[In the following essay, Mpe explores Sol Plaatje's Mhudi—the first novel written by a black South African to be published in English—in terms of the relationship between the African tradition of orality and the Western novel. Mpe notes the influence of Mhudi on both pre- and post-apartheid South African literature.]

Besides being an allegorical indictment of the Natives' Land Act of 1913 as well as an interpretation of the history of South Africa in the early 1800s from a black perspective, Mhudi is also Sol Plaatje's endeavour to preserve Setswana oral traditions. This is done in a number of ways, one of which is the inclusion of some oral art forms in the novel. Another one is spelled out in his preface to the novel, namely to use financial profits from Mhudi “to collect and print (for Bantu Schools) Sechuana folk-tales, which, with the spread of European ideas, are fast being forgotten” (Plaatje 1978:21). His fear of the loss of the folktales also applies to proverbs. He states in an earlier book, Sechuana Proverbs with Literal Translations and Their European Equivalents, that “[w]ith the spread of European speech and thought in South Africa, these primitive saws are fast being forgotten” (Plaatje 1916:ix). The object of Sechuana Proverbs, and of course of his lost books of Setswana poetry and folktales¹ as well as of Mhudi, is therefore “to save from oblivion, as far as this can be done, the proverbial expressions of the Bechuana people” (1). That Plaatje invested so much time in these art forms demonstrates the seriousness with which he viewed them. Despite his demonstrated seriousness, however, his critics have to date not undertaken an investigation into his mediation of Setswana oral traditions in written English.

This article undertakes a brief examination of Plaatje's perceptions of and attempts at preserving Setswana oral art forms. This is done in the light of Eileen Julien's argument that mediations of orality through written works are often deliberate, complex exercises that should not be taken at face value. The starting point of Julien's argument concerns the issue of what brought scholars to examine questions of orality in the African novel. The initial impulse, she argues, was the annexation, appropriation and colonisation of African texts by Eurocentric criticism (Julien 1992:4). In particular, the African novel was seen as an appendix to the Western novel. Very often this meant that the African novel was judged unfavorably by Eurocentric critics. As a response to this Eurocentrism, some critics endeavoured to repossess the African novel by showing that it was in significant ways continuous with African oral traditions.

Julien cites Leopold Senghor as one of the earliest critics “to signal [this] continuity of African verbal arts” (5). Writing of his and his contemporaries' works, Senghor suggests: “For those wanting to discover our mentors, they would do best to look toward Africa” (5). What this means is that the potential discoverers would benefit by acquainting themselves with African oral traditions. As Julien points out, even in his written poetry Senghor alludes to oral traditions in the titles of his poems, and in “parenthetical, italicized scripts that are the equivalent of musical directions” (5). Also, the rhythm in Senghor's poetry, as well as the “‘traditional’—that is to say, culturally specific and nature-based imagery” (5)—are often viewed as derivations from oral poetry. In this way, Julien argues, “Senghor … aims—with what might be called … ‘willed transparence’—to situate his poetic practice vis-à-vis oral traditions and to guide the reception of his poems” (5).

Hamadou Kane, too, seems to hold the view that the African novel is continuous with African oral traditions. Indeed, for him, it is such perceived continuity that determines its originality (in Julien 1992:5). Kane conflates originality with continuity, and continuity is in turn viewed as originating from oral traditions. The texts of Mbwil a Mpang Ngal take Kane's point further. For example, for one of Ngal's characters, “the novel is Western; by implication then, ‘Africanness’ is located in the oral universe of the tale. The novel will have been ‘tamed’ or domesticated when it will have been touched and modified by orality” (6). Accordingly, orality comes to be seen as both origin and authenticity (7), so that if there is any continuity, originality and authenticity in written arts, they must then be located in orality.

The problem with such an approach, according to Julien, is that, firstly, it confuses and equates “an accidental phenomenon (mode of language) with essence: writing is European, orality is African” (8). Because orality comes to be associated with Africanness, writing is accordingly assumed to be alien to Africans, and to be disjunctive in their arts. Secondly, the approach sets up an unnecessary binary opposition between orality and writing.² Thus, besides being a failure to examine an interplay of cultural processes and aesthetics, this construction of the binary opposition between orality and writing is often accompanied by various connotations. Depending on the ideological standpoint of the critic, orality comes to be valorised at the expense of writing and vice versa. Thus there would be those critics who will conceive of orality in evolutionist terms, in which orality is associated with elementary stages in human civilisation. The stages will in turn be associated with an inability to think rationally, and sometimes, as Haggard's treatment of orality (according to Peter Esterhuysen 1988) does, with barbarism. Others will of course see such stages as being marked by innocence and closeness to nature. Orality here comes to be represented as an embodiment of purity and virtue (Julien 1992:12).

Given the problematic of orality in the African novel, Julien suggests that, as readers and critics, when we look at the interaction between orality and literacy, “it … should not be in an effort to prove or disprove cultural authenticity but rather to appreciate literature as a social and aesthetic act” (24). This means that we need to examine the interface of orality and literacy in written texts as a narrative strategy whose inclusion in respective genres is purposeful: it helps to address and solve certain ideological problems and to overcome aesthetic shortcomings.

The work of Julien suggests that mediation of orality in written texts is achieved through complex narrative layering. It is in this sense that it offers us more compelling ways of reading orality in written texts than most critics of Sol Plaatje and his novel have yet offered. According to this approach, orality is examined for the ideological and aesthetic ends that it serves, rather than as an agent of establishing authenticity (Africanness) and continuity (of the oral in the written) in African literature. Besides being a misleading venture, such an exercise, Julien shows, results in a mystification of both orality and tradition, as well as of the African past. In looking at orality in written texts, then, Julien requires us to move away from notions of continuity and simple reflection. Instead of seeing oral forms in written texts as an unproblematic mirroring of extant oral traditions, we need to ask how writers solve the manifest problems that come with this project. How, for example, does one deal with representing oral forms of one language in another? What are the aesthetic, ideological and political possibilities that are opened up by such representations of orality?

This article attempts to answer these questions in relation to Sol Plaatje. It begins this task by examining Plaatje's views on Setswana oral art forms. Deeply committed to their preservation, Plaatje took up the issue of recording and translating Setswana proverbs, poetry and folktales in book form to involving himself in orthographical debates on how Setswana was to be represented in print. Central to all of these endeavours was the concern of how oral forms were to be represented, circulated and made accessible to a wider audience. This preoccupation was in turn intimately associated with questions of translation and of finding cultural equivalents and correspondences through which oral forms could be disseminated to wider audiences. The article investigates how Plaatje negotiated his way around these questions of correspondence, equivalence and translation across language, medium and often continents. It argues that his perception and preservation of the art forms cannot be separated from the ideas that he gained about literature from colonial mission education. In particular Shakespeare and the Bible became major imaginative templates through which he recast Setswana oral forms in English. Indeed, the oral forms, biblical materials and some elements of Shakespeare's plays, in his opinion, possessed such affinities that there were virtually no boundaries between them. The affinities, especially in the case of Shakespeare, were such that, Plaatje felt, the playwright could easily be translated into written Setswana. Indeed, Plaatje's homage to Shakespeare shows that the playwright was also amenable to being oralised and indigenised, thus becoming part of the popular culture among some Batswana. The translation of Shakespeare's plays which Plaatje undertook, as well as the oralisation of Shakespeare, suggests that, for Plaatje, orality and literacy were interdependent. They suggest a dialectic of cross-referencing and complementarity.

The dialectic of cross-referencing and complementarity is also implied in Plaatje's preservation of Setswana poetry and folktales. The act of preservation often involved the writing down and translation of the art forms into English. In terms of translation, as Plaatje was aware, a measure of success could only be achieved by finding cultural equivalents of the material being translated. That was how he managed to translate Shakespeare's plays into Setswana (Couzens & Willan 1976:9).³ Also, as we suggest, that was how he translated Setswana poetry and folktales into English. Plaatje's translations display Shakespearean as well as general English—and, in the case of folktales, colonial mission—influences to an extent that he could be said to have reinvented them. Given the dialectic of cross-referencing and complementarity between orality and literacy it becomes imperative to investigate, rather than to take at face value, his concern to preserve Setswana oral art forms as well as the final product of his endeavour. Such an investigation reveals a creative act of invention of the Setswana traditions on the part of Plaatje.

PLAATJE'S HOMAGE TO SHAKESPEARE

Plaatje's homage to Shakespeare reveals that he often thought of Shakespeare in terms that foreground the playwright's relevance in challenging South African racial political practices in general, and in enriching Setswana cultural art forms, especially that of storytelling. Indeed, in his writings on the reception of Shakespeare by some educated sections of Batswana, Plaatje suggests that Shakespeare was revered for his oratory skills, which were also central to the cultural practices of the Batswana. Plaatje further adds that one other reason that made Shakespeare's works readily accessible and acceptable was that some of the beliefs and practices displayed in his plays find cultural equivalents in Setswana. Because of the two factors, Shakespeare was often appropriated by the Batswana. The process involved retelling, and translating his stories into Setswana. There were thus two processes at work simultaneously: one is that of Africanising Shakespeare, and the second one involves oralising his plays.

But the process worked the other way, too. When, for example, Plaatje wanted to translate some of the praise poems of the Batswana chiefs into English, he had to find English equivalents of the poems. Being well acquainted with Shakespeare, presumably Plaatje frequently drew on him. Indeed, his translation of chief Montsioa's praise displays this influence. Arguably, the Africanisation and oralisation of Shakespeare was accompanied by the “Shakespearisation” of Setswana art forms.

Writing in 1916 Plaatje said of intelligence in Africa that it was still disseminated by word of mouth. This was obviously true of historical as well as fictional forms of knowledge. In this context where oral skills were crucial, Plaatje found Shakespeare handy. Because of his reading of the playwright Plaatje “always had a good story to tell” (in Couzens & Willan 1976:7), a story often drawn from Shakespeare's plays. When it came to his reading of The Merchant of Venice, we are told, “[t]he characters were so real that I was asked more than once to which of certain speculators, then operating in Kimberley, Shakespeare referred as Shylock” (7). Being thus encouraged by his audience's interest in Shakespeare's characters, Plaatje furthered his reading of the playwright. He learnt from the exercise that “the current quotations used by educated natives to embellish their speeches, which [he] had always taken for English proverbs, were culled from Shakespeare's works” (7). This mistaking of Shakespeare quotations for English proverbs in itself suggests that the classification of written expression versus oral genres is a slippery, tricky process.

In retelling Shakespeare's stories orally, Plaatje presumably added or subtracted things from the originals, as it suited him. Whatever the case may be, one thing is clear: Shakespeare was oralised. The process involved the retelling of Shakespeare's written stories, giving them a voice or sound, with the audience participating by asking questions of the type mentioned above. Secondly, from the quotations of Shakespeare by Plaatje's educated contemporaries, we may reasonably deduce that they too found Shakespeare not only a source of embellishment of their speeches, but also a source of fresh oral stories. What is implicit in Plaatje's account of his acquaintance with Shakespeare and the way in which the playwright was received by Plaatje's educated contemporaries, is that his plays were not only oralised, but were also democratised. That is, the act of translating and circulating them orally, though perhaps in new forms, made his reception wider than would have been the case with the printed scripts only. There is a case to be made, then, that Shakespeare's stories became part of the popular tradition of storytelling.

In addition, Shakespeare's sayings influenced Plaatje's journalistic and other works. When King Edward II and two Batswana chiefs, Sebele and Bathoeng, died around 1910, the year that Halley's Comet crossed the skies, Plaatje opened his obituary with the words: “When beggars die there are no comets seen; / The heavens themselves blaze forth the death of princes” (in Couzens & Willan 1976:8). In Mhudi the defeat and humiliation of Mzilikazi is marked by the appearance of a comet, as predicted by his doctors. In fact, Halley's Comet was historically seen in 1835, within the historical temporal setting of the novel. There is a historical basis for associating comets with deaths of great leaders, and it is perhaps on this basis that the defeat and humiliation of Mzilikazi and his nation in Mhudi is also associated with them. The cultural beliefs of the Batswana surely also contributed something towards their appreciation of Shakespeare's works, as his plays contain some aspects of their cultural beliefs. The notion of ghosts in Hamlet or the witches in Macbeth, for example, would not have been alien to them, nor would the whole idea of kingship in Shakespeare's plays in general. Indeed, in Mhudi witchdoctors are after all sentenced to death by king Mzilikazi for attempting to incite fear in him instead of revealing the whereabouts of his exiled wife Umnandi. At least that is how he perceives their warning about the forthcoming comet and its accompanying destruction of his nation by the vengeful Barolong-Griqua-Voortrekker alliance.

Besides, Plaatje's account of the positive reception of Shakespeare within his society suggests an additional aspect of Setswana culture:

Besides being natural story-tellers, the Bechuana 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 for 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 as a reliable white oracle.

(8)

It was thus not enough to Africanise Shakespeare by translating him freely into Setswana and oralising him by giving his plays a human voice, but he also had to have a Setswana nickname. What is more, the words “oracle” and “the white man who spoke so well” emphasize Shakespeare's oral, rather than writing, skills, although the different skills clearly reinforce each other in this particular case. What Plaatje's homage to Shakespeare reveals is that literacy, of which the white oracle is an incarnation, was not wiping out orality. Rather, literacy was domesticated or appropriated, through oralisation, and thus made to add to and enrich oral practices like that of storytelling. In other words, Shakespeare was used as a remarkable cultural resource. In addition, he became, in part at least, a legend on the art of storytelling. Given this, it becomes clear that Plaatje's own view that European thinking was decimating Setswana oral art forms, a view which suggests that orality is vulnerable and at the mercy of literacy, is not unproblematic.

Plaatje's homage is in part a testimony to the tenacity of orality. This testimony is reinforced, among others, by Isabel Hofmeyr's research on orality and literacy on a Berlin Mission in the northern Transvaal. Hofmeyr argues that the effects of literacy, “like those of technology, are subordinated to their social setting” (1991:663).⁴ One instance of such subordination is indicated in the failure of the missionaries at the Berlin Mission Station to persuade their congregants to assume the missionaries' own understanding of literacy. Their understanding included the view of literacy as involving such ideals as “inner discipline” reinforced by “silent reading”:

However, for a long time the missionaries were simply unable to implement their understanding of literacy as congregants and visitors to the mission continued their selective appropriation. As regards church services, these were appropriated by popular taste which helped to dictate the form and style of holy worship and other mission activities. These almost invariably relied on orality, performance, festival, spectacle and image, or, in other words, the central resources of African culture.

(642—emphasis added)

Similarly, the oralisation and appropriation of Shakespeare, especially by Plaatje, constituted a rejection of packaged ideas about the relationship between literacy, race and human behaviour.

In an overview of the critical reception of Mhudi, David Johnson suggests that Shakespeare represented, in Plaatje's time, the example of what good literature was. Linked to this was of course the attempt by some British subjects to use the playwright as a symbol of their patriotism, which thrived on imposing itself on other cultures and portraying them negatively. But if this symbol of civilisation and patriotism could be oralised and appropriated, then surely those who could oralise and appropriate it did not consider their own culture to be any less important, nor can we dismiss their culture as unsophisticated. The oralisation and appropriation of Shakespeare was therefore a rejection of Eurocentrism and racism. As Plaatje said in reaction to the pictures advertising some cinematographic show of the Crucifixion in London, in which Judas was the only black character: “Shakespeare's dramas … show that nobility and valour, like depravity and cowardice, are not the monopoly of any colour” (in Couzens & Willan 1976:8). It is such pictures that made it necessary for Plaatje to indicate that in writing Native Life in South Africa he was not speaking for the cause of “hordes of cannibals” (1982:18). He was instead writing on behalf of oppressed, loyal British subjects who could benefit from British intervention. Although Britain failed to offer some form of political intervention, Plaatje was nevertheless making use of their (perhaps unintended) cultural offer in the person of Shakespeare. In the process this writer was seen through the eyes of a largely oral society which was sophisticated enough to be able to collapse assumed rigid boundaries between literacy and orality, and thus between British and Setswana civilisations that the modes of communication were thought to represent. Another fascinating development was that oral art forms were in turn perceived in Plaatje's case in relation to Shakespeare.

The oralisation of Shakespeare registers the incompleteness or inadequacy of literacy in a predominantly oral society. With Plaatje, oral art forms without literary influences seem to have been inconceivable. In his opinion, for example, through such things as translations, African literature in its mature form will benefit from “some at least of Shakespeare's works”: “That this could be done is suggested by the probability that some of the stories on which his dramas are based find equivalents in African folk lore” (in Couzens & Willan 1976:18).

What the question of equivalents raises is that it will not always be clear whether, in any given story, the African writer draws on his or her oral traditional art forms or on Shakespeare (or, indeed, another exogenous cultural influence). Similarly, keeping in mind that some oral art forms find equivalents in the Bible and vice versa, it will not always be clear whether a particular writer draws on the Bible or not. Indeed, Setswana beliefs, Shakespeare and the Bible are tellingly linked in Plaatje's statement on Halley's Comet and the deaths in and around 1910 of the three rulers mentioned earlier:

Those events gave the colour of truth to a native belief that such heavenly bodies never appear except as omens of wars or some great occurrences like the death of rulers. This belief finds corroboration in the records of civilised nations, as, for instance, the Bible story of the visit of the Magi, besides Shakespeare's writings, for the Bard of Avon wrote: ‘When beggars die there are no comets seen, but the heavens themselves blaze forth the death of princes’.

(21-22)

Further on, we read of missionaries' possible reinforcement of the African traditional beliefs in heavenly bodies:

In common with other Bantu tribes, the Bechuana attach many ominous traditions to stellar movements and the visitation of comets in particular. This superstition was by no means shaken by their contact with missionaries, and their perusal of the Bible story concerning the visit of the Magi. The appearance of Halley's Comet in April [1910] (which found them disconcerted by thoughts of the impending Union of South African Colonies, and the possible inclusion therein of their territories) supplied them with considerable material for discussion. All kinds of disasters were foreshadowed, it being freely stated that the country was heading for a year of sickness, drought and deaths, especially of chiefs, and nations by epidemics.

(23)

Some of the disasters foreshadowed might not have materialised. What did materialise was the establishment of the Union Government which was to pass the 1913 Land Act, thereby taking away lands from these disturbed people.

PRAISE POETRY AND SONG

A further example of Plaatje's perception of Setswana oral traditions in Shakespearean terms is evident from the biographies of some of the leaders to whom he paid tribute. One such tribute was to Montsioa, chief Tauana's son who seems to have played a major historical role in the execution of Mzilikazi's tax collector, Bhoya, in 1830. In a biography Plaatje quotes some of Montsioa's praises. Oral praise poetry, as Ruth Finnegan shows, is a very complex phenomenon. In a discussion of its style, she points out that its use of language can be obscure due to “its figurative quality [as well as allusion to] historical events, places, and peoples” (Finnegan 1970:132). In addition, a “series of pictures is conveyed to the listeners through a number of laconic and often rather staccato sentences, a grouping of ideas which may on different occasions come in a different order” (135). Karin Barber captures the fluidity of oral praise poetry in a simile in her discussion of oriki and similar praise poetry from Africa: “The whole [in oriki] is like a string of beads, a long chain of interchangeable parts, which can be extended or broken off at will without significantly altering its form” (Barber 1995:23). Because of this lack of form, as critics steeped in the New Criticism approach would see it, “Oriki-type texts … offer … slippery and shifting ground [with no] sense of an ending” (22).

The above observations alert us to the difficulty one would encounter in trying to translate such poetry. Also, because the poetry is fluid in nature, it is difficult to pin down through definition. Defining the praise poem of Montsioa would accordingly have presented serious challenges to Plaatje. Plaatje nevertheless faces the challenge by attempting to find English equivalents to refer to both the praise and the praise poets. He calls the praise an “irregular verse” and the poets become “court jesters” (1976:19). “Irregular verse” here assumes that his readership will be acquainted with the British poetic conventions such as writing in iambic pentameters and rhyme scheme, while “court jesters” owes something to his reading of Shakespeare's plays. Having grappled with questions of what to call the praise, Plaatje still had to grapple with the actual process of translating it.

Duncan Brown raises important points about transcription and translation of oral poetry. “Like transcription,” he says, “translation involves an important process of mediation” (1994:169). The challenges of translation do not only stem from the fact that sometimes words and phrases in one language do not have equivalents in the language of the translation, a point of which Plaatje was keenly aware. “The difficulties of translating oral poetry,” Brown puts it, “are exacerbated by the fact that the structure of rhythm and rhyme often differ greatly between languages and language groups, something which is particularly marked between English and African languages” (169). Faced with such difficulties, Brown points out, translators often represent oral poems in writing by using “print conventions of short lines and stanzas, seeking to create an equivalence of effect between the source language and target language” (170). As he usefully reminds us a few lines later, equivalence and sameness are not identical, and as such translation actually involves invention. Not surprisingly, one encounters some notable stylistic as well as semantic differences between the original praise of Montsioa and Plaatje's translation of it.

Plaatje quotes the original and then translates it as follows:

Mogatsa Majang, tau ga di kalo!
Tau ga di kalo, moroa Mhenyana.
Ga di ke di bolaoa leroborobo,
Di ba di etsa dipholofolo tsa gopo,
Di ba di edioa pitse tsa gopo,
Lekau ja Gontse-a-Tauana!
Tau di bolaoa dile thataro,
Lefa dile pedi dia bo di ntse.
(That's not the way to kill lions,
O, husband of Majang!
That's not the way, O, offspring of M'Henyana!
Lions should not be butchered by the score
Nor like hunted animals at the chase;
Lions should not be slaughtered in such numbers,
To litter the field like carcasses of dead zebra,
O, descendant of Gontse, son of Tauana!
Six lions at a time are quite enough
For, even two at a time are not too few!)

(in Couzens & Willan 1976: 18-19)

Besides the fact that the translation comprises ten lines instead of eight as in the original, the translation deviates on a number of points. I offer my own word-for-word translation, as far as this can be done, in order to illustrate the deviations:

Spouse of Majang, lions are not that many!
Lions are not that many, son of Mhenyana.
They are not usually killed by the score,
Like animals at a chase,
Like zebras at a chase,
Lad of Gontse-of-Tauana!
Lions are killed six (at a time),
Even two (at a time) are still many.

In comparing my translation with Plaatje's, what stands out is that Plaatje invents sexual differentiation where it does not appear in the original and, where it does, he omits it (“spouse” becomes “husband”, “son” becomes “offspring”). Secondly, as in the last line of his translation, he puts the point in the negative while the original puts it in the positive. This tends to lessen the effectiveness that one finds in the original. Thirdly, the punctuation in his translation differs from the original. His translation, for example, has at least two more exclamation marks, Indeed, the exclamation mark appears in the translation in each line that has “O”, which does not appear in the original, and which seems to owe much to his acquaintance with particular archaic registers of English. For example, a quick reading of Othello, which is one of the Shakespeare plays he translated into Setswana, reveals that the play uses “O” a lot, often accompanied by an exclamation mark, either after the letter or, alternatively, at the end of a whole phrase or sentence within which “O” appears. Song of Songs, which Plaatje quotes often in his writings, also abounds with the use of this register. A further example of English register is evident in the fact that Mhenyana becomes M'Henyana in the translation. Arguably, this is to help with the pronunciation of the name in English. For had Plaatje not split the letters “M” and “H” with an apostrophe, the “H”-sound might have been omitted in English pronunciation. Other similar points can be raised about the dissimilarities between the original praise and Plaatje's translation, not just in this praise poem but also in another one that precedes it. What is clear is that Plaatje's translation is a search for English equivalents for Setswana oral genres.

This endeavour to find appropriate cultural equivalents of genres and words or phrases across different languages extends to his mediation of songs in Mhudi. For example, after Langa has reduced Kunana to ashes, Ndebele singers praise him:

Come, let us sing!
                    Mzilikazi has a son.
Come, let us sing!
                    Langa is the name of his son.
Come, let us dance!
                    Langa has a spear.
Come, let us prance!
                    His sword is a sharp pointed spear.
Go forth and summon the girls of Soduza
                    To the dance;
Go call the maidens to the Puza,
                    And the dance;
For Mzilikazi has a son!
Langa, the fighter, is his son!

(1978:51)

As I have pointed out (Mpe 1996), Langa's attack on Kunana is shown by Gubuza, as well as the narrator, to be rash and therefore “unmanly”. Indeed, Gubuza is worried that Langa has created a fresh enemy in attacking the Barolong and looting their livestock. The narrator, on the other hand, foregrounds the insensitivity behind this and similar praises, because nobody seems to bother about the pain and grief of those fellow Ndebele who have died or lost relatives in the battle. At best, then, as I argue, the praise song is an expression of barbarism.

Stylistically, it is interesting to note, the presumably illiterate Ndebele in Mhudi are fairly well versed in literary forms. As I have suggested, the song is rather reminiscent of a sonnet in its structure:

The first three quatrains have the rhyme scheme ababcdcdefef, followed by a couplet with the rhyme scheme gg. The quatrains are not divided by line breaks. Rather, they are distinguished by what each emphasises. For example, the first emphasises the idea of singing and of genealogy (“Mzilikazi has a son”), naming (Langa) to suggest particularity. The second quatrain draws attention to fighting (“spear”), pride (suggested by “prance”) and dancing rather than simply singing, fascinatingly linking voice to body language in order to reinforce the worth of both Langa's genealogy and fighting skills. The third quatrain completes the process by pointing out that singing and dancing in praise of Langa falls short of recognising his worth. Accordingly, the singers recommend that maidens be summoned to join in the celebrations, possibly … suggesting that he deserves a wife. The couplet closes off the development of the idea that Langa is worth a lot by reasserting his identity both as a fighter and as Mzilikazi's son.

(Mpe 1996: 77-78)

Earlier on in the novel, Ra-Thaga has also shown himself to be surprisingly skilled in producing a rhyming song, or poem. As Stephen Gray (1977) points out, though in passing, Ra-Thaga's song is reminiscent of English lyrical poetry. Its rhyme scheme is different from the one just examined, although, like it, it provides a criticism of battles and laments the general social hardships that constantly separate Ra-Thaga from his wife Mhudi. The song, “Sweet Mhudi and I”, is a nostalgic expression of Ra-Thaga's memory of Re-Nosi, the forest home that the two established in their flight from Kunana. Because there were no people to bother them, and therefore no wars to fight, Ra-Thaga suggests, Re-Nosi was the best place he had ever occupied, and Mhudi possibly the best person he had lived with. Taken together, the two songs provide a criticism of Mzilikazi's expansionist tendencies, and of imperialism in general. There are a few more songs in Mhudi that display similar features to Ra-Thaga's and Langa's. In Mhudi, then, as in the praises of Montsioa, songs and poems, when encountered in English translation or equivalents, are not entirely the “free verse” that Plaatje makes us to anticipate when he discusses them elsewhere.

From the foregoing discussion, we can argue that the appropriation and indigenisation of Shakespeare underlined the extent to which the plays became, as Karin Barber might have put it, orality-saturated in the hands of the Batswana. In much the same way English versions of Setswana oral art forms in the hands of Plaatje became literacy-saturated. Orality, in other words, was mediated through literacy and vice versa. Mediating orality through literacy, as the above examples illustrate, sometimes involved not just a work of translation but also a creation of new meanings by adding words or phrases that did not appear in the original, or, as in Mhudi, a substitution of English formal structures for what would presumably be “free [Setswana or Ndebele] verse”. Put simply, if Plaatje was endeavouring to preserve orality, then that preservation involved, in part at least, a process of invention. Couzens notes that “Plaatje's Setswana was rich soil for Shakespearean seed” (1988:63). In turn, I would argue, Shakespeare, as well as English literature in general, was rich soil for Setswana. In particular, by translating some of Shakespeare's plays into Setswana, Plaatje was partly enriching written Setswana literature.

Tim Couzens says of Shakespeare and Plaatje that they “matured at the time of a great revolution—when oral culture was being largely transformed to a written one” (63). To the extent that in Plaatje's times, as shown above, there was a marked dialectic of cross-referencing and complementarity between orality and literacy, Couzens's assertion is perhaps a little overstated. The assertion does, however, in part agree with Plaatje's sometimes rather evolutionist perspective that tends to view literacy as being stronger than, and consequently decimating, orality. Yet, even Shakespeare's plays themselves were intended for oral delivery on the stage. That is, they were written down, but with the underlying assumption that they would be oralised. The dialectic of cross-referencing and complementarity was therefore often on display, if not always in the two writers' conception of orality and/or literacy, at least in the interaction or interface that they facilitated between the two phenomena.⁵

CONCLUSION

As I have argued, Plaatje was aware of the dialectic of cross-referencing and complementarity between orality and literacy. To the extent that his work on Setswana oral traditions points to such awareness, we can reasonably conclude that Plaatje anticipated some of the theorisation on orality and literacy, and simultaneously criticised, in anticipation, the binary model of orality and literacy that is today associated with Walter Ong. Yet, in so far as Plaatje also offered, at times, an evolutionist model, which suggests a gradual decimation of orality, his perception of orality tends to be ambiguous and at times even self-contradictory.

In short, then, an investigation of Plaatje's contribution to orality and literacy debates is a study not only of inventions of Setswana oral art forms through translations into English as well as the oralisation and Africanisation of written traditions, but also a study in ambiguities and contradictions. These inventions, ambiguities and contradictions must be foregrounded if we are to broaden significantly our understanding of Plaatje's contribution to the question of orality and cultural politics. In turn, it is in the context of such an understanding that, as critics, we will need to reconsider Mhudi's contribution to orality-literacy debates. It is sad that this—the first novel in English by a black South African, who, in addition, was one of the first black Africans to engage comprehensively and with sophistication with the question of orality in writing, even before it became a major item on the literary and critical agenda—should be consistently by-passed when issues of orality and the African novel are debated.

Notes

1. According to his biographer, Brian Willan, these books got lost because Plaatje insisted on having them published in a phonetic script, which was regarded as weird by many people. Publishers were reluctant to publish books in a “strange spelling” (1984:342).

2. For an overview and critique of models that set binary oppositions between orality and literacy, see Ruth Finnegan (1988) and Brian Street (1993). Walter Ong tends to view writing not only as replacing orality, but also as determining and structuring the way people think and conduct themselves. His own opinion is that writing develops thought in ways that the spoken word cannot, and, not surprisingly, his opposition of literacy to orality is at the same time an opposition of literate and oral societies (Finnegan 1988: 8-9). Communication technology, according to Ong, is what essentially shapes social structures and human conduct. Ong, like other writers who subscribe to what Street calls an “autonomous model of literacy”, “conceptualises literacy in technical terms, treating it as independent of social context, an autonomous variable whose consequences for society and cognition can be derived from its intrinsic character” (Street 1993:5). One of the major problems with the autonomous model of literacy is that it associates literacy “with crude and often ethnocentric stereotypes of ‘other cultures’ and represents a way of perpetuating the notion of a ‘great divide’ between ‘modern’ and ‘traditional’ societies that is less acceptable when expressed in other terms” (7). In addition, because of its insistence on binary oppositions, this model often fails to examine the interaction between and interface of orality and literacy in human and social communication.

3. When it was not possible to find equivalents in translation, Plaatje writes, he has “had to rely on the general sense of the whole passage to render the author's meaning in the vernacular, and that has been his difficulty” (1976:9).

4. Hofmeyr returns to this point in her survey of oral historical studies in southern Africa, in “‘Wailing for Purity’: Oral Studies in Southern Africa” (1995). The selective nature in which black South Africans appropriated biblical scriptures and missionary teachings is also emphasised by Duncan Brown's study of the hymns of Isaiah Shembe and his church. Shembe sought to introduce Zulu cultural practices and traditional beliefs—like polygamous marriages, “first fruits” ceremonies, the “concept of the deity [that] … syncretised Christian and African cosmology”, ancestor worship and so on—into his Nazarite church, something which missionaries disapproved of (1995:78). For an investigation of the complex relationship between oral art forms, communication media and the construction of popular memory see Phaswane Mpe, “Orality and Literacy in an Electronic Era” (1999).

5. Even in terms of orthography and representation of sound on paper he felt that five different spellings in Setswana, which were used by different missionaries and their students, did not augur well for the development of the language. Sometimes the different spellings made the Batswana literate in one form of spelling seem illiterate when confronted with a different form of spelling, and the pronunciation resulting from the confusion in spelling could be baffling. Thus, although he evidently appreciated the great efforts of Robert Moffat in putting Setswana on paper in his translation of the Bible in the 1840s, he seems to have revered more Doke's and Jones's representation of African languages using phonetic spelling. His reverence for the phoneticians stems from his conviction that phonetics helps a great deal in the pronunciation of words and their tones. Even non-native speakers can pronounce the words with appropriate tones accurately (in Couzens & Willan 1976:35, 45). It is in this sense that phonetics can be said to be of some importance in oralising the written. Not surprisingly, Plaatje maintains that the best option for representing African languages would be to use the “principle of International Phonetics, of ‘one sound, one letter’” (45). Indeed, the principle of “one sound, one letter” is a powerful indication that speaking and writing complement and reinforce each other.

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