In one of the little ironies of history, Blixen’s late-life fame inspired a number of projects to track down her servants and hear their side of the story about her years in Kenya. One of these, by the photographer Peter Beard, led to the houseboy Kamante entering into a correspondence with Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis; I met the author of another, Tove Hussein, on the terrace of the Muthaiga Club, where Blixen had first stayed on arrival in Kenya almost a century before. During our conversation I am reminded that one of the last things Blixen wrote before she died was an adaptation of The Tempest, in the form of a short story called ‘Tempests’ published in 1958 in a collection called Anecdotes of Destiny. This tale sees Malli Ross, the abandoned daughter of a Scottish seaman, join a troupe of coasting Nordic actors whose impresario casts her as Ariel in his long-dreamt-of production of Shakespeare’s play. The production is sidelined, however, when the troupe are shipwrecked during a storm off a Norwegian fishing port. Though the rest of the actors make it to shore safely, Malli is left on board ship, only to win herself an almost mythical status when she (like Ariel) steers the craft to the safety of a nearby island. There Malli’s path changes from that of Ariel to that of Miranda; she falls in love with the island’s most eligible bachelor. After a brief period of bliss, however, she absconds. She explains in her parting letter what she now understands: that she braved the storm because it was nothing but a stage effect to her, and her free spirit with which he had fallen in love was in fact a part of her disengagement from the world. This, she sees, is the magic of Prospero, who can control the world because it is nothing but a stage play to him. Falling in love has removed her power because she now sees the world as others do, with a deep-seated fear of loss.
The figure of Caliban is noticeably missing from Blixen’s retelling of The Tempest. Perhaps this was because, like Malli and the storm, she could no longer lightheartedly treat matters about Africa – and indeed she would never write about Africa in her fiction. Perhaps, though, it was because Caliban is the island-dwelling man with whom Malli falls in love.
* It is fascinating that Lear should provide the text of Blixen’s act of empathy, just as The Tempest served as inspiration for the colonizers’ fantasies. The two texts are, after all, mirror-image reversals of one another: Lear’s failure to control his daughters finds an outlet in his railing at a storm, a confrontation which encapsulates his powerlessness; Prospero begins The Tempest by controlling a storm, though it later becomes clear that this is mostly in service of controlling the marital choices of his daughter. The stories are essentially nightmarish and wish-fulfilment versions of the same relationship as they occur to Shakespeare, father of daughters. But, as Blixen and the colonizers saw, they were also two narratives about political power. In the earlier of these, Lear the tyrant comes to understand the dehumanizing effects of arbitrary power upon the ruled.
* Indeed, Old Hamlet’s ghost ironically makes more sense within a Gikuyu context, where the spirit of the father is kept in existence by the remembrance of his male children, but is not accessible after death by female relatives (just as Gertrude cannot see Old Hamlet’s ghost). See Kenyatta, Facing Mount Kenya, 15.
* At the same time in Tanzania, members of the earliest native political organization (the Tanganyika African Civil Servants’ Association) were strongly resisting ‘the current pre-occupation in British colonial thought with “adapting” educational systems to the mentality and culture of Africans’, sending Martin Kayamba to the Advisory Committee on Native Education as a ‘consistent opponent of any proposals to compromise standards of English literary education’. See Austen, ‘The Pre-history of Tanu’, Makerere Journal 9, 2.
6
KAMPALA
Shakespeare at School, at War and in Prison
Then the whining schoolboy with his satchel
And shining morning face, creeping like snail
Unwillingly to school. And then the lover,
Sighing like furnace, with a woeful ballad
Made to his mistress’ eyebrow. Then a soldier,
Full of strange oaths, and bearded like the pard,
Jealous in honor, sudden and quick in quarrel,
Seeking the bubble reputation
Even in the cannon’s mouth. And then the justice,
In fair round belly with good capon lined,
With eyes severe and beard of formal cut,
Full of wise saws and modern instances,
And so he plays his part.
As You Like It (II.vii.145–57)
The truncated account of the seven ‘stages’ of life given by ‘melancholy Jaques’ in As You Like It is funny in part because of the cutting accuracy with which it reduces each age in men’s lives to a few commonplace attributes. Men – and it is specifically men here – are entirely simple and predictable, even though their experience of these life stages is as of things newly discovered, emerging from unique and powerful passions. Jaques is being cynical, suggesting that man’s life is no more than a series of parts and therefore of no more worth than a stage show. But as is so often the case in Shakespeare, Jaques is being played for a fool: what he takes to be the triumph of nihilism, proof-positive of life’s absurd lack of meaning, is in fact a gesture to a compelling affirmation of life. Perhaps life is worth no more than a stage play, giving us mere outward show and performed parts, and requiring from us an infinite suspension of disbelief; but can’t a stage play, like the one you are experiencing even now, be filled with passion and significance and wonder, all the more beautiful in that it has been conjured from nothing by make-believe and sleight of hand? This trick is everywhere in Shakespeare. Macbeth dismisses life as a ‘poor player, a walking shadow / That struts and frets his hour upon the stage, / And then is heard no more’ (V.v.23–5), but the very speech he is speaking is still being heard four centuries later, and even now refutes the idea of him as a mere ‘shadow’. Hamlet scorns ‘actions that a man might play’ (I.ii.84), but is later inspired by a player to some of his most powerful and immortal lines – themselves, of course, part of a play. In part Shakespeare’s genius lies in his ability to capture the paradoxical thing that Jaques misses – the experience of the universal as something particular. Romeo and Juliet are every pair of young lovers and Lear is every ‘foolish, fond old man’, but Shakespeare never assumes that common experience is commonplace; for them, as for each of us, our most profound and overwhelming experiences are almost always ones widely shared in some form or other. So reading Shakespeare is often like hearing Jaques’ speech: we recognize, sometimes with astonishment, how perfectly he has captured stages of life through which we have passed, and gives us some sense of those that are to come. And because Shakespeare’s plays are among the only works to which we still return at various stages of our life, reading them can be something like an ongoing revelation: each time we return to them, we find some new truth that wasn’t there the last time we looked.
One of the most striking things I found as I followed Shakespeare on his travels through East African history was the fact that the works were present at every stage of life in the region during the very period when the region was struggling to free itself from colonial rule. The plays were set as compulsory reading at school, yes, but they were not dispensed with after that as nothing more than rote learning. Many – even most – of those who would go on to become post-independence political, social and cultural leaders went on to study English literature at Makerere University, where the emphasis was heavily on the reading and performance of Shakespeare’s plays. And though this odd fact in itself was the result of a curious set of historical circumstances, these readers of Shakespeare did not simply shake off their reading after graduation as so much colonial propaganda. Instead, they took Shakespeare with them out into the world, and he was woven into every part of the fabric of African life, into the speeches of politicians and lawyers, but also into the folklore of rural villages. Shakespeare even followed in times of crisis, into riots and guerrilla warfare and
into concentration camps. Yet any temptation to write this love of Shakespeare off, as merely a self-loathing attempt to be like the colonial masters even as they overthrew them, is quickly dispelled as the trail is followed: these are wholehearted commitments to reading Shakespeare, and ones as likely to Africanize his works as to preserve him as a pristine European fetish. Intrigued by what the ongoing revelation of Shakespeare would have been like for people in such extreme circumstances, I headed for Makerere University in Kampala, where African cultural and political life converged in the middle years of the last century.
I arrive in Kampala sick as a dog, and Kampala is not the place to be sick. I remember thinking even as a child that Kampala was an uncanny and rather forbidding town, and my swimming head and cold sweats do nothing to shake this impression. The chief Ugandan city is perched, like a tropical Rome, on a series of dark-green hills a little way inland from Lake Victoria; the mid-continental air is heavy and humid, and the town is overrun with marabou storks, massive and funereal scavengers which stand on every avocado tree and telephone pole, like morticians in need of work. Travelling around the city means swooping from hill to hill via the gullies in between, constantly swarmed by the motorcycle taxis which serve as the main mode of transport. Kampala is where the early missionary and colonial settlements chose to make their base in order to set themselves apart from the royal Buganda homestead at Entebbe. When the centre of power shifted from the Kabakas (kings) to the European settlers, local tribes gathered around the Kampala missions, converting long-standing tribal enmity into enmity between Catholic and Protestant converts, who fought ‘religious’ wars here in the late 1880s and early 1890s. Kampala was to see darker days still after independence; my mother was here studying and teaching at Makerere in the 1970s when the first President, Milton Obote, was overthrown in a military coup by Idi Amin, and the Makerere campus still bears the scars of the fighting. Amin had spent his childhood working as a kitchen boy for the British Army, and between that and his Scottish missionary education developed a violent dislike for the English. He promoted a climate of fear in Uganda, starting with the expulsion of Asian residents and proceeding to the torture and execution of his political opponents, as well as to rumours of cannibalism which Amin himself delightedly encouraged.
After a day of sitting in a clinic waiting room, my paranoia not helped by the outbreak of Ebola virus in Uganda the previous summer, I learn to my relief that I do not have malaria, but rather a double bill of tonsillitis and dysentery, brought on (I imagine) by the acacia gum that I shared with a Maasai guide while bundu-bashing (bush-walking) a few days previously. And though I know it is probably down to my delirium, the oddity of Kampala still dogs me. When I came here as a child, I was given a thick roll of banknotes for my pocket money, only to discover that this would scarcely buy me one of the freshly bootlegged Michael Jackson tapes which were sold on every street corner. The disconcerting singularity of Uganda impresses me now as well. A taxi driver proudly tells me that the Queen has visited Uganda more than any other African country, and drives me to a clock and a luxury hotel erected for her visit; but he does so with such fanaticism as to be vaguely threatening. The feeling of an alien land is further exacerbated by the fact that I don’t speak the language. There was an attempt by the colonial authorities to make the coastal Swahili that their officials already spoke a lingua franca here, but it met with only moderate success: the Buganda had a long, proud history, and weren’t about to drop their tongue for a mongrel merchant patois. Luganda is an odd language, with long words and too many vowels, and the few words I can say make me feel like I am speaking in tongues.
Half-crazed and weak as I am, I have limited time in Kampala, and so I drag myself unwillingly to the Makerere University Library in search of the Shakespeare that East Africa’s freedom fighters came to love here as students. Makerere is draped across one of Kampala’s hills, descending from where the Italianate palazzo of its Main Building, with its red-tiled roof and bell tower, gives way to the more practical concrete structures of its post-independence heyday. The whole, however, seems always on the point of being overwhelmed by plant life, and the early accounts of students here feasting on the campus avocado trees bears a touching similarity to the original ‘Academy’, where Aristotle learned from Plato under the trees of a sacred olive grove. The university once had the greatest library in eastern Africa, but it had been rifled and left to rot under Idi Amin, and is only now slowly beginning to recover. I do manage to track down copies of the college magazine, and from this a picture of these crucial pre-independence years begins to emerge. Literature played little part in the curriculum during the first years after the foundation of Makerere College in the 1920s, with the focus being largely on providing practical education to Africans as farmers and minor functionaries. A precise date for the rise of a literary culture on campus is hard to give, in part because the wartime paper rationing meant that no college annual was printed between 1941 and 1946, the years during which future Shakespeare translator and first President of Tanzania Julius Nyerere was studying there to be a teacher. But by the time the annual resumed there seems to have been a flourishing culture of Shakespeare reading under the tutelage of a newly arrived English lecturer, Margaret MacPherson. The 1947 issue of Makerere notes public readings of Julius Caesar, As You Like It and Hamlet, and there appears to have been a pseudo-Shakespearean skit (The Two Gentlemen of Soho) performed that year as well. The real watershed, however, came in the summer of 1948, when MacPherson and the English department began producing an annual full-length Shakespeare play. MacPherson clearly had an extraordinary eye for charisma, and her casting over the succeeding years predicts with astonishing accuracy the vanguard of independent East African life. The title role of the 1948 Julius Caesar was played by none other than Apollo Milton Obote, who would become the first President of Uganda.1 The next year’s production, Richard II, was led by an ‘outstanding performance’ as the weak king by Geoffrey Kariithi, who would go on to become the head of the Kenyan Civil Service. The role of Falstaff in the 1952 Henry IV Part II was taken on by James Rubadiri, who (as David Rubadiri) would later become one of Africa’s leading writers and intellectuals and a leader of the Malawian resistance against the eccentric dictator Hastings Banda. And, since Makerere began admitting female students in 1945, these productions featured performers of both sexes. A review in the annual notes a brilliant performance of Volumnia in Coriolanus by a Zanzibari girl, Assiah Jabir, though Margaret MacPherson notes elsewhere that her fellow Islamic islanders forbade her to act in a Sheridan play. MacPherson suggests that this distinction was made because Sheridan was not part of the course, though Sheridan’s status as an outlaw – outside the course as well as the pale for Islamic students – most likely had something to do with the raunchiness of his plays (something that wouldn’t have been a problem with the sexless Volumnia).2 The Ugandan theatre was to have a long reign in testing the boundaries of East African sexual culture: when the future journalist and activist Yasmin Alibhai-Brown took the female lead in a 1960s school production of Romeo and Juliet she was disowned by some of her family for her stage affair with a black Romeo.3
The expat lecturers who write the performance reviews in the Makerere annual are convinced that these actors are coming to Shakespeare for the first time, but by now I am primed to spot this obsessive tendency on the part of English travellers to think that they are introducing the Genius of Shakespeare to the benighted natives. In fact, though the teaching staff of Makerere might have insisted on thinking of their students as parochial, most of these students represented the African social elite, and they came to Makerere from exclusive boarding schools such as the Alliance High School in Kenya and Tabora Boys’ School in Tanzania. James Ngugi, who came to Makerere from Alliance in 1960, spoke bitterly during the culture wars of the late 1970s (under his re-Africanized name Ngugi wa Thiong’o) of ‘Shakespeare in Colonial Trousers’, though he later recalled with more affection the annual all-ma
le Shakespeare productions at Alliance. Ngugi remarks that even as a schoolchild he mapped the Shakespeare he was watching and reading onto contemporary African politics, imagining that the band of woodland exiles in As You Like It were the Mau Mau rebels with whom his brother was encamped in the northern highlands.4* Ngugi’s first major piece of writing, the play Black Hermit, was put on at Makerere in 1962, and was written in response to the dominance of Shakespeare on the East African stage.
The Makerere Shakespeare productions were not, however, the naïve productions that the English lecturers imagined them to be. The review of Milton Obote’s performance as Caesar is rather dismissive, saying that he ‘did not achieve sufficient dignity except in his last speeches to the senate’, and that his murder was ‘clumsily managed’, ‘drawing laughter from some of the audience’.5 We further learn that the most satisfactory performance was given by the ‘crowd’, who played both the Roman rabble and Brutus’ army, in which guise several of them appeared dressed as members of the King’s African Rifles. But photographic evidence, found for me by the University Archivist, tells a different story. A striking and little-known image shows Obote, instantly recognizable by his distinctive coiffure, sitting on a dais in front of the Italianate main university buildings, as a traitor kneels before him. The moment is instantly identifiable as the one in which Caesar, ‘constant as the Northern Star’, protests his steadfastness to the treacherous men who are about to murder him. This image seems prescient of the momentous things that were stirring even as the production was rehearsed, and of which the reviewer was unaware when he dismissed it: at the same time as learning Caesar’s lines, Obote was forming a political organization to stage protests against the Ugandan Lukiko elite as puppet-tyrants for the colonial overlords. In the light of these events, which would grow into the Ugandan independence movement, it is not surprising that the murder of the tyrant Caesar at the hands of a mob of deserting African soldiers drew a laugh from the crowd. And in a moment of supreme historical irony, the tables were soon to be turned on the reviewers of the student Caesar. As the protests heated up on campus, the faculty members resorted to wearing helmets and shields to protect themselves from the stones hurled by Obote’s protesters, the very ones that had been fashioned from oil drums to serve as legionaries’ costumes in Julius Caesar.6
Shakespeare in Swahililand Page 14
