European and American friends of mine are often shocked to learn, when they ask about my exotic African childhood, that their lives – of suburban malls and theme parks – were every bit as much a part of my fantasy world as exploring jungles may have been of theirs. Every two years my father’s work allowed for a paid and extended period of ‘home leave’ – leave which presumed that Europe or America remained forever ‘home’ – and for these trips I would plan feverishly in the months that led up to them. That summer I had visited my father’s American relatives and had returned obsessed with baseball. Though I retain the passion to this day, my mature mind has come to justify my interest as residing in the finely orchestrated duel of pitcher and batter through a series of three-strike crescendos; my immature passion, however, probably had more to do with the oiled baseball mitt I had brought back, the perfect bone-whiteness of the ball with its faultlessly even red stitches, and the smooth perfection of my Louisville Slugger bat. I can now see the irony in the fact that these things, which I valued for the pristinely manufactured condition lacking in almost everything made in Africa, were made not from plastic but from the same natural materials – leather, wood – out of which local products were made. I still struggle to think of anything as truly desirable unless it is made from these things.
Not understanding this little fetish – or perhaps understanding it all too well – my mother determined that I should spend the rest of the long summer months out from under her feet and honing my skills at the game I professed to love. As Nairobi is a vastly spread-out place, and visits between schoolfriends were rare (even when they were in Nairobi during the long vacation), she suggested to Memli that I should pass the days teaching her son to play baseball. We duly retired to an area of dust and scrub which was the emptiest patch in our heavily forested compound; it sloped sharply upwards to an old abandoned water tank, in which during another summer my brother and I would attempt to make moonshine from apple juice and baker’s yeast. In retrospect, our little league takes on an absurd aspect: I am sure that William had better things to do – though for all I know he was earning pocket money for entertaining the bwana kidogo; and I was caught in my own lie, falling deeper in despair with each blemish inflicted by the thorns and dust on my tooth-white ball.
The experiment was, of course, a failure. Despite being my age mate, William was embarrassingly superior to me in athletic ability, and his easy mastery of the skills I was trying to teach only deepened my unhappiness. We kept it up for a fair few sessions, but only because I didn’t want to give the impression that I didn’t think the servant’s boy good enough for me, or admit that I was only interested in the paraphernalia of the sport; and presumably he didn’t feel he could throw over the sullen little mzungu with whom he had been saddled. That I remember this episode with almost as much interest as shame is down to the fact that my reaction was conjured by something other than a feeling of superiority: I certainly didn’t think him not good enough to play baseball, or to play baseball with me; I simply liked to keep these two parts of my life separate. Each seemed diminished when mixed with the other, like Blixen’s Shakespeare and her beloved Africa with whom she refused to share it.
Though Blixen and other defenders of native rights often gave in to their temptation to romanticize Africans, to think of them as part of an oral culture that could only be harmed by the introduction of literacy, they nevertheless had some sense of the way the wind was blowing, and Blixen herself set up a school for the Gikuyu on her farm. The writings of Blixen and other settlers, however, show very little sense of quite how sophisticated the political opposition to colonial dominance already was in the new urban environment. Nairobi was still little more than a rail depot when Blixen arrived in 1913, with planned neighbourhoods being marked off in the surrounding swampland (‘Nairobi’ coming from a phrase meaning ‘cold water’ in Maasai). Conditions were so poor (at least for those not largely concerned with racecourses and country clubs) that the local prison was widely known as the Hoteli ya Kingi Georgi (‘The King George Hotel’) because the amenities it provided were so superior to those available to most in town. A member of the Indian community dryly remarked in that year that the new Indian residential location, ‘situated on the plain near to or where now is the Somali village’, ‘would be an excellent location as the drainage difficulties are not insuperable’.13 Yet it was not long before a group of young men-about-town began to emerge as the voice of this fledgling urban community, and what set them apart was literacy. Known as the athomi, or ‘Readers’, these young agitators were mission-educated and were to supply the first generation of Kenyan politicians. Among these muthamaki (‘one who draws men to him with words’) was Harry Thuku, who worked as a typesetter at The Leader newspaper in the 1910s and was to lead the first non-tribal political group, the East African Association, until his arrest and exile to Somalia in 1922. The path from literacy to political self-consciousness was not entirely smooth – and Thuku recalls in his autobiography a risibly poor fraudulent cheque for which he was arrested in 1911 – but it was clear at the time that the British had created something they could no longer contain. As Thuku writes:
The Catholic policy was only to teach Africans religion, but no fuller education. … When there were political troubles in Nairobi in 1922, they thought this showed their policy had been right. For they wrote in their mission newspaper published in Nyeri, ‘You British people, you have made a mistake. You sharpened a knife which is now cutting you.’ They meant the knife of education.14
As Thuku implies, those educated by the Protestant missions had a much broader syllabus available to them than the catechism – including, of course, language teaching through texts including Steere’s Hadithi za Kiingereza – and, along with the printing press that Steere had also introduced to East Africa, this gave them the rudimentary tools of their own insurrection.*
Another graduate of the mission schools and member of the athomi, Johnstone Kamau, was to set up the first vernacular newspaper (the Gikuyu Muigwithania, or ‘Reconciler’) and act as General Secretary to the Gikuyu Central Association, a successor to Thuku’s East African Association which commemorated annually his rising in 1922 and awaited his return from exile.15 During these years Kamau’s name changed to Kenyatta (after the brightly coloured belt he habitually wore), the name by which he was to be remembered as the first President of an independent Kenya.
Although Kenyatta was to develop a vision for his country formulated entirely in African terms, he did so only after a period of residence in Europe convinced him that the Muigwithania mission of reconciling kikuyu karing’a (authentic ‘Gikuyu-ness’) and Western ways was futile. During his seventeen years of living in England, Kenyatta was courted and rejected in turn by the missionaries, the labour movement and the communists, all of whom despaired at his refusal to renounce tribal social structures and customs (including female circumcision) in favour of one or other brand of righteousness. But while the image he left to history was that of a tribal elder, carrying a flywhisk and with an animal-skin cloak covering his Western suit, his earlier life was a much more hybrid affair, as suggested by the British wife (Edna Grace Clark) he left behind on his return to Kenya in 1946, the (lost) satirical novel he began about an African student in Britain, and the volumes of Shakespeare which, though studiously ignored in his published writings, were (according to his daughter, Margaret) his favourite books, from which he often recited.16
Though the story of future African leaders in the West during the early twentieth century is a neglected one – ranging as it does from the residence of ‘King Freddie of Buganda’ (Mutesa Edward II of Uganda) at Magdalene College, Cambridge, to Kwame Nkrumah’s stay in the United States before returning to serve as the first African President (of newly independent Ghana) – it was very much part of the popular consciousness of the time, as I was reminded when reading Babar the King to my son. As many a parent (or former child) will remember, Jean de Brunhoff’s cherished bande dessiné
e of 1931 centres on a young elephant who escapes to the town after his mother is shot by a hunter; luckily, upon his arrival in the town, ‘a very rich Old Lady who has always been fond of little elephants understands right away that he is longing for a fine suit’. She underwrites his predilection for cream cakes and spats as well as providing him with a sports car and a tutor, in return for which Babar provides companionship and regales her dinner guests with stories of the jungle. Upon Babar’s return to the jungle, the elephant elders are unanimous in their view: ‘He has just returned from the big city, he has learned so much living among men, let us crown him king.’17 In later instalments, Jean de Brunhoff’s elephant obligingly builds a European city in the kingdom of the elephants, complete with a theatre that produces classical French theatre, introducing civilized ways and rooting out the ‘laziness’ that comes naturally to wild animals. De Brunhoff’s colonial fable comes eerily close to some of the realities of fashionable support for young African visionaries in the 1930s and how they were perceived by contemporaries, right down to the implied sexual edge of the elephant’s relationship with its society hostess. The same note of scandal is seen in intelligence reports, such as those on Kenyatta’s relationship with the American shipping heiress and civil rights champion Nancy Cunard, who Special Branch recorded in 1933 had ‘recently been associating – apparently with considerable satisfaction to herself – with Johnstone Kenyatta’.18
A more detailed, though hardly less pessimistic, account of this period is given in the roman à clef by the South African novelist Peter Abrahams, A Wreath for Udomo. Under a thin veil of fiction, Abrahams recounts in the first half of the novel the residence in London of his close friends of the 1930s and ’40s, friends who included the future Ghanaian independence leader Kwame Nkrumah, the leading pan-Africanist George Padmore, and Jomo Kenyatta. Abrahams gives us some insight into the human side of the heady years during which the pan-Africanism that would dominate politics on the continent for the next three decades was forged in student dorms and at house parties in London and across the United Kingdom. The novel focuses on Udomo (immediately recognized as Kenyatta by Abrahams’s first readers), whose growth to political consciousness is complicated by his erotic encounters with English women. The love affairs of these independence leaders with English women – and through them with Englishness – fundamentally compromises their commitment to the independence movement. The second half of the novel deals with the slow decline from idealism after these same men became leaders of independent states, descending into a saga of internecine struggles, betrayals excused by political necessity, and trade deals which all but give the power back to the old colonial masters.
These insights into the early emotional life and character formation of Jomo Kenyatta are all the more tantalizing given the fact that Uhuru Kenyatta, his son and the heir to his political legacy, is a regular at the Aero Club of East Africa which I make my home while in Nairobi. Settler life in Nairobi often migrated between the poles of private members’ clubs, from the elite Muthaiga Club, where Waugh had stayed and where the liaisons of the Happy Valley set had taken place, to the Railway Club, which had, in the pre-independence years, served as a downmarket alternative. The Aero Club served the needs of bush pilots who, like my father, swarmed in and out of the private Wilson airport on their way to destinations only reachable by light aircraft, and its walls are a gallery of those East African aviators – including Beryl Markham, the first pilot to cross the Atlantic flying westwards – who have made it their home over the years. The club is unremarkable in appearance, merely a bungalow and a compound fenced off from the parade of Cessnas and de Havillands landing outside; but the Members’ Bar has a mythic quality, an unmistakable affinity to Falstaff’s Eastcheap tavern that is made all the more uncanny by the presence of Kenya’s Prince Hal, Uhuru Kenyatta. This has only partly to do with the slender legs and generous paunches of your average bush pilot, or the endless chits that disappear behind the bar for some later reckoning, or the list of members excluded for non-payment, or the endless panegyrics to strong drink, which makes the blood ‘course from the inwards to the parts extreme’ and ‘illumineth the face, which, as a beacon, gives warning to all the rest of this little kingdom, man, to arm’ (2 Henry IV, IV.ii.97–9). It is, rather, the way in which the stories of derring-do expand into the room as the teller warms to his theme, calling across the bar for some expert witness to corroborate the fact that such-and-such a landing strip (landing strip? D’ y’ reckon that was a landing strip?) was then by no means the novice’s training run that it is now – even now, when it is mostly rocks and no one to chase away the buffalo – and the crosswinds, believe me man (‘What, art thou mad? Art thou mad? Is not the truth the truth?’), and cursing this bad world in which manhood is forgotten, to the gales of laughing drinkers returning to their conversations. Uhuru Kenyatta realized the hope and expectation of the time by becoming the fourth President of Kenya during the writing of this book, and I would lay money that there is a drinker or two at the bar who thinks he has forgotten them.
Peter Abrahams’s A Wreath for Udomo is all the more astonishing for the fact that it was written in 1956 – before any of these countries had won independence and decades in advance of the political defeats he predicts with such accuracy. The story is, in a sense, another version of Blixen and Bohannan’s multiculturalism, a warning of what lies in wait for Africa if it does not effect a full separation from English culture. For all the starkness of its warning, though, Abrahams’s novel is not a battle cry but rather a deeply ambivalent account of the complex emotional ties between the powerful and the disempowered, between the servant and the master, and in this respect it is deeply Shakespearean. Shakespeare was himself a servant – one of the Lord Chamberlain’s ‘Men’ and then one of the King’s. Much of the force of this fact is lost on us today because we think of actors and playwrights as people of great prestige and cultural power. But in Shakespeare’s England such ‘players’ were barely distinguishable from vagrants – indeed the law treated them as the same in many respects – and the only way that they could stay on the right side of the law was to take the livery of a powerful person, becoming, in effect, their servants. Remembering this draws our attention to the overwhelming presence of servitude in Shakespeare’s plays, a feature that is often forgotten in a modern world so uncomfortable with a relationship that blends the power to command with such intimacy. The most famous expressions of love in the English language, after all, are Shakespeare’s sonnets to the ‘master-mistress of his passion’, the unnamed patron who is both master and lover.
Shakespeare’s plays have a similar obsession with master–servant relations, and (what’s more) one that evolved as Shakespeare the servant himself became more wealthy and successful. The early plays feature fantasies of the master and servant switching places – as Tranio and Lucentio do in The Taming of the Shrew – and of servants who ‘marry up’, as Viola does in Twelfth Night and Helen does in All’s Well That End’s Well. The portrayals of ‘marrying up’ in Shakespeare’s early plays, however, stay inside the bounds of what was acceptable to his society by having only women enter into sexual relations with their social superiors. When men try to do this – as when the steward Malvolio conceives a passion for his mistress, Olivia, in Twelfth Night – they are exposed as upstarts and roundly mocked. In this respect not much had changed between Shakespeare’s society and the twentieth century; it’s hard not to think that My Fair Lady was a popular comedy and Lady Chatterley’s Lover was a scandal in part because women having sex across social boundaries was fine and men doing it was threatening. By the time of the later plays, however, Shakespeare was himself a part-owner of his theatrical company, a landlord with significant holdings and even the possessor of a coat of arms, a status symbol which entitled him to be addressed as ‘Master’, and for which he was mocked as an upstart by many of his contemporaries. Two of these late plays are centrally concerned with men who attempt to marry above themselv
es. In the first of these, Cymbeline, the heir apparent to the throne marries ‘a poor but worthy gentleman’, prompting her father to exile him and set in motion the events of the play. The other play, The Tempest, delves more deeply into the fear of upstart men by adding race to the mix. As the play opens we find the native Caliban in a state of slavery, though it becomes clear that his relations with Prospero were not always this way: Prospero claims at first to have treated Caliban ‘with humane care, and lodged [him] / In mine own cell’ (I.ii.346–7). This intimacy is cemented by Miranda’s desire that they should have a shared language and culture as well as shared lodgings:
When thou didst not, savage,
Know thine own meaning but wouldst gabble like
A thing most brutish, I endowed thy purposes
With words that made them known.
The Tempest (I.ii.354–7)
Caliban has been degraded to the status of a chained slave, whose labour is compelled by pain rather than encouraged by reward, because he presumed to cast a desiring eye on Prospero’s daughter. Caliban, however, does not accept this judgement lying down, and turns the tools of his master against him:
You taught me language, and my profit on’t
Is I know how to curse. The red plague rid you
For learning me your language!
Blixen and Bohannan hoped that by demonstrating African imperviousness to Shakespeare they would slow the progress of Western culture and its claims to be universal. But for Udomo, as for Caliban, it is too late: whether or not the culture of the master had any claims to be universal, it is clearly dominant, and it is now indelibly part of their heritage too. Caliban, however, shows that accepting this is not the same as letting the master have his own way in everything. Caliban, like Harry Thuku, knew that education could be a tool that the teacher sharpened against himself.
Shakespeare in Swahililand Page 13
