by Ashwin Desai (Unisa Trust)
There are so many books that have the struggle against apartheid as their subject matter. In the year of the ANC’s centenary, one would expect more than the usual crop as publishers cash in on nostalgia and authors sidle up to the ruling elite.
The vast majority of books documenting the struggle focuses on the venerated generation of Mandela and Sisulu. The iconography lends itself to the coffee table.
Handsome, well-turned out men, dignified in the dock. ‘Whites Only’ signs on park benches. Cops swinging sjamboks, solemn processions of women. Prison bars on a desolate island. The images were striking, but becoming a little hackneyed by now.
At first glance, it is surprising that the prolific craftsman Professor Ashwin Desai’s latest work takes as its theme, Robben Island and deals with some of its most noted inmates. Desai has a reputation for the untold story, the forgotten biography and the unofficial history.
However, Reading Revolution: Shakespeare on Robben Island is no rehash of any story already told. Nor is it an uncritical celebration of the prisoners who later came to play so formative a role in post-apartheid politics.
If the book were a musical composition, it would be noted for being played in a minor key, delightfully out of tune. This is because of its subject matter.
Reading Revolution is a poignant and insightful look at the books Robben islanders loved, in particular the plays of the Bard that they were drawn to during their long, enforced sojourn on Robben Island.
It’s a story crying out to be made into a film.
It’s about men sentenced to spend the rest of their lives in jail, who smuggle books, books that are part of the boring, official Anglo-Saxon literary canon.
And yet these texts were used as a basis for political discussion and inspiration and private, solitary comfort.
Desai’s sample of the reading habits of prisoners is wide and non-sectarian.
Nor does he confine himself to the heroes of the struggle. In vintage style, he unearths the quirky characters that history has passed over without properly marking their place.
There is Monde Colin Mkunqwana who was incarcerated on the Island in 1964 and who in his early 70s set his sights on learning to fly.
And there is Sedick Isaacs who went from Robben Island to selling chickens and eggs on the Cape Flats to obtain a doctorate and became head of Informatics at Groote Schuur.
In dealing with the literary preferences of individual prisoners, the book shows fidelity to their world views.
There is no smarminess, point-scoring or 20/20 hindsight. There is a generosity in the way the portraits of these men are painted. But this does not mean there is no engagement with their ideas.
For instance, in the chapter on Sonny Venkatrathnam, Desai notes “… What is it about the organisations setting themselves as more radical and militant than the ANC… that saw them splinter and atrophy?
“Is it not ironic that the people who scream betrayal… defined the ANC in the first place as short on Left commitments? A critical account of the Left alternatives to the ANC awaits its historian.”
During his stint, Sonny Venkatrathnam had secreted within his cell, a copy of Shakespeare’s Collected works.
While in jail, prisoners chose their favourite passage; a quote from a play they most enjoyed or drew from during the dark years behind bars. Where the book is eerily insightful for me is where it analyses these choices, particularly in the light of the turn the lives and politics the islanders would take after 1994.
This is a beautifully presented, unusual and carefully crafted book and several new and surprising facts about beloved icons are brought to light.
In doing so, Reading Revolution records a part of the biographies of the founding fathers of the new SA that will now rightly go down in posterity.
It strikes an extraordinary, utterly un-donnish and altogether beautiful note in a rather cluttered and uneven symphony of struggle historiography. – Terence Pillay