| Janet van Eeden speaks to Stephen Coan about his fascination with Rider Haggard and editing Memeena and other plays |
Janet van Eeden, Stephen Coan
 Mameena and other plays, by H Rider Haggard
Edited by Stephen Coan and Alfred Tella
On a recent cold and wintry night in Pietermaritzburg, Stephen Coan* launched the publication of Mameena and other plays by H Rider Haggard. It was ironic that the launch took place in the restaurant of the Botanical Gardens in Maritzburg. Almost a hundred years ago Rider Haggard and his wife spent a few days wandering through these same gardens. They even bought a few packets of seeds to take to their farm in northern Natal. Nothing more is known of the progression of the seeds, but Mrs Haggard did confess in her diary that she was growing very bored of Pietermaritzburg. An understandable emotion, really, but one which was not echoed by those who had gathered to listen to Coan introduce Mameena and other plays and talk about putting together this unusual collection.
The book, published by University of KwaZulu-Natal Press, was co-edited by Alfred Tella, an economist and former Georgetown University research professor in the United States.
“Al lives in McLean, Virginia,” said Coan in his introductory speech. “He is a lifelong Haggard collector who has discovered several previously unrecorded works. He has issued some of these in limited editions. It was in a letter to me in 2003 that Al said he was thinking of publishing a larger Haggard item, namely the play script of Star of Egypt. He asked me if I would consider helping him with an introduction and notes along the lines of Haggard’s 1914 diary that I’d done and that UKZN Press also published. I thought Al’s idea was a good one. But then the thought occurred to me: Why not do all of Haggard's plays? There are only three, after all. Then we would have the Complete Dramatic Works of Rider Haggard.
"Haggard’s name is not one generally associated with drama,” Coan continued, “but it was known that he had written some plays. These were Star of Egypt, based on his Egyptian romance novel called Morning Star; and then there was the unnamed play, referred to briefly in correspondence as the ‘patriotic Irish play’. In 1913 he’d written Mameena, which was adapted from the second volume of his Zulu novel trilogy, Child of Storm. Mameena was staged at the Globe Theatre in London in that same year. So all in all he had written three plays.”
Alfred Tella agreed that they may as well do them all. And so it was that they went ahead with the idea of publishing The Complete Dramatic Works of Rider Haggard.
“I should mention here that Al and I have never actually met,” said Coan. “Our only contact has been via letter and, in more recent times, via e-mail, but over the years he has kindly sent me copies of his limited editions.”
Coan and Tella first had to obtain the permission of Nada Cheyne, Haggard’s granddaughter and the copyright holder, to proceed with their idea. The only thing missing was the so-called patriotic Irish play.
“I arrived for a visit to Ditchingham Lodge in Norfolk, the home of Nada and her late husband Mark (to whom, incidentally, this volume is dedicated),” Coan continued. “Soon after I arrived she said, ‘Oh, I’ve found the Irish play,’ and handed me a typed manuscript titled To Hell or Connaught. The title was a phrase attributed to Oliver Cromwell and it was particularly apt, considering the play is set against the backdrop of the Cromwellian colonisation of Ireland in the seventeenth century.”
Haggard’s complete dramatic works were now at their disposal, and Coan and Tella collated an interesting series of appendices to complement the plays. There is an introduction the plays in general, plus a historical background to each work in particular. Included is also a brief biography of Haggard which gives the reader insight into this unusual man.
Another appendix of note is a transcription by the technical adviser regarding aspects of Zulu culture to the theatrical production, James Stuart, a (KwaZulu-)Natal civil servant and expert on Zulu culture. Haggard had worked with Stuart previously and Child of Storm was dedicated to him for the information in the novel gleaned from Stuart’s research. Under Haggard’s guidance Stuart was employed by actor-manager Oscar Asche, who produced Mameena, to acquire authentic Zulu costumes and artefacts for the London production. Stuart was also responsible for transporting to England two Zulu men who were to instruct the cast on the correct use of the artefacts as well as provide a deeper understanding of the relevance behind the rituals to be performed on stage. In the transcription included in this publication, Stuart interviewed Mandhlakazi kaNgini and Kwili KaSitshidi, the men brought over to England, about their impressions of London during their visit in 1913/14. As they put it, “When we crossed the ocean, we were going to the Globe Theatre, Shaftesbury Avenue, in London. There were two famous Englishmen, Mr Oscar Asche and Sir Rider Haggard. They were the men who invited us to London. We were to act the exploits of Mameena, the play Mameena, a play about Mbuyazi, a play about Cetshwayo, a play about Saduka, a play about Zilikali, Mbezi, Masapo and Allan Quatermain. Those were the plays that had to be enacted. We came to London and performed them.”
This appendix is full of interesting observations. As much as the black men were objects of fascination for the mainly white inhabitants, so the inhabitants were extremely fascinating to the visitors. For example, Mandhlakazi talks about Kwili “taking exception” to the young boys who called others to stare at him when “they saw he was not wearing shoes and that he wore a head ring.” It is an intriguing look at Britain and its inhabitants from the perspective of the men who had come from a country so far removed in terms of both distance and culture. The original of this fascinating document can be found in the Campbell Collection of the University of KwaZulu-Natal in Durban, where Stuart’s record of the testimony of almost two hundred informants about Zulu history are kept for posterity.
Included in the appendices is a brief biography of Oscar Asche, the theatrical entrepreneur who embarked on the project of Mameena with Rider Haggard after they'd met in Melbourne, Australia. Ashe and his wife, Lily Brayton, played the leads in the one and only production of this play. Ashe was an actor/manager in Britain in the early part of the twentieth century. He achieved his greatest success when he and Brayton began touring the Dominions in 1910. One of their biggest successes was Kismet, which made much of the exotic East, using costume and spectacle to convey the Indian culture. It was during their tour of Australia with Kismet that Ashe met Haggard, then also on a tour of the Southern Dominions. They mooted the idea of following on the success of Kismet with an equally exotic story, a dramatisation of Haggard’s novel Child of Storm.
Another appendix includes contemporary reviews of the play. These are interesting to the theatre lover as they show that critics haven’t changed much. The reviewer for The Daily Telegraph saw the play entirely from his limited point of view: “The noble savage fills the scene, and does it very well … All the horrible things which thrilled your innocent youth were there – assegais and queer piebald shields … The music was weird and harassing. The pervading noise, whether of war-cry or loyal assent or mere noise for noise’s sake, had an awful volume. Altogether you could feel quite as keenly as you wanted to that all these folks were really dreadful fellows and something quite gory might happen at any moment.”
The play was not a great success. The advent of the First World War and the implementation of blackouts at night did little to encourage theatre-goers at this time. Haggard had initially hoped to postpone the production, but Ashe had been adamant about producing it. The play opened at the Globe Theatre on September 30th, 1913 and the curtain fell on it for ever on 14th January, 1914.
Reading the play Mameena it is possible only to imagine the spectacle that Oscar Ashe put on in 1913/14. This is a work which was written to be seen. Photographs of certain scenes recreate the turn-of-the-century British love of spectacle, and this publication provides invaluable information about this period as a slice of dramatic history.
I asked Coan where his fascination with Rider Haggard originated.
“I think it started when my father gave me a copy of King Solomon’s Mines when I was twelve,” Coan replies. “I continued reading all his novels and think that they sparked my own interest in Africa and made me want to live abroad. In 1975 I came to South Africa at the age of twenty-four, and kept seeing the countryside in terms of Haggard. I’d see a mountain and say, ‘That’s a Haggard mountain.’ Then I picked up a copy of a book in Hillbrow, The Cloak that I Left, a beautifully written memoir by his daughter Lilias. I realised that this book, and the other biographies about him, tended to take Haggard’s version of South African history on trust. But Haggard’s view of events was based on the perceptions of his mentor, Theophilus Shepstone. In many ways Shepstone is the villain of the piece in historical terms. So my research began providing a corrective and in the process I also unearthed new material. In 1997 I met the Haggard family in Britain and they encouraged my work and graciously gave me a manuscript of his 1914 diary of a visit to South Africa on the understanding that I would find a publisher for it.”
The publication of Diary of an African Journey (edited and introduced by Coan and published by UKZN Press in 2000) is now beginning to change perceptions of Haggard, who spent some of his formative years in this country (from 1875, when he was about 19, to 1881). Laurens van der Post noted in his introduction to William Plomer’s Turbott Wolfe that Haggard was one of the first white men to invest black people with a sense of dignity in his work. Remarkably, during his 1914 visit to this country Haggard also met and interviewed John Dube, founding member and first president of the African National Congress, and expressed agreement with Dube’s views on the 1913 Land Act.
Van der Post’s statement appears to be true if one thinks of Haggard’s work, where there are, in fact, few white characters other than Allan Quatermain who are memorable. Another remarkable aspect of Haggard’s work, especially considering the context of his time, is that he always had strong female central characters. Think of She, for example, and Mameena, the Zulu equivalent of Helen of Troy.
I asked Coan why he thought Haggard foregrounded women so strongly in his work.
“Well, the obvious answer is that he liked women!” he laughed. “In fact, Freud, and subsequently Jung, leapt at Haggard’s creation of She as a classic female archetype. His works all contain the exaltation of the feminine. But he did have an unrequited love in his life who seemed to inspire his creation of strong female heroines. He fell in love with Lilly Jackson before he left England in 1875, but she broke off their unofficial engagement while he was still in South Africa and married another man.”
In the biographical appendix, Haggard is quoted as saying that the news of Lilly’s marriage “… left me utterly reckless and unsettled. I cared not what I did or what became of me.” The biography goes on to say that Haggard had an affair with a married woman who became pregnant with a child who subsequently died.
“So Lilly becomes a mythical woman in Haggard’s work,” Coan continues, “Her name is used for a key character in Montezuma’s Daughter, and let’s not forget Nada the Lily. Even after he married Louisa Margitson, an heiress, his fascination with Lilly continued. He named his youngest daughter Lilias.”
Coan talks of how Haggard’s very tolerant wife endured Haggard’s lifelong concern with Lilly Jackson. After her marriage to fraudster Fred Archer disintegrated, Lilly became ill with syphilis. Haggard then put her up near his own home and was present at her deathbed.
Haggard’s remarkable heroines, including Mameena, are perhaps a fitting tribute to his lifelong love for Lilly Jackson. His recreation of Africa for generations of people who had never been to, or had no hope of ever coming to, this continent is another remarkable achievement. A telling fact is that King Solomon’s Mines has never been out of print since it was first published.
All these achievements are impressive, not least because Haggard saw himself as primarily an agriculturist rather than an author. His knighthood was for services to agriculture alone, and his tombstone makes no mention of the fact that he was a writer. Thankfully people like Tella and Coan have not allowed Sir H Rider Haggard’s literary work to be forgotten. Mameena and Other Plays is a beautifully produced document of literary and historical interest to lovers of Haggard as well those who are interested in theatre and the literary arts.
 * Stephen Coan is an assistant editor and feature writer at The Witness, the Pietermaritzburg-based KwaZulu-Natal daily. Born in London, he joined the BBC after leaving school. He first worked as a researcher for BBC News before being trained as a film editor. He came to South Africa in 1975. He was employed by the SABC in Johannesburg as a film editor for two years and subsequently by a small film production company. During the eighties Coan freelanced as a writer-director in the film industry and in theatre. His production of the play Stevie by Hugh Whitemore about the poet Stevie Smith, with Dorothy Ann Gould in the title role, won several awards, including the Breytenbach Epathlon for best director as well as a Vita award for best production.
Coan moved to Pietermaritzburg in 1990. In addition to writing for the Witness, he has been involved in researching the life and work of H Rider Haggard with particular focus on the years Haggard spent in South Africa. He edited, annotated and wrote a biographical introduction for Haggard’s previously unpublished Diary of an African Journey published by the University of KwaZulu-Natal Press in 2000. In 2001 a British edition was published by Christopher Hurst and an American edition by New York University Press. With Alfred Tella he co-edited Mameena and other plays – The dramatic works of H. Rider Haggard, again published by the University of KwaZulu-Natal Press. He was also involved in the creation of the Haggard Literary Trail for KZN Literary Tourism.
Coan’s poetry has been published in various journals, including The English Academy Review, Sesame, Fidelities and Carapace.
For more information about this publication, email Adele Branch at UKZN Press on brancha@ukzn.ac.za or check out your local branch of Exclusive Books.
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