‘Orthello’

Dillard was taking his daily constitutional, a three-kilometre round trip, which began at his front gate and ended at his back gate. It was a time for him to reflect on the unfairness of life and to prepare his work for the day. Looming large, at the moment, was his production of Shakespeare’s Othello, the rehearsals for which had not been going too well. The performances were due in three days’ time. His plan to cast a black Desdemona and a white Othello had been meeting with resistance. Logistically it made sense since only one white student (a male) had come for auditions; but it had created anomalies in the script, which still needed attending to.

It was Tuesday, which meant rubbish collection day for this part of Daleside. Dillard was shocked to see the number of scavengers around the bins, which were waiting to be emptied by the municipal garbage collectors; and the litter they scattered far and wide. The pied crows were worse than the humans who tended to be more selective in their choice of sweepings, rinsings and leavings. One old man with a ragged balaclava pulled over his face, in spite of the October weather, fished out a SPAR plastic bag, which had been tightly knotted. Dillard paused to watch him tear open the bag. Out fell a large dead rat. The old man picked it up by the tail and sniffed it before returning it to the metal dustbin. A small queue had formed behind the old man, mainly of primary school children in their ill-fitting hand-me-downs. A Lucky Dip queue! Even at this time of the morning the heat was oppressive, though the jacaranda blossoms did not seem to mind; and Dillard could not recall a time when the bougainvillaea vines had looked so splendid; such a variety of brilliant colour; such vicious thorns, mind you! Already the sprinklers were going. He could hear them behind the two-metre instarect walls topped with razor or electric wire. It was the garbage bins from these houses that were attracting crows, stray dogs and Bulawayo’s rapidly growing tribe of human offscourings. Ahead of him to the left, a sleek electronically controlled gate opened for an equally sleek Mercedes Benz driven by a not so sleek representative of Bulawayo’s nouveau riche. Dillard recognised Desdemona’s father and gave him a coy greeting, which was returned with bluster. A stanza from one of this year’s A-Level poems swam into his consciousness:

‘The city filled with orange trees is lost’, which, interpreted, meant ‘all conspicuous luxuries augur ruinous punishment.’

Not that many orange trees left in Bulawayo. Not that many makiwas either. Plenty of jacarandas, though; and silver oaks, and flamboyants, and eucalyptus. Botanical colonisation was proving more resilient than its human equivalent. Dillard was one of only three white teachers left at his school, all middle-aged or elderly. The best black and brown teachers had also left for greener pastures – not that you’re going to find too much green pasture in Francistown or Pietersburg or Darwin.

Five years ago there hadn’t been a single vendor on his route; now he counted thirty: ten for each kilometre. All the vendors were either women or children. They created little tables out of cardboard boxes or bits of paving. On these surfaces they displayed, ever so neatly, their meagre stock: overripe tomatoes and bananas, cigarettes (sold individually), boiled sweets, and the ubiquitous ‘penny cools’. As a consequence of these vendors and their miniature tuck-shops, Dillard’s route had become fouled with tons of litter, dominated by the transparent plastic ‘penny cool’ containers.

At first Dillard thought that the vendors worked for themselves until he began to notice a Pajero with tinted windows, which visited each site periodically. He made a few discreet enquiries and was not that surprised to learn that a single entrepreneur, very well connected in ruling party circles, owned all these tuckshops, and many more besides. Dillard learnt, furthermore, that there was a tuckshop war going on in the suburbs of Bulawayo. The tinted Pajero had held a monopoly until the BMW with blackened windows sidled into view.

Nowadays Dillard had to make several detours from his regular route since there were so many leaks from the municipal water system. Spreckley Road resembled a Venetian canal, while it would soon be possible to go white-water rafting down William Shakespeare Avenue. As recently as a few months back, the municipality would have responded promptly to a reported leak; now they didn’t even answer the phone. It had not taken the ruling party long to bankrupt Bulawayo, an MDC stronghold. The city of Kings was dying.

One of his detours took Dillard past the palatial residence of Othello’s family. He heard the sprinklers going, and from the house a famous Country and Western singer whose name Dillard couldn’t remember but whose tits and mop of bottle blonde hair he could clearly visualise, was belting out a song with the refrain: ‘Nine to five’. Their rubbish bin was being besieged by no fewer than five scrawny school children. Behind the electric gate a boerbul and a rottweiler, in a frenzy to get at the children, were attacking each other. A beautifully lettered sign on the wall near the gate read: IF YOU ENTER THESE PREMISSES WITHOUT PERMISSION YOU WILL BE EATEN ALIVE.

The Othello family were also part of Bulawayo’s ostentatious nouveau riche. Upstarts, Dillard like to call them. Dillard came from pioneer stock. His great-grandfather had been an Anglican missionary in the Inyati area. His grandmother had been born in old Mangwe Fort during the 1896 Matabele rebellion. He could go on! Othello’s father had made his fortune in the early years of Independence, in what is euphemistically termed ‘buying and selling’. All you needed was one corrupt senior civil servant, preferably attached to Customs and Immigration. Desdemona’s father had to wait a little longer, when unbudgeted payouts to war veterans, forays into the DRC, and the agricultural reform programme (also known as the Third Chimurenga) created a black market economy where black, white, and brown marketers became shockingly rich in a shockingly short period of time, while the rest of the country grew abject. Desdemona’s father ‘bought’ food donated by various NGOs, repackaged it, and sold it to the rural poor. He also dabbled in diesel, paraffin, and cooking oil.

What to do do about the play! How could you have a white Othello when the text called for a Moor, ‘thick-lips’, an ‘old black ram’? How could you have a black Desdemona when the text called for a Venetian, ‘that whiter skin of hers than snow’, a ‘white ewe’? Simple: change the text; update it; localise it. That’s what you do to Shakespeare. How about ‘thin-lips?

How about ‘an old white ram is tupping your black ewe’? How about ‘that blacker skin of hers than coal’? No, not ‘coal’: that’s racist. ‘Ebony’? Yes, that’s better. Hang on! Ebony’s a heavy, dark wood used for making furniture. Does it really have positive connotations?

‘That blacker skin of hers, than ebony’. Not so sure. Besides, it’s not iambic. Got to be a single syllable. ‘Jet’? Possibly, but it’s still a type of coal! ‘Sable’?

Sad and un-iambic.

Not so simple after all.

Then Dillard had a flash of inspiration. Change Moor to Zimbabwean, Venetian to Rhodesian (goodness, it almost rhymed!) – the rest would fall into place. Hang on a moment! Then the only white actor in the play would be Zimbabwean, and all the other actors, all black or brown, would be Rhodesians! Try it the other way round: change Moor to Rhodesian, Venetian to Zimbabwean. Let’s test it: what does Brabantio say?

Look to her, Moor, if thou hast eyes to see: She has deceived her father and may thee.

Look to her, Rhodesian …

No, that buggers up the metre. What about:

Look, Rhodesian, if thou hast eyes to see: She has deceived her father and may thee. Not bad, but what about when Shakespeare speaks metaphorically?

When the Duke tries to console Desdemona’s father, doesn’t he say something like, ‘And noble signior’… something like:

If virtue no delighted beauty lack, Your son-in-law is far more fair than black.

Now the problem isn’t metre, it’s rhyme. If I change it to ‘far more black than fair’, I’m going to have to find a word to rhyme with ‘fair’. Let’s see …er … what about:

If virtue’s qualities are always rare Your son-in-law is far more black than fair.

Bit clumsy. What if I change ‘fair’ to ‘white’? Um … what about:

If virtue lack no beauties that delight Your son-in-law is far more black than white.

Better: ‘white’ has fewer positive connotations than ‘fair’. Needs more work, though. Certainly needs more work.

Dillard was looking forward to a pot of tea and a couple of slices of toast when he unlatched his back gate. And he must phone the printers to see if the Othello programme was ready. But there was a power failure, and the phone lines were down. Then he noticed that he had been burgled. Gone was his digital radio (never to be replaced); gone was his Toshiba laptop (never to be replaced); gone was his unopened bottle of Green Valley wine (likely to be replaced).

About the Author

John Eppel was born in South Africa, and grew up in

Zimbabwe. He teaches English at Christian Brothers College in Bulawayo. His first novel, D.G.G. Berry’s The Great North Road, won the M-Net Prize in South Africa. His second novel, Hatchings, was short-listed for the M-Net Prize and was chosen for the series in the Times Literary Supplement on the most significant books to have come out of Africa. His book of poems, Spoils of War, won the Ingrid Jonker Prize. His other novels, The Giraffe Man, The Curse of the Ripe

Tomato and The Holy Innocents, and poetry anthologies,

Sonata for Matabeleland, Selected Poems: 1965-1995, and Songs My Country Taught Me, have received critical acclaim. He has also written two books, which combine his two

distinct voices, the lyricist and the satirist: The Caruso of Colleen Bawn, and White Man Crawling. His children’s play, ‘How the Elephant got His Trunk’, is due to be published in the near future. John was published in Writing Now (2005) and Laughing Now (2007). His latest short story collection, Absent: The English Teacher was published in (2009).