Tsitsi Jaji
When Plaatje discovered that many of the proverbs he had heard educated black South Africans quoting were not merely part of the English language but taken directly from Shakespeare, he formulated an interpretation of the bard as a source of “sayings” rather than as a man of the theater. This interpretation effectively recruits the function of Shakespeare into the cultural context of South Africa, where many indigenous languages were rich in proverbs and where quoting such sayings or their English counterparts was a mark of prestige.
The overwhelming consensus in the global North at the end of the nineteenth century held that Africa was fundamentally, even ontologically primitive. Its traditions might be celebrated as inspiration and instigation and its ancient civilizations prompt uneasy awe, but rare indeed was the notion that Africa might produce, or have produced, classic art.1 Nor were African-descended peoples in the diaspora, whose gradual emancipations continued to drag against access to modernity (1791 in Haiti . . . 1834 in Britain . . . 1848 in France . . . 1865 in the United States . . . 1899 in Brazil . . . ), any more likely to lay legitimate claim to the classic. Given their ex-centric position in relation to the hegemonies of taste and style dictated by a global minority of largely white European and North American men, black perspectives on the classic are necessarily novel. As W. E. B. Du Bois put it, invoking Pliny the Elder in his 1920 Darkwater: Voices from Within the Veil, “Semper novi quid ex Africa” (32).2 While the classic might seem to be the opposite of the modern, I argue that for black artists it was a strategy of modernism, one that I call “classic black.”
My grounding assumption is that “classic black” can and does teach us something new about the relation of the classic to modernism. Recalling the work of LeRoi Jones (later Amiri Baraka) and Nathaniel Mackey in worrying the line of distinction between jazz as noun or verb, I want to think about how the classic, as the seeming obverse of the popular, the vernacular, the “in,” might also function as a sort of verb, a way of making meaning and value. Such a consideration should not imply a reactionary call to prioritize elite forms over those with mass appeal. Rather, I want to insist on the diversity of black subject positions, motivations, and artistic practices in order to enrich conversations about the role of black cultural production, particularly music, in modernism. Examples of popular black culture inspiring “high” modernism are well known, but at the same time that T. S. Eliot was quoting the Johnson brothers and Cole’s “Under the Bamboo Tree,” contemporaneous discourses on music, value, and the role of the past were unfolding among an array of artists of African heritage. Many of these black artists articulated tensions and countercultures of modernity from outside the popular. Attending to global black reinventions of the classic is a necessary supplement to rich scholarship on popular and vernacular black musics like the blues, ragtime, jazz, son, and beguine. As this essay shows, even in seemingly elite forms of black expression, “their special power derives from a doubleness, their unsteady location simultaneously inside and outside the conventions, assumptions, and aesthetic rules which distinguish and periodise modernity” (Gilroy, The Black Atlantic, 73).
I will not venture to arbitrate what is and is not a classic: this question has already been debated by such able critics as T. S. Eliot, Frank Kermode, John Maxwell Coetzee, and Ankhi Mukherjee. Instead, I am interested in the work that the notion of the “classic” accomplished for black artists deeply concerned with the sonorous worlds of music, oratory, and linguistics at the beginning of the twentieth century. What did these thinkers use the “classic” for? I approach this question through two case studies, a composition by Samuel Coleridge-Taylor (1875–1912), a musician of British and Sierra Leonean heritage, and an essay by Solomon Tshekisho Plaatje (1876–1932), a writer, activist, and linguist of Batswana South African heritage. While there is much excellent scholarship on African American modernism, I have chosen these two figures precisely because they are not African American, yet they demonstrate strategies that could be termed globally or transnationally black.
Race serves as a useful optic for these two figures separated by nationality and medium only because of the rise of an internationalist movement that linked organized protest against local forms of racial oppression to a global intentional phalanx of allied struggles. This movement crystallized in a modest yet signal gathering, the Pan African Conference of 1900. Fifty-three delegates of African heritage gathered in a diverse assembly that included two attendees from India and fifteen participants of European heritage (Sherwood, Origins of Pan-Africanism, 279–288). The conference evinced a new will to make common cause in protesting the most egregious forms of racial discrimination and colonial violence. This orientation stood in contrast to earlier back-to-Africa movements that had seen emigration as an alternative to reform and had in fact relied on colonial logics.3 To identify as black in this global sense meant partaking in a shared political and ethical project. It was a significant act of self-making as fundamentally modern, an embrace of the call first articulated at the 1900 conference to address the “problem of the Twentieth Century . . . the colour-line.” In other words, blackness was under renovation at the turn of the century, repurposing discourses rooted in black religious missions, African colonization schemes, and Ethiopianist romance for an emerging global consciousness. Print media ranging from newspapers to musical scores to anthologies were crucial modes of instantiating this consciousness. These print forms captured the simultaneity of contemporaneous expressive cultures and circulated key strategies and tropes. Identifying with a global black struggle, then, became an important way to signal that one was A New Negro for a New Century, as one editorial team put it.
What exactly the term “classic” designates is slippery to say the least, and the distinctions between classic, classical, and classicism bring to mind the same definitional debates as the modern/modernity/modernism quandary Susan Stanford Friedman has mined. The classic may be that which has been judged over time to hold merit, excellence, or importance. It implies enduring value or interest, rewarding repeated attention, yet often is distinguished because it is memorable. It may simply be an elegant style impervious to the vicissitudes of fashion, as in “classic black.” Yet time is not the only distinguishing factor. As Frank Kermode notes, the term “classic,” first coined by Aulus Gellius to refer to works deemed canonical, is defined by a power differential: “Classicus . . . scriptor, non proletarius: the classic writer is distinguished from the rabble” (15). We are reminded, then, that the classic assumes an act of sorting, classifying objects by rank, or into groups that share attributes, properties, affinities.4 While the roots of the term in English can be traced back to Middle French, current usage in modern French emphasizes that classics are models of excellence suited for study (in class). They are works that conform to ancient or traditional approaches to form and style or, more broadly, are practices that follow an established convention.5 Common to all of these usages is the occluded role of power: to make a classic, one must have the (cultural) capital to assign value. Analogously, the classic is that which is vested with such capital. Here we note that it is no accident that this essay focuses on male authors, as the critical power to assign value as a classic, even the insurgent power of black artists, was highly gendered. Contemporaries such as the Afro-British composer Amanda Aldridge (under the pseudonym Montague Ring), the South African activist Charlotte Maxeke, and the African American author Georgia Douglas Johnson could not claim access to the cultural platforms of their male counterparts. This essay investigates how early twentieth-century black artists who shared a project of vindicationist racial upliftcountering centuries of expropriation and prejudice used the “classic” and what their work does to make the term available as a keyword for other instances of global modernism.
Samuel Coleridge-Taylor’s Africa: Romance or Classic
Samuel Coleridge-Taylor’s Twenty-Four Negro Melodies represents what I would call his most self-consciously and globally black modernist work. Here the “classic” functions not so much as a noun but as an operation, a curatorial procedure that preserves and heightens the appeal of the “simple” materials of folk music and adds a protective layer of cultural prestige to guard it against the looming erosion of value in the face of modern industrialization, urban migration, and racial terror. Coleridge-Taylor is perhaps as unlikely a representative modernist as Booker T. Washington was before Houston Baker’s virtuosic reading in Modernism and the Harlem Renaissance (1987).6 As the son of an absent Sierra Leonean doctor and a British mother who raised him, Coleridge-Taylor’s musical education placed him in elite circles in a comparatively less racially charged environment than the colonies or the United States at the time. However, British audiences implicitly expected that “Coalie,” as he was taunted when young, would offer music with an exotic tinge. His early works appear to have done so within the bounds of the conventional Victorian forms he mastered. However, his career tracks the development of a globally informed black identity over the decade between 1895 and 1905. Increasingly, he viewed African American and African folk music (especially the spirituals) as an urtext limited in its circulation only by its “extreme brevity and unsuitability for the ordinary amateur.” The compositional techniques he had honed at the Royal Academy of Music would allow him to transform these folk melodies into works that would survive a rapidly changing present by entering a standard repertoire. In short, he would make them “classics.”
Coleridge-Taylor was not only present but also prominently featured at the 1900 Pan African Conference. The conference was an important turning point in his consciousness, and thus he is an ideal figure for considering how transnational black consciousness inflected the uses and valences of “the classic” in the early twentieth century. Music was remarkably central to the gathering. The conference convener, Henry Sylvester Williams, had taught music before emigrating from Trinidad to England; the director of the Fisk Jubilee Singers, Frederick Loudin, was in attendance; and several of Coleridge-Taylor’s vocal works were performed, including two from African Romances, an 1897 suite of settings of Paul Laurence Dunbar poems. The suite’s title is Coleridge-Taylor’s rather than Dunbar’s. While he attaches “African” to both the suite and the first piece, “An African Love Song,” none of the poems specifically refers to Africa. Race is only evoked through quaint descriptors like “dusky” and “swarthy”; nonetheless, the young composer sees in his collaboration with Dunbar an alluring and novel expression of ethnic identity. Just as his musical aesthetics are solidly late romanticist here, literary romance is the dominant mode of Coleridge-Taylor’s other large work with Dunbar, the 1898 Dream Lovers: An Operatic Romance, for two male and two female characters, chorus, and orchestra. This operetta is actually set in Africa (Madagascar). Apart from tropes of ethnic sympathy it is the successful marriage plot and harmonic resolution that predominate. One is tempted to read the marriage plots joining the African and African American characters as presaging international black solidarity, but the conventional diatonic harmonic language, balanced musical forms, and lack of any non-European melodic material do not convincingly support such a reading. In these works, as in his wildly popular oratorio on Longfellow’s Song of Hiawatha, his musical innovation (or light exoticism) does not override his mastery of form. Despite the hint at the spiritual “Nobody Knows the Trouble I’ve Seen” in its opening theme, Song of Hiawatha was embraced for its singability, familiar exoticism, and colorful orchestration. It was a staple (or temporary classic) of the British secular choral repertoire, with the score selling hundreds of thousands of copies, and the work was recorded and regularly performed until the Second World War.
It is not until Coleridge-Taylor’s later works that a more substantive engagement with African American, Caribbean, and African material becomes apparent, and he joins in an established discourse that viewed the Negro spiritual as an urtext of black musical (and religious) creativity.7 In 1904, Coleridge-Taylor presents a more decisive turn toward African and Afro-diasporic musical content in his Twenty-Four Negro Melodies op. 59, reworking melodic themes culled from ethnomusicological studies and collections of spirituals into a set of virtuosic pieces for piano. I would argue for our considering this an example of a modernist practice of global black expression. The fact that Booker T. Washington provided a three-page introduction for that collection indicates how Coleridge-Taylor’s music not only reflects but also reinforces transnational black collaboration. Several years earlier the composer first heard spirituals when the Fisk Jubilee Singers toured England. His foreword to the opus 59 score acknowledges that it was “the world renowned and deeply lamented Frederick J. Loudin, manager of the famous Jubilee Singers, through whom I first learned to appreciate the beautiful folk music of my race.” Coleridge-Taylor deftly articulates his theory of classic-ing through compositional craft, and it is worth quoting at length:
The Negro Melodies in this volume are not merely arranged—on the contrary, they have been amplified, harmonized and altered in other respects to suit the purpose of the book. I do not think any apology for the system adopted is necessary . . . What Brahms has done for the Hungarian folk-music, Dvořák, for the Bohemian, and Grieg for the Norwegian, I have tried to do for these Negro Melodies. . . . The actual melody has in every case been inserted at the head of each piece as a motto.[8] The music which follows is nothing more nor less than a series of variations built on the said motto. Therefore my share in the matter can be clearly traced, and must not be confounded with any idea of “improving” the original material any more than Brahms’ Variations on the Haydn Theme “improved” that.
Coleridge-Taylor stands at the intersection of nineteenth-century European theories of Volksmusik that reflected an inborn national spirit, American traditions of collecting and transcribing spirituals, and the rise of ethnomusicology as a discipline. Yet by traversing these distinctions, which had been variously used to hierarchize and sentimentalize race relations, he effectively upends these historical conventions. He thus introduces a modernism that is radical because it takes a global range of black vernacular creativity seriously enough to treat it as a “classic.” Insisting that he is not “improving” these songs but doing what Brahms (who had died only a decade earlier) did with an already beautiful theme by a composer of what music historians call the classical era also made a claim for the status of the black musical sources as classics.9
An extended discussion of the compositions themselves is not feasible in an essay of this length. However, it is crucial to note that although Coleridge-Taylor’s dissimulating preface suggests that he is making the melodies suitable for “the ordinary amateur,” his pieces would be difficult for any but the most gifted of pianists. This is apparent in the nearly ubiquitous use of octaves for both the right-hand melodies and the left-hand accompaniments, sometimes at rapid tempi (as in “Going Up” and “My Lord Delivered Daniel”); the many arpeggiated and rolled chords that stretch a tenth or more (as in “They Will Not Lend Me a Child! or A Ba Boleki Nwana!”); and large leaps required in the lefthand (bringing to mind the virtuosic stride pianists of the following generation). Like Washington, Coleridge-Taylor knew the art of talking out of both sides of his mouth: they displayed Baker’s “mastery of form” in slyly putting one over racists too quick to dismiss black talent.
Coleridge-Taylor’s cataloguing of differences between the “African Negro” and the “American Negro” and his proposal that both were more easily integrated into a “Caucasian” aesthetic than other “native” non-European musics may strike us as problematically conservative. Yet he carefully indexed sources for his melodies: Henri Junod’s ethnomusicological collection Les chants et les contes des Ba Ronga, a West African song collected by Victoria Randall, and Loudin’s performances, which introduced him to African American spirituals. These detailed citations reflect an impulse to classify and demonstrate scientific authority that was very much in step with contemporaneous African American assertions of the ability to “originate and scientifically arrange good music.”10 Coleridge-Taylor’s use of African American, African, and Caribbean folk music anticipated the call that the New Negro movement would issue a generation later to embrace the spirituals but also, less often, African sources for their modernist aesthetics. Locke, writing in 1925, chided African Americans to take up African art, although he noted that their motivations would be different from those of European artists of a generation earlier. He wrote:
what the Negro artist of to-day has most to gain from the arts of the [African] forefathers is perhaps not cultural inspiration or technical innovations, but the lesson of a classic background, the lesson of discipline, of style, of technical control pushed to the limits of technical mastery. A more highly stylized art does not exist than the African. . . . [If] the present vogue of African art should pass, and the bronzes of Benin and the fine sculptures of Gabon and Baoulé, and the superb designs of the Bushongo should again become mere items of exotic curiosity, for the Negro artist they ought still to have the import and influence of classics in whatever art expression is consciously and representatively racial.
(256, 267; my italics)
In other words, black artists who presented their work as “consciously and representatively racial” were necessarily motivated by different interests than modernist Europeans, for whom African art had been an epiphany, to use Simon Gikandi’s term. Locke viewed the European modernist turn as emerging in a moment that was experiencing the “marked decadence and sterility in certain forms of European plastic art expression, due to generations of the inbreeding of style and idiom [plagued by] the exhaustion of imitating Greek classicism” (258–259).
Coleridge-Taylor’s turn to African and African American folk music would seem to be just the sort of move Locke would later recommend. As a keyword for Coleridge-Taylor’s transnational black modernism, “classic” remains rooted in its shared etymology with “classification” and with that “class” of works judged over time to merit being taught, emulated, and passed on to succeeding generations.
Solomon Tshekisho Plaatje: Standardizing the Classic
Sol T. Plaatje is best known for his diary documenting the Anglo-Boer War, his collagelike nonfiction work Native Life in South Africa (1916), and his novel Mhudi: An Epic of South African Native Life (completed in the early 1920s but only published in 1930). Born to Tswana parents and raised at the German mission where they worked, Plaatje had an unusual ear for language and music, and he mastered nine languages. Our interest lies in the intersection of his careers as a linguist and a writer. Plaatje was deeply concerned about the distortions introduced into indigenous South African languages like his mother tongue, Setswana, as they transformed from oral to written languages via the dual processes of colonization and evangelization. Three pressing concerns occupy his writings on linguistics in the modern era of colonial expropriation and racial segregation. First, the miscarriages of justice that indigenous South Africans faced when their encounters with the state were mistranslated by official interpreters. Second, the confusion created by multiple orthographies for indigenous languages that were the direct result of competing systems among various missions. And third, the dual problem of cultural amnesia whittling away at younger generations’ knowledge of deep language structures like proverbs and idiomatic expressions and, simultaneously, the cultural isolation of those whose lack of command of English limited their access to reading material. I have discussed elsewhere Plaatje’s essays on the need for competent court interpreters and his enthusiasm for the standardized notation of tonal languages enabled by a cutting-edge new system: the International Phonetic Alphabet.11 Here, however, I propose a close reading of (an English translation of) the introduction to his translation of Shakespeare’s Comedy of Errors, Diphosho-phosho, which was published in 1930 along with three other plays he translated. The introduction reflects Plaatje’s belief that a “classic” was defined by its translatability across not only languages and historical periods but also across colonial power differentials.12
I want to argue for reading Plaatje’s theory of translation as a critical discourse, one that locates his work within the hermeneutic and evaluative processes most fundamental to the “classic” as that which is judged over time to be “of acknowledged excellence or importance,” to turn to the OED’s primary definition (my italics). For Plaatje, a translatable “classic” was a number of things: a finely wrought conduit through which one could pour “original” content, an echoing pipe down which to hiss biting satirical critique and indigenous parody on the Ellisonian “lower frequencies,” and a two-way channel where “source” and “target” languages rewrote each other through exchanges of sociolinguistic value. What made the difference between a finely wrought translatable classic and a crude, quickly forgotten novelty was a careful and critical practice of translation as a multidirectional transaction, which is why Plaatje spends so much time on the broad questions of Setswana orthography.
The first indication that his approach to translation is as wily as those of his fellow modernists from Beckett to Pound lies at the top of the title page. The work is entitled “Mabolelo a ga Tsikinya-Chaka (The Sayings of William Shakespeare).” As David Schalkwyk and Lerato Lapula have noted, Plaatje’s first encounter with Shakespeare was a live performance of Hamlet. When he discovered that many of the proverbs he had heard educated black South Africans quoting were not merely part of the English language but taken directly from Shakespeare, he formulated an interpretation of the bard as a source of “sayings” rather than as a man of the theater.13 This interpretation effectively recruits the function of Shakespeare into the cultural context of South Africa, where many indigenous languages were rich in proverbs and where quoting such sayings or their English counterparts was a mark of prestige. Furthermore, the bard’s name is phonetically transcribed as Shake-Spear and then translated literally into Setswana as Tsikinya-Chaka. Plaatje shakes the synecdoche of imperial prestige, England’s most universally esteemed author, like a spear in the face of Dominion while simultaneously turning his back on the hegemony of the English language, taking Tsikinya-Chaka hostage for his project of vernacular modernism. The preface is itself a sly play on Shakespeare’s title, for in cataloguing the various limitations, problems, and resulting misprisions occasioned by the legacy of an orthography invented for “religious literature,” Plaatje depicts the missionary project as its own comedy of errors. Damning with faint praise, he notes that “Batswana authors find these orthographies useful in one way or another” but then raises one little frustration, a mere jot: the missing letter j. He goes on to explain its significance with an inside joke:
In this book we have added the letter “j” to the missionary alphabet, so that we can distinguish words such as nyalela (marry my daughter) and njalela (give me some seed). Had we not done this, readers would misunderstand Antifoluse when he said to his younger brother, “U njetse tinare” (“You have partaken of my dinner”), and would think he was using vulgar language, when he was not. [Nyetse, a synonym of nyalela, would imply an inappropriate passion for dinner.]
(383)
If missionaries are the originators of written Setswana, they are presumably among the readers who are likely to be duped by their own scriptive practices. Plaatje thus signifies on recurrent and inane Western stereotypes of Africans as sexually depraved, vulgar, and primitive. Such racism is already inscribed in the Western notations of Setswana, and it is the incestuous relation between colonial writing and colonial meaning making that would vandalize Shakespeare’s text into a scandalous one were it not for the “minor” corrective Plaatje applies to the alphabet.
He continues by gnawing at the very root of British imperial pride, the purported lineage from Rome’s hegemony to the Pax Britannia: “the 26 letters of the Roman alphabet used in all these books is insufficient for Setswana” (383). The Setswana language, unlike antiquated English, for which an alphabet invented millennia ago suffices, demands the most modern of linguistic technologies. “That is why [he has] borrowed letters from the International Phonetic Alphabet, namely ŋ and.” Not finished, Plaatje’s next paragraph adds another letter from the IPA, ɔ. Justifying this choice, he lists a number of examples, closing with the difference the new IPA character allows readers to recognize between the Setswana words for “steam” and “ignoramus.” This is hardly an innocent choice: the first steam train in South Africa was introduced in 1860, and the development of railways rapidly gathered speed after the discovery of diamonds at Kimberley. Reminding his Tswana audience that there was only a slight (and hitherto ignored) difference between steam, a symbol of the industrial capitalism that had already cost South Africans so much, and the ignoramuses imposing it made for a piercing jibe.
The index of problems with existing mission-derived orthographies ended with a set of words Plaatje did not offer any remedy for, implying that even with the best tools of scientific linguistics, Setswana was too musical a language to be captured adequately by script: “in Setswana tone plays a very important role in that it conveys different meanings in words which look identical, such as ditlhaka (reeds) and ditlhaka (letters)” (383). Readers and killers were indistinguishable, pride and opening one’s eyes might be mistaken for each other, and the difference between a hiding place and experience were only discernible by those who had a command of Setswana tones, largely native speakers. While outsiders proudly wielding the authority of their letters risked getting lost among the “native” reeds, the savvy reader could look forward to an entertaining treat: this trickster introduction was just the warm-up for an entire comedy of errors.
In the following section, Plaatje avows, “It has not been an easy task to write a book such as this, it has been both difficult and intricate” (383). Dwelling on the difficulty of his labor in translating Shakespeare, Plaatje calls to mind the ways that translation and difficulty were core values for “high” modernism. Similarly, Plaatje’s choice to call his novel Mhudi an epic reminds us of the genre’s significance for Joyce, Stein, Pound, and others. However, Plaatje’s motivation for taking on this difficult task was the alarm shared by many of his compatriots. “Tau’s Setswana”—the language of Tau, the last ruler of the Barolong nation that Plaatje immortalizes in his novel—was rapidly being displaced by “the missionary language.” Given that “Tau” also means lion, Plaatje here stages, yet again, the struggle over dynastic power, pitching the Tswana lion against the British lion. These examples show Plaatje’s skill as a master of double entendre. Similar rhetorical strategies were mobilized by blacks in other parts of the globe to destabilize colonial and race relations. Such parodic linguistic strategies appear in works such as Kobina Sekyi’s The Blinkards (1916), Claude McKay’s Constab Ballads, and the brilliant outmaneuvering of minstrelsy in the work of Bert Williams and George Walker.
Yet if it appears that Plaatje was aligned with a stable, monolithic ethnic identity, his next critique exposes the dangers of confusing linguistic pride with ethnic chauvinism. It is a truism that the most fundamental damage wrought by colonialism was the conscription into global capitalism. Plaatje had detailed in his Native Life in South Africa how economic exploitation from hut taxes to land expropriation to coerced labor in the mines were unraveling black life in the early twentieth century. On a more personal level, Plaatje the writer faced a lifelong struggle to raise the funds to publish his work. Many of his shorter writing projects (such as a 1921 pamphlet entitled “The Mote and the Beam,” which Plaatje sold during his tour of North America at twenty-five cents a copy) were intended to underwrite longer works such as the Shakespeare translations, his novel, and what he considered his most important life’s work: a collection of Setswana proverbs. Shifting the object of his critique from language to capital, Plaatje reports in the introduction on the difficulties of publishing. He notes how, when he found himself unable to meet the costs of printing the translation, he first appealed to a number of “well-to-do Batswana,” supposing that “when they heard that this was for a book in their own language they would stop simply asking for a book in Setswana and instead make it possible for it to be printed” (384). However, they were not willing to infuse the capital needed to translate Shakespeare, rendering it a Setswana classic. Despite the self-interested miserliness of his compatriots, he found an Indian and four Europeans willing to fund the publication. Thus, Plaatje’s translation became a multiracial, even global exercise in modernist translation.
A similar frustration with the lack of interest among the Batswana appears to frame his closing anecdote. He recounts the perplexity of a certain old man who, observing Plaatje and his fellow linguist D. M. Ramoshoana laboring late into the night, asks “What is it that you gain from your witchery . . . working tirelessly on your books, when the rest of the people are asleep?” (385). Ramoshoana replies: “‘There are presently about 300 African languages which have their own printed books. If I die having translated one of Shakespeare’s plays into Setswana I shall rest in peace, because I will have done something for you’” (385; my italics).
In Ramoshoana’s address to a man of an older generation who believes “witchery” and literacy are twin arts of the night, Plaatje seems to stage an encounter between the ancient and the modern. Yet there is little antagonism here. Rather, Ramoshoana proposes a bond, linking the old man’s aging to his own eventual death and implying that just as the old man seeks a peaceful night’s rest despite his anxiety over these mysterious scribblers, so too Ramoshoana hopes to “rest in peace” after his death. But he also suggests that the translation of Shakespeare’s classic into Setswana does something for the old man, who by all appearances is illiterate. However, this certain old man was first recognized for his mastery of Setswana verbal art, for it is at a moment when Ramoshoana and Plaatje are “puzzled by a problem [in their translation work that they summon] a certain man who was going past” them and seek his assistance. Literacy is irrelevant to the ethical relation between the three. Ramoshoana and Plaatje consider their translation of “the sayings of Shake-Spear” an offering to the Setswana language and the Batswana people and a work that parallels earlier generations’ bequest of a vast repertoire of Setswana proverbs. Transferring value and prestige across exponential differentials of power—between the world of letters and the world of primary orality, between the imperial literary canon and an indigenous emergent orthography—was a project of such anticolonial bravado that the resulting entanglement of The Comedy of Errors / Diphosho-phosho can be considered a modernist classic in the tradition of classic black.
Notes
1. See Gikandi, “Africa and the Epiphany of Modernism”; and Archer-Straw, Negrophilia.
2. Du Bois, perhaps quoting from memory, reformulates the original, “Ex Africa semper aliquid novi,” which is used in a notably different context, Pliny’s zoological discussion.
3. On predecessors of pan-Africanism as a formal movement, see Appiah, In My Father’s House; Gilroy, The Black Atlantic; and Hamilton, “Introduction.”
4. The OED’s entries for “classic,” (noun) “class” (noun and verb), and “classify.”
5. Tresor de la langue francaise, entries for “classique.”
6. Baker shows how the Wizard of Tuskegee achieved a “mastery of form,” bending the taste for racial caricature and minstrelsy among white Southerners (and Northerners) resistant to real advancement for blacks to hold their attention to his proposals for education while at the same time signifying or, as Zora Neale Hurston might have called it, “lying” to assure black audiences of his good faith.
7. See Richards, “A Pan-African Composer?”
8. The Souls of Black Folk, published the previous year by Du Bois, includes incipits from spirituals at the head of each chapter, a practice also adopted by other black modernists including Alain Locke, James Weldon Johnson, and Langston Hughes.
9. Later music historians identified “Haydn’s” theme as the “Chorale St. Antoni,” of debated authorship, but it is still regularly referred to by the name Brahms gave it.
10. See Ramsey’s discussion of James Trotter in “Cosmopolitan or Provincial?”
11. See Jaji, Africa in Stereo.
12. Isabel Hofmeyer’s The Portable Bunyan is an important precedent for my reading.
13. See Schalkwyk and Lapula, “Solomon Plaatje, William Shakespeare, and the Translation of Culture.”
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