Shakespeare in Swahililand

by Edward Wilson-Lee

  As the first independent East African state and as a laboratory for progressive Africanist politics, Tanganyika was a magnet to revolutionaries from across the continent and the wider world.20 While many of these, such as the Committee of Nine, who coordinated anti-colonial and anti-Apartheid struggles across the continent, were in the country at Nyerere’s instigation, others were not. Indeed, Nyerere was probably not even aware that the world’s most wanted man – sought after by both comrades and enemies – spent his ‘lost year’ right under Nyerere’s nose in Dar es Salaam. After helping Fidel Castro to overthrow the Batista regime in 1959, the Argentinian doctor Ernesto ‘Che’ Guevara quickly tired of his new establishment post (as Minister for Industry), and quietly left Cuba in April 1965 in search of new revolutions to support. His first choice was the Congo, where he joined the guerrilla forces of Laurent Kabila in their attempt to overthrow the violent dictator Mobutu, who had himself recently ousted the independence leader Patrice Lumumba.* There followed seven months of dismal waiting, during which Che languished in the jungles of the eastern Congo, unable to stoke Kabila’s troops to action (and even, increasingly, to lead his own hundred-man Cuban column effectively). Eventually he abandoned his plan to die as a martyr to violent revolution in the Congo, and allowed himself to be secreted back across Lake Tanganyika, debilitated by dysentery and with a broken spirit.

  Che spent the next five or six months (October 1965 to February/March 1966) in a secret two-room apartment on the top floor of the Cuban embassy in Dar es Salaam, held in limbo as Fidel Castro tried to prevent his comrade-in-arms from having another shot at martyrdom in his native country of Argentina. (Che eventually settled on Bolivia, where he received his desired death at the hands of CIA operatives in 1967.) He spent the first few months of his confinement dictating his memoir of the Congolese campaign to the embassy’s cryptographer, Colman Ferrer, calling it the ‘history of a failure’. In an attempt to keep him in Dar longer, Fidel flew Che’s wife, Aleida, to Tanzania, and from January to March the couple had a second honeymoon in their Dar safe house; in her later memoir, Aleida recalled the curious reunion in costume that greeted her in Tanzania.

  Che was waiting for me there, transformed into another character I almost didn’t recognize. He was clean-shaven, not wearing the olive green uniform he always wore in Cuba. I, too, was incognito, extremely nervous, full of doubts. […] In order to travel, I had disguised myself with a black wig and glasses that made me look much older than I was. So two apparent strangers met in Tanzania, but our feelings for each other could not be disguised.21

  Though Aleida had been spirited from landing strip to embassy, and later regretted not having seen the storied safari parks of eastern Africa, she remembered fondly the programme of reading they undertook together, with Che setting the syllabus and the two of them discussing what they had read each evening.

  Our accommodation was not particularly comfortable, but that hardly mattered. We had a single room in which we ate, slept, and studied, and a bathroom, where Che developed some of the photographs he had taken with his professional quality camera. We also returned to our regular routine. After breakfast, I would read, always with Che’s guidance, and he would read or write.22

  Che’s leading biographer notes that the small library Aleida brought from Cuba in the diplomatic pouch was ‘curiously apolitical’: ‘The Greek tragedies of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, as well as Pindar and Aristophanes; the Histories of Herodotus, a manual of analytical geometry, the theatre of Shakespeare, and Dante.’23 Like many African travellers before him, Che saw in the otherworldly environment of the Dark Continent the ideal location to immerse himself in high European culture. Despite his revolutionary temperament, he even brought with him the same library recommended by Burton, Roosevelt and other early travellers: the Greeks, Euclid, Dante, Shakespeare; but like Nyerere, Che hoped these books would show him the path to socialism in the Third World.24 One cannot help but wonder whether, during his romantic African house arrest at the hands of his former comrade turned politician, Che was haunted by two of the plays that unstoppably rose to the surface in the African mid-century: Julius Caesar, in which the bonds of friendship are melted in the forge of nation-making, and The Tempest, in which the just man sequesters himself in the wild, with the books and the woman he loves, to await the day of his righteous return.25

  During the first five years of his presidency, Nyerere was refining his programme of African Socialism, a programme that he launched in the 1967 Arusha Declaration, which outlined his plans for the nationalization of the farming industry and its redistribution among the newly fashioned communal farms which would be the bedrock of his progressive-traditional state. He was also translating his second Shakespeare play, The Merchant of Venice, which was published in 1969 as Mabepari wa Venisi. This time, Nyerere left no doubt about the motive for choosing this particular play as his second contribution to the Swahili canon. Even in the title, Nyerere’s choice of ‘Mabepari’ (the Gujarati-derived word for ‘bourgeois’) to translate ‘Merchant’ hints at his interest in a Marxist-inspired look at the economic roots of society’s ills.26 As Marxists, Nyerere and Che would have believed less in the possibility of a universal culture and more that similar economic systems produced similar cultural forms. Shakespeare was the poet of emerging capitalism – the joint-stock companies like the East India Company (which may have performed his plays in idle moments) were an early form of this new world order – and he was perfectly placed to chart the world it created, including friendship, which was forged by its economic migration and threatened by the wealth it created. But he was also a poet of its discontents.

  In one respect, there was nothing particularly groundbreaking about Nyerere’s choice of a Shakespeare play to draw attention to the role of capital as the root of evil. After all, Marx himself was a declared fan of Shakespeare; his favourite play was the little known economic fable Timon of Athens, in which the bon viveur Timon is abandoned by his erstwhile parasites when the money runs out, precipitating a descent into a barking, cynical madness in which Timon recognized wealth as, in the words of Marx, ‘the alienated ability of mankind’. The Merchant of Venice had proved the most popular of Shakespeare’s economic fables, and it was often among the first plays to be translated into other languages; as we’ve seen, the Merchant was not only among the tales chosen for Steere’s Hadithi (translated there as Kuwia na Kuwiwa or ‘Mercy and Judgement’), but was also performed in Agha Hashr’s translation in Mombasa (Dil Farosh) and was discussed at length by Karen Blixen and her servant Farah. Although interest in this play has recently revolved around whether or not the depiction of Shylock is anti-Semitic, the lack of a Jewish presence in East Africa makes it likely that these audiences’ rancour was directed at the figure of the moneylender rather than the figure of the Jew – as, indeed, may have been the original intention of Shakespeare, who himself most likely had little acquaintance with actual Jews.27

  But while Nyerere was almost certainly drawing on this general distaste for those who make vast profits off the desperation of others, I wonder whether he did not also see in Shakespeare’s play a deeper affinity for his programme of ujamaa, or ‘familyhood’, through which he was attempting to steer Tanzania away from the inequalities of unbridled capitalism. After all, it easily escapes attention that the title of Shakespeare’s play identifies as the main character neither Shylock, the moneylender, nor Bassanio, the amorous young man on whose behalf the loan is secured and whose romantic mission to woo the heiress Portia forms the focus of the play. Rather, the ‘Merchant’ of the title is Antonio, a rather reclusive figure who stands as guarantor of the loan and whose ‘even pound of flesh’ looks to be forfeit after he defaults on repayment. Antonio is a mystery in a number of ways. On the one hand, he seems like a superfluity: why not have Bassanio take out his own loan, allowing Portia to save him from the threat of the forfeit flesh? This would remove the awkward third wheel that is Antonio, who (as both facilitato
r of Bassanio’s wooing and recipient of Portia’s heroic aid in saving him from Shylock) seems very much to make this couple into a crowd. Modern criticism, with its propensity to think along a single track, has often identified a sexual motive for Antonio’s actions: he consistently plays a part in Bassanio’s love life because he can’t bear to let go of him. Antonio’s opening speech of the play is seen by many as a veiled reference to this unsatisfied romantic longing:

  ANTONIO:

  In sooth, I know not why I am so sad.

  It wearies me, you say it wearies you,

  But how I caught it, found it, or came by it,

  What stuff ’tis made of, whereof it is born,

  I am to learn;

  And such a want-wit sadness makes of me

  That I have much ado to know myself.

  The Merchant of Venice (I.i.1–7)*

  Yet though Bassanio later gives away his beloved Portia’s ring to show his love for Antonio, it becomes clear that the relationship between the two is not erotic but a particular form of intense friendship that was held in the highest esteem during the Renaissance. The Gascon essayist Montaigne went to great lengths to set this amitié apart from other forms of emotional attachment; although the special quality of this love was hard to put a finger on exactly, it was best captured by the feeling that between the two friends ‘souls are mingled and confounded in so universal a blending that they efface the seam which joins them together so that it cannot be found’, a feeling that Bassanio speaks of as being ‘infinitely bound’ to Antonio.28 Antonio’s discontent, then, stems from an economic motive, from the inability to do anything which will truly live up to his friendship with Bassanio. Montaigne similarly demonstrated the qualities of this amitié with a counterintuitive economic fable, about a dying man who bequeaths to his two great friends the right to look after his mother in her old age and to provide a dowry for his daughter. Though this sounds like madness to the common ear, Montaigne says, those who know true friendship will recognize that the man did his friends a truly great service in giving them the means to express their love. Antonio similarly experiences a profound satisfaction at the moment that he is able to throw off trade and speculation in order to do something for a fellow human being to whom he is linked by no other bonds than those of friendship. At the moment when Antonio believes that the court will uphold Shylock’s right to his flesh, and that he will die as a result, he speaks the following words to Bassanio:

  I am armed and well prepared.

  Give me your hand, Bassanio; fare you well.

  Grieve not that I am fallen to this for you,

  For herein Fortune shows herself more kind

  Than is her custom: it is still her use

  To let the wretched man outlive his wealth,

  To view with hollow eye and wrinkled brow

  An age of poverty, from which lingering penance

  Of such misery doth she cut me off.

  Commend me to your honourable wife:

  Tell her the process of Antonio’s end;

  Say how I loved you; speak me fair in death,

  And when the tale is told, bid her be judge

  Whether Bassanio had not once a love.

  Repent but that you shall lose your friend

  And he repents not that he pays your debt;

  For if the Jew do cut but deep enough,

  I’ll pay it instantly, with all my heart.

  The Merchant of Venice (IV.i.259–76)

  As he prepares to die, Antonio finds a peace that has previously eluded him, a peace produced by the marvellous ability of Shylock’s bond to transform money from ‘the alienated ability of mankind’ into something right at the core of the experience of living. In short, it has meant that Antonio can give to his friend Bassanio something much more real than money; the gift of his actual heart’s blood is a glorious release from the various metaphors for worth in which humans normally deal. Brutus was only speaking poetically when he said that he would ‘coin my heart / And drop my blood for drachmas’, but Antonio has found a way to make the metaphor real. My guess is that this is what Nyerere the translator saw in the Merchant: a cure for bourgeois malaise in the form of shared blood, a ‘familyhood’ that reverses the discontents of capitalism.

  Nyerere’s utopian and pacific vision of the African future was not without its critics. Elsewhere were voices warning that political independence by no means meant freedom from outside control. One of the most powerful expressions of this, directed in part against Nyerere and his ilk, was a version of Shakespeare by another black poet-statesman, the playwright Aimé Césaire from Martinique. Césaire’s 1969 play Une tempête stays close to the plot of Shakespeare’s Tempest, but radically recasts the meaning of each of the actions: Prospero’s ‘magic’ is revealed to be no more than navigational skill, even if he believes he has created this New World with his compass and maps. They are to him ‘terres pressenties par mon génie’, lands both made present and presented to him by his skill. The party arriving from Naples, moreover, is not there entirely by chance: they are there to expand their usurpation of his dominions by taking over the island. Stephano and Trinculo become revolutionaries who, like the Freelanders and Che Guevara, are attempting to plant the international anti-authoritarian project in foreign soil. For all that Césaire’s recasting of Shakespeare might be thought to have been inspired by his island home, and the West African-derived populations of the Caribbean, it is clear that the East African independence struggles were at the front of the playwright’s mind. Caliban retains some traces of the language he had before Prospero ‘taught him to speak’, and prominent in this language is the Swahili word uhuru (freedom), the battle cry of anti-colonialism in East Africa. Among these new visions of Shakespeare’s characters, Ariel represents the figure of the intellectual – men like Nyerere and Kenyatta – forever counselling patience to the native population and living in hope of a peaceful co-existence in which the colonizer learns the error of his ways. The men who once had been pilloried and imprisoned as agitators were now under siege from the other side for a conciliatory stance that was seen by many as dangerous appeasement. Césaire’s single major change comes at the end of the play. Caliban predicts that Prospero’s plans to depart the isle to go back to Europe are illusory, and that he will never abandon his ‘vocation’ in the New World. Prospero, protesting that Caliban’s plans to rid the island of the ‘white toxin’ do not constitute a platform for rule, and furious that the savage’s ingratitude at his liberation has made him doubt himself for the first time, decides to remain on the island and give over the rest of his life to his civilizing project. There is, then, to be no easy escape for Caliban.

  * At the time of writing the Vatican has awarded Nyerere the title of ‘Servant of God’, which represents the first step on the road to canonization.

  * The pun, which is dependent on ‘Rome’ and ‘room’ being homophones in early modern English, is part of Cassius’ attempt to paint Caesar as constricting Rome by reducing it to one man’s fiefdom.

  * Indeed Hamlet is so concerned with consequences that almost nothing happens – and almost everything that does happen does so by mistake (the deaths of Polonius, Ophelia, Laertes and the Queen, and of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern). Othello, like Romeo and Juliet, is a tragedy in which the mistake is so great that there can be no living on after it.

  * The interest of the Cuban revolutionaries in the eastern African struggles was longstanding, as suggested by the fact that their guerrilla strike-force was nicknamed ‘the Mau Mau’. See Anderson, Che Guevara, p. 384.

  * Antonio is one of many middle-aged men in plays from this period of Shakespeare’s career who express a similarly inexplicable ennui, a group that includes Hamlet (in his ‘I have of late lost all my mirth’ speech) and Jaques in As You Like It.

  8

  ADDIS ABABA

  Shakespeare and the Lion of Judah

  RICHARD II:

  For heaven’s sake let us sit upon the g
round,

  And tell sad stories of the death of kings:

  How some have been deposed, some slain in war,

  Some haunted by the ghosts they have deposed,

  Some poisoned by their wives, some sleeping killed,

  All murdered. For within the hollow crown

  That rounds the mortal temples of a king

  Keeps Death his court; and there the antic sits,

  Scoffing his state and grinning at his pomp,

  Allowing him a breath, a little scene

  To monarchize, be feared, and kill with looks,

  Infusing him with self and vain conceit,

  As if this flesh which walls about our life

  Were brass impregnable; and humored thus,

  Comes at the last and with a little pin

  Bores through his castle walls – and farewell, king.

  Richard II (III.ii.150–65)

  Of all the African scenes in which Shakespeare’s words were spoken, Ethiopia was perhaps the one in which they required least adaptation. Here, after all, as late as 1974, was an absolute monarchy of the kind that offered Shakespeare and his fellow playwrights an endless dramatic gift, intensifying human folly and fragility by investing it for a time with unlimited power. As in Shakespeare’s time, this mode of government produced a court in which courtiers vied for attention, with its promise of favour and patronage, through a complexly choreographed programme of intrigue and alliance, mingling flattery with duplicity and supported by the silent languages of costume and gesture. And, as in Shakespeare’s time, the fragile equilibrium of this bizarre arrangement was held in place by a Christian church that both attested to the Godly and ancient nature of kingship and wrote this social structure into the daily life of the humble through a range of ritual practices. It should, then, be unsurprising that it was here that Shakespeare’s East African adventure in a sense reached its climax, with translations of Othello, Macbeth and Hamlet by the Ethiopian poet laureate Tsegaye Gebre Medhin forming a backdrop to the decadent reign and violent overthrow of Emperor Haile Selassie I, and earning their author extremes of adulation and condemnation, from state-mandated editions to censorship and imprisonment.