Shakespeare in Swahililand

by Edward Wilson-Lee

  I wonder whether it has ever occurred to many of us that while that £80 was being spent [by the government to educate] me (or for that matter on any other of the past or present students of Makerere) some village dispensary was not being built in my village or in some other village. People may actually have died through lack of medicine merely because eighty pounds which could have been spent on a fine village dispensary was spent on me, a mere individual, instead. Because of my presence at the College, (and I never did anything to deserve Makerere) many Aggreys and Booker Washingtons remained illiterate for lack of a school to which they could go because the money which could have gone towards building schools was spent on Nyerere, a rather foolish and irresponsible student at Makerere. My presence at the College therefore deprived the community of the services of all those who might have been trained at those schools, and which might have become Aggreys or Booker Washingtons. How can I ever repay this debt to the community? … The educated man is not important in himself; his importance lies in what he can do for the community of which he is a member.4

  After a few years as a teacher Nyerere was sent on a government scholarship to the University of Edinburgh, where he studied Politics, Philosophy and Economics, and where he mixed with the pan-Africanist circles around George Padmore, the same circles in which Kwame Nkrumah and Jomo Kenyatta had forged their strategies for independence and self-government.

  Although Nyerere briefly continued teaching upon his return to Tanzania, he soon turned to full-time involvement in politics, first as the president of the Dar branch of the African Association, and then in 1954 as the founding President of the Tanganyika African National Union. The success of TANU was an astonishment to all who witnessed it. While even the more progressive of colonial administrators were envisioning a move to self-government in a matter of decades, the explosive growth of its membership led to the transfer of power being repeatedly brought forward. In a speech to the UN in December 1956, Nyerere showed his considerable skill in framing the Tanzanian independence struggle for an international audience. At the same time as giving the movement deep roots and drawing on postwar anti-German sentiment by locating the genesis of nationalist sentiment in the 1907 Maji Maji rebellion against German colonial rule, Nyerere distances TANU from the revolutionary struggles led by the Mau Mau in Kenya:

  There was no nationalist movement, no nationalist agitators, or subversive Communists who went about the country stirring up trouble against the Germans. The people fought because they did not believe in the white man’s right to govern and civilize the black. They rose in a great rebellion not through fear of a terrorist movement or a superstitious oath, but in response to a natural call, a call of the spirit, ringing in the hearts of all men, and of all times, educated or uneducated, to rebel against foreign domination. It is important to bear this in mind, madam, in order to understand a nationalist movement like mine. Its function is not to create the spirit of rebellion but to articulate it and show it a new technique.5

  As might be expected, Mwalimu Nyerere’s pamphleteering and speechmaking used Shakespeare quotation prominently to prick at the colonial opponent, as when he paraphrased Julius Caesar in a pamphlet entitled Barriers to Democracy to remind the colonial masters that ‘men at some time are masters of their fates’ (I.ii.140).6

  The momentum of TANU was initially checked by the counter-manoeuvring of the Governor, Sir Edward Twining, who attempted to divide and conquer by promoting a rival party (the multi-racial United Tanganyika Party) and by summoning a convention of chiefs (themselves colonial appointees with a history of working for the British), as well as closing branches of TANU.7 A moment of crisis arose when Nyerere seemed headed to prison for refusing to pay a fine after a court charged him with libelling a British District Commissioner; the fact that Tanzania did not follow the bloody path of Kenya can be attributed in part to Nyerere’s resistance to being made a martyr in this way, and in part to a realization in the British administration that the time for temporizing had passed. Twining was replaced by Sir Richard Turnbull, and despite Turnbull’s fearsome reputation as the ‘Hammer of the Mau Mau’ he and Nyerere struck up a working relationship based on what seems to have been a genuine mutual respect.

  Charles Meek, a colonial official who was at the table during the transfer of power (and who later became Nyerere’s Permanent Secretary), records the lightning pace at which things progressed from this point on.

  We moved from ministerial government to semi-responsible government, full internal self-government and then independence within the amazingly short period of three and a half years. We seemed to shed constitutions every six months like a kind of political striptease.8

  Nyerere was appointed Chief Minister of a caretaker government on 1 September 1960; in December 1961 Tanganyika declared independence with Nyerere as its first Prime Minister; he became President of Tanganyika when a republic was declared exactly a year later, and President of the new country of Tanzania when Tanganyika merged with Zanzibar in 1964.

  It was during these pivotal days in 1961 that the Father of the Nation began retiring from the day’s work to complete his monumental Swahili translation of Julius Caesar, sending it to be published by the Dar branch of Oxford University Press in 1963. Scanty as they are, all sources are in agreement that Nyerere’s Caesar was the occupation of solitary evenings, when perhaps he sought to recapture the privacy of his schoolboy cave. Meek recalls how ‘In those days [Nyerere] was apt to be beset in the evenings by his political associates’, and how he would often seek to escape from the hubbub of his official residence at Meek’s own house. ‘Inevitably we would talk over the problems of the day, but we were just as likely to discuss Julius Caesar, which at the time it was his diversion to be translating into the mellifluous Swahili of which he was a master. I recall a long discussion about how best to render Shakespeare’s pun about “Rome and room enough”.’9* Contemporary accounts are also largely in agreement that Nyerere’s aim in making the translation was to demonstrate Swahili’s capacity to serve as a great literary language, though one commentator also suggests that Nyerere was determined to make a Tanzanian contribution to the quatercentennial celebrations of Shakespeare’s birth in 1964.10 Nyerere’s attempts to adapt Shakespearean blank verse met with a mixed reception, with some heralding it as a liberation from the fetters of traditional Swahili rhyme, while others saw it as a tragic abandonment of the indigenous poetic aesthetic.11

  The most intriguing question, however, is why Nyerere should have chosen Julius Caesar as the play with which to spend his evenings and with which to make an argument for Swahili as one of the world’s great tongues. The immediately obvious connection, between the name of the title character and of the translator, can quickly be dispensed with as a motive: Nyerere was, after all, not named after the Roman tyrant, but rather after one of the Catholic saints of the same name (as the baptismal ritual required). It is also unlikely that Nyerere would have felt much affinity with Shakespeare’s character, who is the tyrant and not (like Nyerere) the tyrant-slayer. Caesar is, in more senses than one, not the hero of his own play: the assassination of this weak, vain and affected man before the half-way point of Julius Caesar gives way to the real heart of the play, as the battle for the hearts, minds and bodies of Rome takes place between the patriotic rebel Brutus and the cunning politician Mark Antony. The momentous course that East African history was taking at the time also does not offer any easy explanations: not only did the first reviewers deny any link between Caesar and the events of the day, but later attempts to read Nyerere’s translation as a political allegory rely heavily on him being prescient of events that occurred after he published his version.12

  The key to understanding Nyerere’s choice of Julius Caesar lies, I think, in looking past the intrigue and assassination in the first half of the play to the conclusion for which these events prepare.13 Like three of Shakespeare’s four ‘high tragedies’ – King Lear, Hamlet and Macbeth – Julius Caesar is centrally
concerned not just with the tragic events themselves but with living with the consequences of past upheavals: the murder of Old Hamlet, Caesar and Duncan, the disavowal of Cordelia.* In a moment that serves in many ways as the emotional climax of Julius Caesar, Brutus, the leader of the insurrection, accuses his friend and co-conspirator Cassius of using their new power to enrich himself. Each man stands upon his dignity, Brutus disdaining to discuss the matter further with a fallen man and Cassius astonished to be turned upon by his closest friend. After a fraught scene of charge and counter-charge the men are reconciled, though it is obvious that the wound has been covered rather than cured: friendship, which is evidently central to the value the two men place on life, has been irremediably polluted by power. During the negotiations with Governor Turnbull over the transfer of power to the independent nation, Nyerere shared his premonitions that the same fate might await him. Drawing upon the experiences of his childhood, when he and his companions would break away from herding or from schoolwork to hunt small birds, Nyerere spoke of a ‘certain pattern’:

  When hunting there is no problem. … Problems start when the animal has died, that’s when fighting starts, because this one wants that piece and another cuts another piece, and that’s when people start to get their fingers cut.14

  Nyerere, like Brutus, fears that he will have to choose between his friendship and his honest dealing with the country he loves. In lines that rang with Nyerere’s commitment to wakulima, the peasant farmers of Tanzania, his Brutus said:

  Naapa ni afadhali niufue moyo wangu

  Uwe fedha, na kutoa moyo wangu uwe pesa,

  Kuliko kuikamua mikono ya wakulima

  Vitakataka vyao kwa njia ambayo ni mbaya.

  By heaven, I had rather coin my heart

  And drop my blood for drachmas than to wring

  From the harsh hands of peasants their vile trash

  By any indirection.

  Julius Caesar (IV.iii.72–5)

  Nyerere, who as a young man had translated the cost of his university education into the lives it could have saved, was keenly aware of the real price paid for luxuries like learning and friendship.

  It is easy for us today to forget that friendship, that powerful bond inspired by shared tastes and values (and cemented by shared weaknesses), is by no means a phenomenon that has existed in the same way at all times in history and in all places.15 While pre-urban cultures formed more binding relationships than we do, most of these were based on kinship or economic/institutional relations (master–servant, client–patron, membership of guild or parish). Friendship in a sense comes to replace these, when migration and residence in the anonymizing city meant that people begin to lose their ties to family, place of origin, or shared occupations. The idea of friendship, that one might owe one’s loyalty to someone else purely on the basis of a shared set of ideas about the world, was one introduced in many ways to the modern West by Renaissance humanists, and with which Shakespeare himself was intensely concerned. A great many of Shakespeare’s plays are about the very logics and limits of what (largely male) friends owe each other – Valentine and Proteus in The Two Gentlemen of Verona, Leontes and Polixenes in The Winter’s Tale, Claudio and Benedick (and Hero and Beatrice) in Much Ado about Nothing. Shakespeare’s society was one defined by fairly rigid social divisions, however, and the most powerful of these considerations of friendship deal with what happens when there is a power imbalance between the friends that threatens the ideal of a relationship based on shared values: Hal and Falstaff in the two parts of Henry IV, Antony and Enobarbus in Antony and Cleopatra, the speaker and the addressee in the Sonnets, and Hamlet and Horatio (as well as Hamlet and Rosencrantz and Guildenstern). Renaissance humanist ideals of friendship derived (as so much of the Renaissance did) from a classical pedigree, and the Roman Brutus shows himself to be a true devotee of friendship when, at the beginning of the plot to assassinate Caesar, he refuses to allow the conspirators to take an oath of loyalty:

  No, not an oath. If not the face of men,

  The sufferance of our souls, the time’s abuse –

  If these be motives weak, break off betimes,

  And every man hence to his idle bed.

  So let high-sighted tyranny range on

  Till each man drop by lottery. But if these,

  As I am sure they do, bear fire enough

  To kindle cowards and to steel with valor

  The melting spirits of women, then, countrymen,

  What need we any spur but our own cause

  To prick us to redress? What other bond

  Than secret Romans, that have spoke the word

  And will not palter? and what other oath

  Than honesty to honesty engaged

  That this shall be or we will fall for it?

  Swear priests and cowards and men cautelous,

  Old feeble carrions, and such suffering souls

  That welcome wrongs. Unto bad causes swear

  Such creatures as men doubt, but do not stain

  The even virtue of our enterprise,

  Nor th’insuppressive mettle of our spirits,

  To think that or our cause or our performance

  Did need an oath, when every drop of blood

  That every Roman bears, and nobly bears,

  Is guilty of a several bastardy

  If he do break the smallest particle

  Of any promise that hath passed from him.

  Julius Caesar (II.i.113–39)

  Brutus refuses to let the bond of their shared values become cheapened by being reduced to a legal or ritual obligation, such as might be contained in a contract or a sacrament: all Romans who share the same noble beliefs are friends. They are linked by bonds as close as family ties, and betrayal will exclude them from these ties as if they were bastards.

  There existed, in a sense, a direct equivalent of this friendship in the custom common to many East African tribes of ritually cementing the union between members of the same age group, forming a set whose shared identity was the product of shared experiences and not of blood ties. These bonds always exist in an uneasy relationship with the notion of family: they are always acts of voluntary association that claim a different type of allegiance from the individual to kinship, but, like the many childhood friendships I attempted to seal with blood or spit, they always reach towards the language of family relations – shared fluids and the threat of bastardy. There is more than a touch of Brutus’ discomfort with this reliance on ritual in Nyerere’s conscious attempt to distance himself, in his speech to the UN, from the ritual oath-swearing of the Mau Mau (‘[The Tanganyikans] rose in a great rebellion not through … a superstitious oath, but in response to a natural call, a call of the spirit, ringing in the hearts of all men, and of all times, educated or uneducated …’). As Nyerere translated Julius Caesar, he was experiencing, as almost no other reader of the play ever has, the core elements of Shakespeare’s play: both the crucial importance of friendship and its fragility in the turbulent crucible of power from which a new state emerges.

  Nyerere was right about the challenges he would face after winning the battle for independence. In part this was down to his refusal to engage in a witch-hunt against all non-Africans as vestiges of colonialism, preferring instead a conciliatory approach inspired by his other great literary idol, the black American civil rights campaigner Booker T. Washington (and mirroring the forgiveness of Brutus for those of Caesar’s party). On the eve of independence, when Nyerere should have been riding a wave of popularity as liberator of his people, he was instead angrily defending to the National Assembly his Citizenship Bill, which allowed for white and Asian citizens as well as black. As Meek reported, Nyerere argued that ‘his ideology he could change, his religion he could change, the one thing he couldn’t change was his colour, and he rubbed his skin as he spoke. No man should be treated differently because of the one thing he could not change. He would rather resign than accept a racially defined citizenship.’16

 
Once in power, Nyerere continued to distinguish himself from many other post-independence leaders by not using his new powers to enrich himself or to consolidate power. He refused to live at the official residence, Government House, and instead built himself a relatively humble home on the beach. And though Tanzania was to be a one-party state (avoiding the tribalization which might result from many parties, as well as attempts by outsiders to play one party off against another), he was determined that it would be a participatory democracy.17 Nyerere’s main concern, however, was to develop a programme for Tanzanian society that would prevent traditional African communal ties from being eroded by rampant capitalism. As early as his Makerere days Nyerere had written passionately in the editorial pages of the Tanganyika Standard insisting that while the ‘European tendency is to be as individualistic as possible’, the African is ‘naturally socialistic’.18 The young university student’s ideas were strikingly precocious, and seem to predate by some years the doctrine of ‘African Socialism’ as formulated by mature political thinkers. First and foremost among these was Léopold Sédar Senghor, the poet-philosopher who led Senegal to independence and became its first President. Like Senghor, Nyerere sensed that Africa did not need to follow the Marxist route to a fairer society. In large part this was because the nuclear family, which Marx saw as a bulwark of patriarchalism and private property, had never formed any part of African society. African Socialism, the theory went, would attempt to bypass the revolutionary overthrow of capitalism by simply institutionalizing the traditional, socialistic structures of the African community.19