latter’s mobilisations illustrate the potential in the analogy for resistance against racist policies, which deny the humanity of those they seek to subjugate. Like Plaatje’s strategic use of Shakespeare’s signifying potential, the Drum writers also rely on the fact that if apparently less civilised Africans can deploy the exemplar of English culture, and can point to similarities between what it meant to be African and the time that produced Shakespeare, then the connection is proof of the worth of the denigrated African experience of, or approach to, life.
Oxford-educated Sampson had a degree in Elizabethan drama. He overlaid his understanding of the conditions of Shakespeare’s time onto what he saw happening in Sophiatown. This enabled him to enjoy and romanticise ghetto life in early apartheid South Africa: ‘[A]ll that frenzied activity… seemed to me to be every bit a Shakespearean play with terror and murder waiting in the wings.’4 ‘It was wildly romantic.’5 In his autobiography, he wrote:
It came to me suddenly that I was watching an Elizabethan play. It was as if the characters had tripped straight from the stage of the Globe, lugging their dead bodies with them. Sophiatown had all the exuberant youth of Shakespeare’s London. It was the same upstart slum, with people coming from a primitive country life to the tawdry sophistication of the city’s fringes. Death and the police state were round the corner: and there was the imminent stage direction: Exeunt with bodies.6
It is true that the responses of those who lived under the increasingly difficult conditions of the times – gangsters, good-time girls, shebeen queens (brewers and sellers of liquor, usually from their homes, at a time when it was illegal for black people to drink alcohol), and more conventional workers – were inventive, colourful, innovative, and energetic. Sophiatown was also a violent, hectic, squalid place, ‘surrounded by a surface of uncertainty and hostility, epitomized by the threat of removal which hung over it from 1939 … a huge generosity of spirit coexisted with conditions that made it a “deplorable, sickening slum”’.7
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