Two recent additions to our collection of South African Shakespeare translations will be of interest to Sesotho and Sepedi speakers: K.E. Ntsane’s Mohwebi wa Venisi (The Merchant of Venice) and C.N.M. Phatudi’s Julease Sisare (Julius Caesar).
Ntsane’s Mohwebi was published in 1961. This was the first translation of a Shakespeare play to be produced in Sesotho, and it remains the only known full translation. (Isaac Mahloane’s Romeo le Juliet, which appeared in 1964 to mark the tercentenary of Shakespeare’s birth, is a prose synopsis of the play.)
Kemuel Edward Ntsane was born in 1920 in Lesotho. He wrote three novels and two volumes of poetry in Sesotho, documenting the experiences of Basotho migrant workers who had travelled to Johannesburg and the reef to work on the mines, and presenting gentle satirical takes on love gone wrong, the nostalgia of old age or the false piety of the religious (the scholar Johannes Lenake has written extensively on this). Ntsane’s poetic imagination was fuelled equally by the mountain vistas of Lesotho, the conventions of praise poetry, and the grim daily rounds of life in the mining compounds.
You can page through Ntsane’s text here, or download a searchable PDF from Shakespeare ZA’s Translations section.
Mohwebi wa Venisi is also available via the Sol Plaatje Archive of Shakespeare in African Languages (a project of the Tsikinya-Chaka Centre at Wits University), which collects and catalogues digital copies of translations of Shakespeare’s plays from across the African continent.
C.N.M. (sometimes referred to as N.C.) Phatudi was one of the more prolific South African Shakespeare translators of the twentieth century, producing versions of Julius Caesar, King Henry IV Part One and The Merchant of Venice. The latter text was the last to be published (in 1985) but the first of Phatudi’s translations to be added to Shakespeare ZA’s collection and the Sol Plaatje Archive. Julease Sisare, the new addition, appeared with Better Books in 1971 but this first edition includes a foreword by P.C. Mokgokong of the University of South Africa dated 1965. 1 Henry IV, also published by Better Books, came out in 1973.
The legacy of Cedric Namedi Makepeace Phatudi is a complicated one. He was a teacher, then a school principal, then a supervisor of schools, then a school inspector (he was president of the national body of Inspectors of Bantu Education for over two decades) and eventually Minister of Education in the ‘Homeland’ or Bantustan of Lebowa. Phatudi, whose father had been chief of the Mphahlele people (Kgosi Mmutle III, the subject of Phatudi’s 1966 historical drama), crafted a political path for himself from the 1960s.
By 1973, he was Chief Minister of Lebowa. He was very conscious, given this role, of being perceived as an apartheid crony. Certainly, he was accommodationist in his approach – conciliatory, insisting that different race groups need one another – but he tried to twist the apartheid government’s notion of Separate Development into “a means to an end”. He probably overestimated his negotiating power; while he was successful in persuading Pretoria to allow the exiled writer and intellectual Es’kia Mphahlele to return to South Africa, for instance, he was put squarely in his place when he tried to secure Nelson Mandela’s release from prison.
Despite his anti-apartheid rhetoric, Phatudi was arguably naïve in his hopes that the apartheid state would adopt a federal system in which black South Africans, via “one man one vote” in the homelands, could have meaningful representation in government. Nevertheless, his legacy as an educationist and as a promoter of Sepedi remains significant.