Shakespeare in Swahililand

by Edward Wilson-Lee

  The Makerere Shakespeare productions were, then, a cultural centrepiece at the beating heart of East African intellectual life, in a period when the students and faculty counted among their numbers not only future independence leaders but also leading African public figures and international celebrities who would take the African Question to the wider world. The leading Kenyan historian Alamin Mazrui and the future theatre director Okot p’Bitek became members of the faculty in the 1950s, and they were joined by the American novelist and travel writer Paul Theroux early in the 1960s, who overlapped with the future Nobel Laureate V. S. Naipaul during his period as writer-in-residence there in 1966. In an age when the greatest challenge facing African independence was the need to develop inter-tribal solidarity and overcome the divide-and-conquer tactics of the colonial administration, it is thrilling to note that the Makerere Shakespeare productions, which seem to have acted as a breeding ground for political figures and movements, were truly pan-African. The reviewer of the 1949 Richard II notes that over twenty different tribes were involved in the production; this trifling ‘stage play’, then, would have given many emerging leaders their first experience of organization along national and international lines, even as they played at killing tyrants. The colonial authorities clearly also recognized the capacity of theatre to foster political organization, and when they took over the Gikuyu schools from the native administrators at the beginning of the Kenyan independence movement they immediately cut performance from the syllabus.7

  Though the students at Makerere were drawn from the East African elite, the reach of these Shakespeare productions was by no means restricted to a small audience of university students. The review of the 1949 Richard II notes that the play was chosen because it was on the 1950 Cambridge Examinations syllabus, and that 2000 schoolchildren saw the play during the course of its five performances. Their familiarity with these school texts would have a profound effect on East African cultural life; Richard II was, incidentally, the text on which I also sat my end-of-school exams, and I can testify that one never gets to know any other text quite as fully and intimately as these. The vast majority of these witnesses did not, of course, go on to be leading public figures. But they did fan out across the region and through them Shakespeare trickled down into the groundwater of East African life. Back at the Aero Club in Nairobi the great Shakespearean actor John Sibi-Okumu had told me over dinner that he first heard the plot of Julius Caesar as if it were a local legend, recounted to him by his Uncle Daniel, who had returned to their small village from boarding school. Abasi Kiyimba, a professor at Makerere who works on Ugandan folklore, confirms that this is a common experience: he remembers how as a schoolchild he and his peers would contribute to evening storytelling sessions by adding their own versions of stories learned at school, from the Lambs’ Tales from Shakespeare. Shakespearean narrative, he tells me, blended easily with the traditional folklore of the older generation: the moving Birnam Wood that comes to defeat Macbeth was just another version of the traditional Kibate stories of forests that come to life; and Portia’s triumph over Shylock found a ready audience in a culture rich in trickster tales. There is even a similar one, in which the moneylender is duped into receiving stones (ejjinja) when he believes he will be paid in a particular town (Rejinja). Lear made its way into Buganda folklore, as a traditional narrative in which the apparently prodigal child is revealed to be the most reliable one; and The Taming of the Shrew was cited by the elders as proof that even the Europeans were departing from their traditional ways in allowing women greater liberties. Shakespeare was not alone in this – Abasi tells me that Chinua Achebe’s groundbreaking 1958 novel Things Fall Apart circulated more widely by word of mouth than as a printed text during his childhood – but he does seem to have been pre-eminent. In a culture where memory is communal and is shared orally, these evening storytelling sessions represented nothing less than Shakespeare entering the fabric of East African life, blending irreversibly with traditional stories and the world as understood by them.

  Many of the leading figures in the East African independence movements, then, had a primarily literary education, and their first experiences of intellectual debate and community organization came through discussions and productions of Shakespeare’s plays. Following the story of these figures from their school days into the fray of revolutionary politics, it becomes clear that they were forced to use the tools they had at their disposal, to turn what they had received as the totem of British civility into a weapon all the more dangerous for its closeness to the British heart.8 I’ve come across dozens of instances of this in the archives from the independence days of the early 1950s and 1960s, such as when the first African member of the Kenya Legislative Council, Eliud Wambu Mathu, used The Merchant of Venice to put the injustices of the colonial government in their own language. Mathu was one of the first Kenyan Africans to be educated to secondary level, and he went on to be the first African master at the elite Alliance High School before leaving for further study at the University of Exeter and at Balliol College, Oxford (supported by none other than the Rhodes Trust); while in Britain he spent his weekends in London staying with Kenyatta and associating with the leaders of George Padmore’s International African Service Bureau. His fifteen years on the Legislative Council after his return to Kenya, where he was driven by the conciliationist ideas of his idol, Booker T. Washington, have led many historians to characterize him as a puppet of the colonial administration, a piece of window dressing which allowed the pretence that the African population was being consulted to continue. But it is evident from the transcripts of the debates in the Legislative Council that Mathu was intent on embarrassing the colonial government on its own terms. During a 1955 session in which the colonial administration attempted to renew a tax that disproportionately affected the Gikuyu tribe by asking them for money while restricting their ability to work – its real intention being to drain the financial resources of the Gikuyu Mau Mau militant group – Mathu responded by turning the white man’s mantras against him:

  MATHU: … Sir, I am afraid of this [legislation] because I do not want the Government and this legislature to be accused of being like Shakespeare’s Shylock, the Jew, and Bassanio in The Merchant of Venice.

  Here we are making a bond in the way of an Ordinance for 1956 and the Jew, in this case the government, is going to demand before 31st December, 1956, a pound of flesh in the form of the tax. The question is this: Antonio is not there, so who is going to pay? Because the cargo is delayed, because the ship cannot come in to shore on time, and that is just the point here. Now the cargo is being waited for and the cargo, in my opinion, which is going to come in order to pay Shylock, the Jew, the pound of flesh, is the opportunity for earning a decent and legitimate livelihood by these people. The question is who is our Bassanio, Sir, and who is Portia to give the judgement. (Applause)

  THE MINISTER FOR AFRICAN AFFAIRS: Mr Speaker, I do not propose to bandy Shakespeare with my hon. friend …9

  Mathu’s clever analogy, between the moneylender who hopes his creditor will default so he can have power over him and the government that lays a trap for its subjects by instituting a tax it knows they cannot pay, evidently struck a powerful chord with those who were listening. The time Mathu spent in Britain was likely enough to convince him that the British could not stand being shown their own villainy as reflected in one of their most cherished morality tales. Like Caliban cursing Prospero in his own language, Mathu and other political agitators became adepts at using the colonials’ cultural totems against them.

  While the public demonstrations which led to nationalism in Tanzania and Uganda were largely peaceful affairs, not all the struggle took place in Legislative Councils and courtrooms. The rising of the anti-colonial Mau Mau Gikuyus in Kenya, at its height between 1952 and 1956, made a reality of the worst nightmares of the colonial administration, and their reaction was swift and brutal. A state of emergency was declared, and the Mau Mau practice of using traditio
nal oaths to bind members to revolutionary solidarity was outlawed; in the imagination of settlers and Europeans back home, these native forms of affiliation were recast as superstition, witchcraft and a regress to savagery from the ‘modern’ forms of the colonial period. Over the coming decade a million Gikuyus were held in concentration camps and enclosed villages, where they were subjected to physical torture and psychological warfare in the name of ‘retraining’. The scale of British wrongdoing during the Emergency is only now coming to light, as reams of previously classified documents come into the public domain.10

  Heartbreaking as the stories from inside the camps and prisons are, there are also a number of inspiring stories of detainees refusing to be bestialized by the conditions in which they were kept by colonial and apartheid regimes in Africa. The most famous case of this is perhaps on Robben Island, a penal colony off Cape Town, where in the late 1970s Nelson Mandela and thirty-three other political detainees marked their favourite Shakespearean passages in a copy of the Works that was passed around among the prisoners and became known as ‘The Robben Island Bible’.11 The passages chosen by the prisoners are often from the Roman plays and the history plays, marking out sections in which some parallel to their own political struggle and imprisonment can be seen; but there are also selections that turn entirely away from the circumstances of captivity, that find in Shakespeare a total escape from the prison island and its daily routines. Mandela signed his name on 16 December 1977, fifteen years into his three-decade detention, next to Julius Caesar’s famous lines on the resilience of the brave:

  Cowards die many times before their deaths;

  The valiant never taste of death but once.

  Of all the wonders that I yet have heard,

  It seems to me most strange that men should fear,

  Seeing that death, a necessary end,

  Will come when it will come.

  Julius Caesar (II.ii.32–7)

  It is extraordinarily moving that Shakespeare’s pithy distillation of classical stoicism should have been given voice by the most famous and triumphant survivor of racial oppression in Africa. One cannot help but feel that, whereas the prisoner in monochrome garb most likely felt himself uplifted by Shakespeare’s venerated words, the blessing is in fact the other way around: the love for Shakespeare of Mandela and other African political prisoners in some way purifies the works, removing from them some of the taint of their use as a tool of psychological warfare and cultural colonization.

  The very power of dramatic writings to mingle with the thoughts of those speaking them, however, made them a more sinister tool in the hands of those charged with ‘rehabilitating’ the Mau Mau detainees in the Kenyan camps. If great lines of verse can give expression to feelings that might otherwise be difficult – or dangerous – to articulate, they can also be forced upon people, putting words in their mouths in hopes that these will stick in their hearts and minds. This is an idea as old as rote-learning and catechizing, and everyday language provides plenty of instances of how what we say and what we think are often seen as interchangeable: a ‘creed’ is both our belief and the specific form of words we must learn to express that belief, and to ‘sing from the same hymn sheet’ or to ‘be on the same page’ is not merely to be experiencing the same words but also to be taking them into us and making them part of how we view the world. This was one of the main reasons why Steere and his fellow missionaries were determined to be the first to produce standardized, authoritative writing systems for native languages; he who wrote the hymn book would hold a powerful sway over the minds of those singing from it.

  The colonizers would not, however, have everything their own way. As we have all experienced, from childhood onwards, what sticks with us most powerfully from songs, poems and speeches is not so much the specific words as the non-semantic elements of language – rhythm, syntax, rhyme. We have all, I am sure, inserted new words into famous lines and felt how the power of the original carries over into the dubbed version; this was a common phenomenon even in Shakespeare’s day, when popular songs were rewritten to have political or spiritual messages, piggybacking on the fact that the verses already had a place in the popular memory. The native African political movements availed themselves of this power by altering the words of Christian hymns and colonial anthems in native languages to become their first expressions of resistance, doubtless revelling in the fact that their fervour could not only be expressed in the open in front of uncomprehending colonial officials, but would even be mistaken for expressions of piety and nationalism.12 They might, indeed, have echoed Shakespeare’s powerful formulation on how song can reverse the polarity of power:

  … our cage

  We make a choir, as doth the prisoned bird,

  And sing our bondage freely.

  Cymbeline (III.iii.42–4)

  The central Mau Mau practice of ‘oathing’ similarly blended the ancient tribal rituals that bound the individual to his age peers with the legal and spiritual forms of swearing that had been brought to Africa by the colonizers.

  So when the colonial government rounded up tens of thousands of suspected Mau Mau fighters in October 1952 they were concerned not merely to put anti-government forces out of commission but to reverse their loss of power over the things that were spoken in Kenya Colony. In addition to separation from families, physical brutality and forced labour, the detainees were subjected to mass ‘confessions’ of having taken part in the ‘oathing’ process, replacing formulas of allegiance to Mau Mau with formulas of penance and repudiation. In a bizarre turn of events, the very people who had been responsible for transforming Christian hymns into songs of Mau Mau protest were now ordered by the rehabilitation teams to recast them again as anti-Mau Mau propaganda.13

  Language, though, is a slippery thing, and will not always behave as we want it to. If being forced to repeat words can sometimes instil belief in the speaker, it can also draw our attention to the fact that there is more going on than what is being said. Agreeing to ‘play our part’ means falling into line and doing what we are told, but it also alerts us to the fact that we are merely playing a part – play-acting rather than doing for real. Hamlet has often been seen to represent a breakthrough in human thinking about selfhood, in many ways not because he says anything groundbreaking about what it is like to be a person but rather because he suggests we can’t say anything about the important parts of selfhood. Everything that can be performed – speech, gesture, emotion – is necessarily open to fabrication, and so the authentic part of us must be something that cannot be performed. Hamlet, more than anything else, has ‘that within which passeth show’, and his attitude to everything external is tinged with that kind of ironic distance with which modern audiences find it so easy to identify. Yet this insight into the distance between what we say (or do) and who we are releases Hamlet to be Shakespeare’s most theatrical character, one who not only spends much of the play pretending to be mad (which he thinks of as putting on an ‘antic disposition’, or playing the part of a theatrical fool), but who is also – in his additions to the ‘play-within-a-play’, The Mousetrap – the only playwright character in Shakespeare.

  This may help to explain the fact that the rehabilitation programme not only failed to end the antipathy of the detainees to white colonial rule, but also gave rise to some of the first theatrical writing in East African languages. This drama was, to be clear, mandated by the camp wardens and was in itself meant to be part of the rehabilitation programme, intended both to test the extent to which the detainees had repudiated their former views and to re-stage history, forcing the audience to watch their confederates revile Mau Mau with the same lips that once sang its praises. Although it is impossible to weigh one form of persecution against another, to say whether this brainwashing was worse than the physical brutality to which the inmates were subjected, there seems to be a particular darkness to the British using theatre in this vindictive manner. In Shakespeare’s day there was a popular aphorism express
ing this bleak kind of fall from grace: corruptio optimi pessima (‘the corruption of the best is the worst’). There is, they recognized, a kind of special defilement in making your most cherished things the engine of evil.

  Some consolation may be taken from the fact that this part of the programme also seems to have failed dismally. Gakaara wa Wanjaū, one of the authors who had been tasked with rewriting his own anti-colonial hymns and with producing pro-British propaganda plays, recounts joyfully the performance of his play in front of successively smaller and more authoritative audiences – first for the detainees and prison guards, then for the Commandant of the camp, and finally for a group of Special Branch officers.14 The play, Let the Guilt of His Crimes Weigh Heavily on His Conscience, centres on a prison camp ringleader (Zakayo) who learns from a visiting priest that his family is falling apart in his absence – his former business partner has, in his absence, denounced his older wife to the authorities, exiled his son from the family shop, and taken up with the younger wife. Zakayo is broken by this knowledge, and his confession to the camp authorities allows him to return and salvage some of his former life, with his older wife returning from the Kamiti prison and his younger wife revealing that she has been hiding money away against his return. Had the play ended there the authorities might have been satisfied with it as a morality tale demonstrating the benefits of acquiescence and evidence of Gakaara’s change of heart. But the climactic ending of the play turns the preceding narrative on its head by having the business partner, Labani, return at the moment of reconciliation and collapse at the sight of his one-time friend whom he thought to see die in prison. The ‘guilt’ announced in the title is not the guilt of the Mau Mau resistance fighter but rather of those who have collaborated with the colonial authorities. ‘I was under the impression, from the demands for extra performances’, the playwright comments with delicious irony, ‘that everybody was deriving a lot of pleasure from my play.’