Robben Island is a small, rocky outcrop nearly six miles away from the South African Coast. The winter winds howl so bitterly that the northwestern coast is nearly uninhabitable.
Yet the southeastern portions of the island have been sporadically inhabited since the 1600s, most frequently as a prison. The island’s remoteness and abundance of stone and slate quarries made it ideal for a prison and benefitted from the convict labor.
During the 1960s –– after time as a hospital, leper colony, and WWII staging ground –– Robben Island became a prison again, this time for political prisoners, particularly those opposed to Apartheid. During this final incarnation, Robben Island saw its most famous inhabitant, Nelson Mandela, as well as its most famous book, a 1970 edition of The Alexander Text of the Complete Works of Shakespeare.
The volume itself was unremarkable when it came to the prison along with anti-apartheid activist Sonny Venkatrathnam as his one permitted book. After all, the Alexander Text was one of the most widely sold and read 20th- century editions of Shakespeare.
The book became remarkable, however, when Venkathrathnam began circulating the book amongst his fellow prisoners in the single-cell section of the prison, asking them to mark their favorite passages.
Between 1975 and 1978, when Venkathrathnam was released, thirty three prisoners –– including Mandela –– signed the book next to various plays and sonnets. The selections were occasionally starred, sometimes bracketed off, but all of them significant.
“Somehow Shakespeare always seemed to have something to say to us,” Venkatrathnam said in a 2012 interview with The Mercury, KwaZulu-Natal’s leading morning newspaper. “He’s a universal philosopher; there’s a message for anyone and anybody,”
Billy Nair belonged to Umkhonto we Sizwe (MK), the armed wing of the African National Congress (ANC), and was arrested in 1963. Over his 21 years on Robben Island, Nair attempted to reform prison conditions despite frequently violent resistance. In 1977, he signed his name by Caliban’s speech in The Tempest, using an arrow to specifically mark the lines: “This island’s mine, by Sycorax my mother / Which thou tak’st from me” (1.2.331–2).
Ahmed Kathrada, a former MK member charged with sabotage, was an avid lover of Shakespeare who filled seven prison notebooks with quotations from the Bard’s works. Kathrada selected the now-near-cliche introduction to King Henry’s speech, given to rally his troops in France, before the Siege of Harfleur:
“Once more into the breach, dear friends…” (3.1.1).
Nelson Mandela, the most famous signer, was a founding member of the ANC’s Youth League and a co-founder of MK. He was also familiar with Shakespeare, quoting him in speeches as well as his 1994 autobiography. Two years after his 1962 arrest, Mandela was sentenced to life imprisonment. His selection in the Robben Island Shakespeare is a speech from Act II of Julius Caesar.
Some critics have commented on the irony of Mandela’s selection, pointing out that the words he chose were spoken by a tyrant. But most hold that the selection should be taken as words of resolution in the face of life’s end.
But Mandela was released after 27 years of his sentence, most of which was spent at Robben Island. He went on to serve as President of South Africa from 1994-1999, ANC president from 1991-1997, and won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1993.
The book was important to many of Venkathrathnam’s fellow inmates, for it’s beauty as well as the intellectual stimulation it offered. This was particularly important to Venkathrathnam, who spent time at Leeuwkop Prison, where he was more haunted by the tedium than the crushing physical labor
At one point, the Robben Island Shakespeare was confiscated as punishment and locked in a storeroom. Taking advantage of the fact that the guards couldn’t understand the dialogue, Venkathrathnam claimed it was his copy of the Bible and that he needed it for chapel.
To maintain the charade, he obscured the cover with bright, multi-colored greeting cards commemorating Diwali, the Hindu festival of lights.
“The one thing the Afrikaner is scared of is God and a lawyer,” he told The Mercury.
Multiple offers have been placed on the book, but Venkathrathnam refuses to sell it. However, he has permitted the book to be displayed in both The British Museum and The Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, D.C., where the author first encountered the book and the stories of the men who signed it.
