ Sol Plaatje’s translations of Shakespeare were just such an activity; his work was directed at the asymmetries of power so apparent in the relationship of Setswana to English, and of orature to literature. But the textual history of these two translations demonstrates the ways in which their colonial context continued to exert a stranglehold on their performance of a subjectivity based on negotiation with Shakespeare’s text.

The only other translation of Shakespeare to have survived – Plaatje’s 1917 translation of Julius Caesar – was published after his death by G.P. Lestrade and Clement Doke, linguists from Pretoria’s Orthography Committee, whose plans for the implementation of a centralised orthography for Setswana Plaatje had stoutly resisted.²⁸ As Schalkwyk and Lapula have demonstrated, the 1937 text of Plaatje’s Julius Caesar was significantly altered in a deliberate undoing of the fusions of identity that characterised his translations. The linguists’ editorial interventions ‘corrected’ what Lestrade called the ‘outright errors’ of Plaatje’s Setswana translation and changed his orthography to one they had devised themselves for the language.²⁹ All Plaatje’s introductory material was omitted and replaced by an introduction that explained Lestrade’s "rectification" of his text. On the title page of his translation, Plaatje had identified Shakespeare as William Tsikinya-Chaka – the name that would be instantly recognisable to his Tswana readers. This was changed back to the "William Shakespeare" of the white, English-speaking, western canon. Despite the Tswana’s creative oralised translation of Tsikinya-Chaka into their own vernacular Doke and Lestrade felt the name "William Shakespeare" to be somehow more sacrosanct than his writings. The text continued to be produced in this form, as part of the "Bantu Treasury" series produced by Witwatersrand University.³⁰

Since the publication of Plaatje’s translations little, until recently, has been written about them, but the fact of their existence has been utilised to forge a link between Plaatje and Shakespeare – almost exclusively in terms of his novel Mhudi. The influence of Shakespearean techniques and dramatic forms on the novel, and on Plaatje’s view of history, was first suggested by Stephen Gray and subsequently challenged by Mazisi Kunene.³¹ But the discovery, in 1976, of an original typescript for Mhudi challenged all previous conceptions of Plaatje’s novel. It revealed a considerable shift in tone, intention and style – so that the first edition published in 1930 seems to have been altered, as Gray and Couzens argue in their article about their discovery of the typescript, so as to "conform more to the norms of white English literature".³² Gray and Couzens question the reason for these emendations to the published work. It is not clear who was finally responsible.³³ What is clear however, is that the changes and omissions are evidence of a "watering down" of the political and historical themes of the novel – one effect of such suppressions is to diminish Plaatje’s suggestion that tyranny of whatever kind will eventually be overthrown. The most important change, the deletion of the narrator Half-A-Crown from the 1930 edition, marks the severance of the link to orature in Plaatje’s Mhudi.³⁴

This rupture of the continuity of Mhudi with the African oral tradition reveals the insight of Mazisi Kunene’s early criticism of the novel and his angry resistance, in response to Gray’s article, to what he saw as the transformation of Plaatje into a ‘Shakespearised’ African. There are now enough critical reassessments of the power of Plaatje’s fusion of orature, history, romance and drama in the multi-generic Mhudi, to prove against Kunene’s claim that the novel is a "failure". But Kunene’s article raises an important distinction. Kunene, himself a Zulu poet much influenced by the oral tradition of izibongo argues for a consideration of orature that was not apparent in early criticism of the book.³⁵ Plaatje’s novel, he states, was not the first novel by a black South African – if by novel what is meant is a story in this semi-fictional form – it was simply the first novel to be written down in English.³⁶

The omission of Half-a-Crown from the 1930 edition of Mhudi allowed for a misreading of the link to orality, and of Plaatje’s position as transcriber of an oral culture, both in Mhudi and within his Shakespearean translations.³⁷ The alteration of Mhudi was an assimilationist move, a rupture of the relationship of Plaatje’s text to Tswana orature, which repeated the realignments to an English tradition performed by Lestrade and Doke in their editorial ‘correction’ of Plaatje’s Julius Caesar and their effacement of the indigenised name given by the Tswana to William Shakespeare, from the translation published in 1937. Today, as South Africa struggles with a new vision of itself, and therefore of Plaatje, the dominance of English within the South African literary academy, the concomitant impulse to bring Plaatje’s achievement into line with the norms of English literature, and the failure to seriously engage with his writing in Setswana, risks repeating or continuing the stranglehold of the colonial context in which he wrote both his novel and his translations. The challenge, in a culture of 11 official languages, is to repeat Plaatje’s achievement, and strive after less easily achieved identifications, thus engaging with a South Africa that is necessarily, already, in translation, transgressing the racial, cultural, and linguistic boundaries of our nation and allowing a new South Africa to enter the world.³⁸

Deborah Seddon completed a BA and MA in English Literature at Rhodes University, South Africa. She is currently doing a PhD at Clare College, Cambridge University, on the nineteenth and early twentieth century
appropriations of Shakespeare.

1. This is a revised and shortened version of a paper which first appeared on Litnet, South African Online Journal. Online posting, March 2003. www.litnet.co.za/seminarroom/seddon.asp
2. Makeba’s remark illustrates how the English name for "The Click Song" is a refusal of cultural translation characteristic of many English speakers’ attitudes to African language in South Africa.
3. Address By Minister Of Education, Professor Kader Asmal, MP on the occasion of the naming of Sol Plaatje House, 123 Schoeman Street, Pretoria, Thursday, 15 June 2000. The full text of Kader Asmal’s speech can be found at the South African Department of Education website: education.pwv.gov.za/Media/Speeches_2000/June_2000/Sol_Plaatje.htm
4. Plaatje was editor of Mafeking’s Koranta ea Becoana (Bechuana Gazette), written in Setswana and English, from 1902-1907, and of Kimbereley’s Tsala ea Becoana (Friend of the Bechuana) from 1910-12. He edited Tsala ea Batho (The Friend of the People), written in Sepedi, Setswana, and English from 1912-1915. See Brian Willan, Sol Plaatje: South African Nationalist, (London: Heinemann, 1984), pp. 104-173. For examples of Plaatje’s journalism see Sol Plaatje, Selected Writings, Brian Willan (ed.), (Johannesburg: Witwatersrand UP, 1996).
5. Elleke Boehmer, Empire, the National, and the Postcolonial, 1890-1920: Resistance in Interaction, (Oxford: Oxford UP), p.126.
6. Tim Couzens, ‘Editorís View’, in Sol Plaatje, Mhudi (Cape Town, Francolin Press, 1996), p.188.
7. In addition to the connections he made in his travels to England, Plaatje also visited the United States and Canada, meeting and finding common political ground with prominent African-American statesmen, writers, and leaders, amongst them W.E.B Du Bois and Marcus Garvey. See Willan, South African Nationalist.
8. Plaatje translated Julius Caesar, A Comedy of Errors, Much Ado About Nothing, The Merchant of Venice, and Othello. There is some evidence that he also began a translation of Romeo and Juliet. Only two translations survive today. See Willan, South African Nationalist.
9. See David Schalkwyk and Lerothodi Lapula, ‘Sol Plaatje, William Shakespeare and the Translation of Culture’ Pretexts: Literary and Cultural Studies, (9:1, 2000), pp. 10-26; and Brian Willan, Sol Plaatje: South African Nationalist, (London: Heinemann, 1984).
10. Ato Quayson, Strategic Transformations in Nigerian Writing: Orality & History in the Work of Rev. Samuel Johnson, Amos Tutuola, Wole Soyinka & Ben Okri, (Oxford: J. Currey, 1997), pp. 16-17. Quayson favours "interdiscursivity" over the term "intertextuality" because of the privileging of the written text implied by the latter.
11. Robert Scholes, Textual Power (London: Yale UP, 1985), p. 15
12. ‘Bechuana’ is a nineteenth- and early twentieth-century term for the Tswana.
13. Sol Plaatje, ‘A South African’s Homage’ in Selected Writings, Brian Willan (ed.), (Johannesburg: Witwatersrand UP, 1996), p. 211.
14. Setswana/English English/Setswana Dictionary. Compiled by Z.I. Matumo. 4th Ed. Gaborone: Macmillan Botswana. Because of changes to the Setswana orthography the modern spelling of the name would be Tsikinya-Tshaka.
15. Karin Barber, ‘African Oral Praise Poetry’ in Oral Literature and Performance in Southern Africa, Duncan Brown (ed.), (Oxford: James Currey, 1999), p.30.
16. Ibid, p. 30-31.
17. Sol Plaatje, ‘A South African’s Homage’, in Selected Writings, p. 212.
18. Sol Plaatje, ‘A South African’s Homage’, in Selected Writings, p. 210.
19. Proverbs have multifaceted functions within African cultures. They are often said to represent a people’s philosophy, a repository of wisdom on a wide range of human experience, but within such an understanding there is a great deal of scope for flexibility and individual originality. See Ruth Finnegan, Oral Literature in Africa, (Oxford UP, 1970), pp. 403-420.
20. Sol Plaatje, Sechuana Proverbs with Literal Translations and their European Equivalents (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner and Co, 1916); and Sol Plaatje and Daniel Jones, A Sechuana Reader in International Phonetic Orthography, (London: University of London Press, 1916). Sechuana was the word used for Setswana in an earlier orthography.
21. Shakespeare’s plays also provided a context to record the more archaic forms of his own language Interviewed shortly after the publication of his translations, Plaatje remarked that in the "absence of a reliable dictionary of some doubtful passages" required "verification" from the older members of the Tswana to ensure their accurate interpretation. See ‘Shakespeare in Sechuana’ The Star, 26 July, 1930, in Sol Plaatje, Selected Shorter Writings, ISEA reprints, (English in Africa 3:2, Sept 1976), (Grahamstown: ISEA/Rhodes, 1995), p. 12. Plaatje’s efforts to publish the other translations, as well as a more accurate dictionary and a collection of Setswana praise poems and folk tales were thwarted by lack of funding, the political context, and the debates over Setswana orthography that pervaded the early twentieth century.
22. Plaatje’s introduction is translated from the Setswana by Lerothodi Lapula. See Schalkwyk and Lapula, p. 20.
23. Schalkwyk and Lapula, p. 20.
24. S.J. Shole, ‘Shakespeare in Setswana: An Evaluation of Raditladi’s Macbeth and Plaatje’s Diphosho-phosho’, Shakespeare in Southern Africa. (4: 1990/1), pp. 51-64.
25. David Ramoshoana, ‘Shakespeare in Sechuana’ Umteteli wa Bantu, 4 October 1930, quoted in Willan, South African Nationalist, pp. 330-331. A ‘Mochuana’, or in today’s orthography, a ‘Motswana’, is a Tswana person.
26. See, amongst others, Jean Marsden, The Re-Imagined Text: Shakespearean Adaptation and Eighteenth Century Literary Theory (Lexington: Kentucky University Press, 1995); Gary Taylor, Reinventing Shakespeare: A Cultural History from the Restoration to the Present. (New York: Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1989); and Thomas Cartelli, Repositioning Shakespeare: National Formations and Postcolonial Appropriations. (London: Routledge, 1999).
27. Kate Chedgzoy, Shakespeare’s Queer Children: Sexual Politics and Contemporary Culture. (Manchester UP, 1995), pp. 1-2.
28. For details on Setswana’s history see Tore Janson and Joseph Tsonope, Birth of a National Language: the History of Setswana (Gaborone: Heinemann, 1991). For Plaatje’s struggle with white linguists over an orthography for Setswana see Willan, South African Nationalist, p. 343; Sol Plaatje, Selected Writings, Willan (ed.); and "A Whiteman’s Native Language", Umteteli wa Bantu, 5 December 1931 in Sol Plaatje, Selected Shorter Writings, p. 67.
29. G.P. Lestrade’s introduction is translated from the Setswana by Lerothodi Lapula. See Schalkwyk and Lapula, p. 23.
30. See Schalkwyk and Lapula, pp. 10-26.
31. See Stephen Gray, "Sources of the First Black South African Novel in English: Solomon Plaatje’s Use of Shakespeare and Bunyan in Mhudi". Munger Africana Library Notes, 37, (Pasadena: California Institute of Technology, 1976), pp. 1-28 and "Plaatje’s Shakespeare", English in Africa, (4: 1, 1977), pp. 1-6; Mazisi Kunene’s review of Gray’s ideas appears in Research in African Literatures, (11: 2, 1980), pp. 244-247.
32. Stephen Gray and Tim Couzens, "Printers’ and Other Devils: The Text’s of Sol T. Plaatje’s Mhudi." Research in African Literatures, (9: 2, 1978), p. 210.
33. Gray and Couzens ask whether the alterations are evidence of a pragmatic self-censorship on Plaatje’s part, changes he thought he ought to make, for his audience or his editor, in order to get his novel published or were these interventions from another source. We cannot know for certain, neither it is assured that the discovered typescript is the original version of the novel, only that appears closer, than the 1930 edition, to Plaatje’s original intentions. See Ibid.
34. Ibid, pp. 198-215.
35. See Mazisi Kunene’s poetry, particularly Emperor Shaka the Great: a Zulu epic, (London: Heinemann, 1979) and Anthem of the Decades: a Zulu epic, (London: Heinemann, 1981); both translated from Zulu by the author.
36. Mazisi Kunene, "Review" Research in African Literatures, (11:2, 1980), p. 245.
37. Plaatje produced Mhudi, as he states in the Preface, in order to raise money to print his collection of Setswana folk tales "which, with the spread of European ideas are fast being forgotten". Sol Plaatje, Mhudi, (London: Heinemann, 1978), p. 21.
38. For a sense of Plaatje as a writer on the borderlines of cultures compare the attempts of his translations with the description of borderland cultures in Homi Bhabha, "How Newness Enters the World: Postmodern Space, Postcolonial Times and the Trials of Cultural Translation" in The Location of Culture, (London: Routledge, 1994), p. 223.