Shakespeare in Swahililand

by Edward Wilson-Lee

  Neighbours were reached by a quarter hour’s walk through the rocky scrubland beyond the edge of the forest, fields where I served as my brother’s assistant and carried the bags containing the harvest of snakes and lizards we would bring back to the house, to join the tortoises and turacos of our menagerie. I suppose I thought of them as pets at the time, though there was little real boundary between the house and the world around it, and these animals mostly came and went with little regard to how we felt about the matter. The lack of boundary between our world and theirs was underscored when our Jack Russell, ‘Tumbili’ (‘little monkey’) was killed by a python from the swamp, and our trigger-fingers were restrained during its slow and immobile digestion as an early lesson in not begrudging animals their wildness. The snake was caught in and killed by a water-pump downstream during its next venture into the human periphery a few weeks later.

  Though Blixen’s farm was a dismal failure financially, she found fame on her return to Europe through her account of settler and plantation life, Out of Africa, even though the book is quite discreet about the passionate affair with the Great White Hunter, Denys Finch-Hatton, which became the focus of the Sidney Pollack film of the same name. Blixen and Finch-Hatton, along with Berkeley Cole and the godfather of the settlers, Hugh Cholmondeley (pronounced ‘Chumley’), third Baron Delamere, were among a select first wave of highland settlers, from whom the Happy Valley set would later take the flame in the twenties. Though this first group were serious farmers who never quite managed the cocaine-fuelled orgies of the Happy Valley set, they did not run their vast fiefdoms without a certain amount of self-indulgence. Among the favourite habits of Hugh Delamere, who breakfasted on gazelle chops and blancmange to the sound of his gramophone blaring from the verandah, was to head into Nyeri town of a Saturday night and end his binges by trashing the bar of the hotel he himself owned. It is said that he always faithfully paid the bill for damages.3

  It came as no surprise by this point to find, upon reading the great profusion of memoirs and diaries and letters left by this group, that these settlers followed Burton and Stanley and Roosevelt in making Shakespeare a central totem in their culture. Yet while there was a flourishing culture of amateur Shakespeare performances among the humbler settlers, including an annual Shakespeare Festival at the Railway Club, which ran from 1933 until the 1950s, the colonial elites were more interested in the explorers’ fantasy of Shakespeare in the wilderness.4 Just like Berkeley Cole, who ‘when he stayed on the farm, had a bottle of champagne out in the forest every morning at eleven o’clock’ and insisted on the best glasses, they immersed themselves in Shakespeare in precisely those moments when he might most seem out of place. Blixen’s writings and letters are littered with quotations from Shakespeare, and her library at her home in Rungsted on the north Danish coast holds eleven editions of the Works, most of them heavily annotated and marked by remnants of her life – four-leafed clovers, dried flowers, water damage on an edition used as the pedestal for a vase. In one copy she has written over Shakespeare’s name the rather excellent anagram ‘HE’S A SPEAKER’. These kinds of markings were long ignored by scholars, considered to be meaningless additions to (or even desecrations of) the text itself; only more recently have these things been recognized for what they truly are – evidence of the part these books played in their readers’ lives, of where they were read and what daydreams they provoked. She later commented that

  Books in a colony play a different part in your existence from what they do in Europe; there is a whole side of your life which there they alone take charge of; and on this account, according to their quality, you feel more grateful to them, or more indignant with them, than you will ever do in civilized countries. The fictitious characters in the books run beside your horse on the farm, and walk about in the maize fields.

  Among her Shakespeare volumes are those she kept from Denys Finch-Hatton’s collection, which he stored at her house when he could not take them on safari – his schoolboy edition, purchased at Eton in 1905, his mother’s volume with her schoolgirl notes, the inscribed volumes that his mother gave to his father.5 New arrivals in Kenya proved themselves to be of the ‘right sort’ by showing Blixen their devotion to the works, as did Edward Grigg, Governor of Kenya Colony from 1925 to 1930:

  it is always pleasant to meet Grigg […]. He is such a great devotee of Shakespeare, so we always talk very enthusiastically about him, – also very well up on the Old Testament, two interests that often go together, although not where I am concerned, for I can get nothing whatsoever out of it and think they were a lot of scoundrels …

  Letter to Ingeborg Dinesen, Sunday, 14 September 19306

  Grigg was later to remark that Shakespeare was losing out to Robert Burns in the British colonial expansion: whereas Burns’s statue had been erected around the world by proud Scots, the English were too sheepish to rear their standard in strange lands.7

  What one can reconstruct of these conversations from Blixen’s writings, however, suggests that Shakespeare was not, for Blixen and Finch-Hatton, used as an amulet to keep them from ‘going native’, as it had been by Burton and the members of the Emin Pasha expedition. Rather, during the resistance she staged to the administration’s ‘reforms’ of the local Gikuyu way of living, Shakespeare allowed Blixen to frame their plight in a manner not so easily dismissed by the other colonists. So, when the buyers of Blixen’s bankrupt estate determined to evict the Gikuyu residents from her land as ‘squatters’, and the administration deemed their desire to stay together when moved to the Gikuyu Reserve unnecessary, Blixen turned to Lear’s unparalleled defence of the part played by the impractical in human dignity:

  ‘Oh reason not the need,’ I thought, ‘our basest beggars are in the poorest things superfluous.’ – and so on. All my life I have held that you can class people according to how they may be imagined behaving to King Lear. You could not reason with King Lear, any more than with an old Kikuyu, and from the first he demanded too much of everybody; but he was a king. […] The old dark clear-eyed Native of Africa, and the old dark clear-eyed elephant – they are alike; you see them standing on the ground, weighty with such impressions of the world around them as have been slowly gathered and heaped up in their dim minds; they are themselves features of the land. Either one of the two might find himself quite perplexed by the sight of the great changes that are going on all around him, and might ask you where he was, and you would have to answer him in the words of Kent: ‘In your own kingdom, Sir.’8

  Well-intentioned though it may be, Blixen’s romantic reduction of Africans to picturesque and bestial features of the landscape is a little hard to stomach nowadays; I suppose we do well to remember that we will (with any luck) fall as far short of future standards of compassion as Blixen does of ours. But Blixen’s support for the Gikuyu demands despite her failure to see them as rational is part of the point, and it is here that Shakespeare’s stunning observation on the nature of dignity comes into play. King Lear, we remember, resigns his kingdom to his elder daughters at the beginning of the play, only to find them chipping away at the few privileges he retained, deeming them unnecessary for a man in his dotage.* Realizing what is going on, Lear’s mind is raised to a point of furious clarity that enables him to make a moral and political argument centuries ahead of its time – namely, that dignity is only dignity when it is allowed to define its own terms. Deciding what is or is not important or valuable or appropriate for someone else deprives them of the most fundamental part of personhood, and it is only in defending those values that seem confusing to us that we demonstrate our belief in dignity.

  An episode in my own childhood has always served to bring home to me the weight of Lear’s observation. One Sunday afternoon, walking with my father and brother in the same Ngong hills from which the Gikuyu residents of Blixen’s farm were evicted, we rounded a corner and came upon a group of young men lying in wait for us. Anyone who has been in this situation knows the leaden steps taken towards a fa
te from which one knows it useless to run. We were pinned to the ground and my father took a beating, and a few of the things we had on our walk were taken from us – a wallet, my father’s leather sandals, a bone-handled fishing knife given to me by my grandfather. We were lucky that my father had the presence of mind to throw the keys to our car into the bushes as they approached, and that the path was popular enough for these desperate men to choose not to linger long. I remember that, walking back along the dusty path to the car, my strongest impression was of my father’s bare feet. This, it seemed to me, was a matter of shame and the greatest defeat that had been visited on us that day. Dignity, as Blixen and Lear knew, must be allowed its own terms. Doubtless many of the young men who attacked us were themselves lacking shoes.

  The part played by Shakespeare’s works in Blixen’s conversation did not merely confine itself to exchanges with Finch-Hatton and with other colonists. A memorable episode in Out of Africa recounts an occasion on which she tried to explain the plot of The Merchant of Venice to Farah, the Somali servant who was at her side during her whole African stay and with whom she formed a close personal bond. Having received a letter from a friend in Denmark about a production of The Merchant, Blixen recalls that ‘the play became vivid to me, and seemed to fill the house, so much that I called Farah in to talk with him about it, and explained the plot of the comedy to him’. Much to Blixen’s apparent befuddlement, however, Farah sides with Shylock, insisting that he should not have forgone his claim to ‘an even pound’ of Antonio’s flesh, to which he had a claim under law after Antonio defaulted on his loan. When Blixen points out that Shylock would face death if he shed a single drop of blood in the process of cutting the flesh from Antonio, Farah responds with practical advice:

  ‘Memsahib,’ said Farah, ‘he could have used a redhot knife. That brings out no blood.’

  ‘But,’ I said, ‘he was not allowed to take either more or less than one pound of flesh.’

  ‘And who’, said Farah, ‘would have been frightened by that, exactly a Jew? He might have taken little bits at a time, with a small scale at hand to weigh it on, till he had got just one pound. […] he could have taken small bits, very small. He could have done that man a lot of harm, even a long time before he had got that one pound of flesh.’9

  The problem here, Blixen explains, is that ‘Coloured people do not take sides in a tale; the interest for them lies in the ingeniousness of the plot itself.’ The very cultural differences, then, that were to be respected in the Gikuyu demands for land on which to keep their cattle and stay together are the same differences which mean that, for Blixen, the African will never understand Shakespeare. Farah has failed to understand what Blixen believes to be the point of the play, the triumph of the good man Antonio over the villain Shylock. I wonder, though, whether Farah doesn’t have a point: as Shylock has been deprived, like Lear, of the right to define his own standard of dignity, it behoves him to stand upon whatever rights he does have in the law of his oppressors, even if that means staining himself with blood. The first African politicians, as we will see, became expert in using the colonial law against their masters.

  Illustration of Shylock from the Swahili translation. (Oxford University Press, Dar Es Salaam, 1969)

  Interestingly, stories like Blixen’s appear (with variations) quite frequently in travellers’ and settlers’ tales of their lives in Africa and other exotic places. Perhaps the most famous version of this ‘explaining Shakespeare to savages’ episode was told by Laura Bohannan in her 1966 article ‘Shakespeare in the Bush’ for Natural History magazine, an article that is still regularly given to first-year anthropology undergraduates to illustrate the fundamental differences between cultures. Bohannan relates how, during her field trip to study the Tiv people of Nigeria, heavy rains forced her to spend much of her time in one of the elders’ huts, where it was customary to retire during the wet season to drink the local brew and to tell stories. Although she postpones her own turn as storyteller as long as possible, eventually the audience will brook no further delay, and she decides to tell the story of Hamlet, a copy of which she has brought with her for her stay in the bush. Bohannan’s attempt to tell the story faithfully and in great detail descends into chaos as she encounters the barriers between the two cultures: the Tiv do not believe in ghosts, and it is customary among them that a man marry his dead brother’s widow, so the apparition of Old Hamlet to condemn Claudius’ marriage to Gertrude makes no sense; Hamlet is wrong, in Tiv culture, to scold his mother, and instead of seeking revenge himself should have consulted a man-who-sees-all about the truth of his father’s death before referring the matter to his father’s age-mates for justice. Ophelia could not have drowned herself as only witches can drown people; Hamlet could not have forged a death warrant for Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, because written things are unexceptionably trustworthy. In the end, the Tiv elders produce their own, more satisfactory versions of the story, including a rewrite of Hamlet’s relationship with Ophelia and her brother Laertes:

  Polonius knew his son would get into trouble, and so he did. He had many fines to pay for fighting, and debts from gambling. But he had only two ways of getting money quickly. One was to marry off his sister at once, but it is difficult to find a man who will marry a woman desired by the son of a chief. For if the chief’s heir commits adultery with your wife, what can you do? Only a fool calls a case against a man who will someday be his judge. Therefore Laertes had to take the second way: he killed his sister by witchcraft, drowning her so he could secretly sell her body to the witches.10

  Bohannan’s objections and attempts to salvage the situation fall on deaf ears: she is told, ‘We believe you when you say your marriage customs are different, or your clothes and weapons. But people are the same everywhere; therefore, there are always witches and it is we, the elders, who know how witches work.’

  Both Blixen’s and Bohannan’s stories are amusing attempts to prove that even great Shakespeare is not universal – indeed, Bohannan’s story even features as its antagonist a pompous old Oxbridge don whose belief that Shakespeare transcends cultural differences is triumphantly disproved.11 We should, however, be cautious in accepting these stories at face value. After all, one needn’t go as far as Nigeria or Nairobi to find someone to whom parts of Shakespeare’s plays don’t make sense – indeed, many members of Shakespeare’s original audience would have been uncomfortable (for instance) with the idea of ghosts. On the other hand, eloquent proof that Shakespeare’s works were open to understanding by vastly different cultures was being furnished even then by the readers of Steere’s Swahili Shakespeare and the culture of Indian performances which spread to Nairobi in the 1920s.* Both Blixen and Bohannan, I suspect, set out to demonstrate that the Africans with whom they are conversing need to be understood on their own terms, and this requires dispensing with the notion that there can be any kind of story which makes sense equally to all mankind. In an early version of multiculturalism, a threatened culture is defended against an invasive one by insisting on their fundamental incompatibility, and thus the need to keep them apart to prevent the unique features of the threatened culture being lost. Blixen and Bohannan’s retellings focus on elements of the plays – belief in ghosts, the righteousness of revenge – which were hardly universal for Shakespeare’s original audience, and certainly weren’t believed in by Bohannan and Blixen themselves; they rely, for their amusing anecdotes, on a confusion about the nature of the stories that they are telling. The Tiv believe that Bohannan is telling them a true story, which must therefore play by the rules of the world as they see it; Farah, on the other hand, does not understand that he is being told a moral fable, and so concentrates on inconsistencies in the plot. The fact that both Blixen and Bohannan were misleading their readers in a good cause – to deliver a rebuke to Western cultural complacency and to demand that the Gikuyu and Tiv be understood on their own terms and not in terms of some supposedly ‘universal’ standards – makes one a little more sympat
hetic to them. It is a curious result of these well-intentioned attempts to stick up for other ways of doing things that they actually erect barriers between cultures where they needn’t have been.12

  Perhaps I am so quick to forgive Blixen because I remember with some regret my own attempts to keep cultures separate. For all that I don’t remember having bigoted thoughts as a child, my life in Kenya was lived mostly among whites and those of Indian descent, a segregation effected more by means of wealth than skin colour; sadly, the social and economic history of post-independence East Africa meant that this led to fairly thorough separation. The school I attended did have black African students, but they were a noticeably small minority compared to the white and Asian populations, each of which made up about half the school. My interactions with black African children, then, were most often in the form of brief friendships struck up with local youngsters while on safari, and of interactions with the children of our household servants. As was usual then – and is now – the servants lived in purpose-built quarters in the grounds of the house. This will understandably strike many as a deeply paternalistic arrangement, though the many affectionate master–servant relations in Shakespeare’s plays remind us too that there are also intimacies to these situations. The families of the resident staff mostly lived elsewhere, back in the ancestral village, to which they would return with their earnings on days off and during longer periods of leave. Occasionally, though, their children would come to stay with them for long stretches, and this was the case with the son of our cook, Memli, whom I spent one summer failing to induct into the mysteries of baseball.