Shakespeare in Swahililand

by Edward Wilson-Lee

  Tsegaye himself was briefly imprisoned, and there is a heartening story of his having saved a fellow inmate from the noose by means of a linguistic quibble. But like his counterpart Shakespeare, Tsegaye proved remarkably adept at weathering regime change. If he was proud of the fact that his work had been banned by three successive governments – Haile Selassie, Colonel Mengistu and the Derg, and Meles Zenawi – he was nevertheless also feted by all three as well. His Otelo was revived in 1980 and was reputedly seen by 100,000, earning the National Theatre a healthy $200,000 profit. The audience was ironically bulked up by crowds of civil servants seeking to avoid the compulsory weekly discussion meetings instituted by the regime to foster a sense of political solidarity. The praise for the production from the Minister of Information, however, shows how far Tsegaye’s plays had lost their sting; the personal corruption of social elites could be lambasted, but this was mere preaching to the choir. In Shakespeare’s London as in Imperial Addis, the tragic intensity of these plays relied upon a contradiction, an intense fascination with the vulnerability of power, a fascination that is at once horrified and yet cannot look away, that recognizes the absurdity of power and its centrality to our imaginative and emotional lives. When productions today modernize Shakespearean tragedy they reach instinctively for mob bosses, military dictators and plutocrats, because these plays require that private life be exploded onto a public stage, giving rise to the public jubilation and catastrophe that we all (at some level) feel should follow our private affairs. The conspiracies and lusts of bureaucratic politicians are banal; they may expose petty hypocrisies, but they are far from catching the pulse between transcendence and annihilation that characterizes emotional experience.

  Back in Yerusalem’s compound, I am included in a family reunion, with stacks of spongey injera, hot and sour stews, and a spectrum of pickles. The drinks table teeters with mead-like tej and bottles of Johnnie Walker, which has never quite lost its Reagan-era status in the developing world as a symbol of access to the promise of the West. The gathering of around three dozen people, from elderly gentlemen in Italian camelhair overcoats and white cashmere scarves to young men with smartphones and baggy jeans, is blessed by a priest who swings an incense burner and stays for the whisky. Those of middling age are self-conscious yuppies, brandishing the marks of allegiance to a sacred domestic life with no interest in politics or transcendence. Their fantasy life is lodged securely elsewhere, as it was for Shakespeare, who went to Denmark, Venice and Scotland to explore the extremes of human experience. But interest in an increasingly reclusive leadership may soon lodge that otherworld closer to home once again. A game of football picks up in the dusty yard, and I obligingly accept the unquestioned authority held by someone who shares David Beckham’s nationality (if precious little else).

  * Ethiopian tradition has it that Makeda, Queen of Sheba, was tricked into bearing Solomon’s child in the following manner: Solomon made her swear a solemn vow not to take anything belonging to him, before serving her with a richly spiced banquet; during the night she drank from the pitcher of water placed by her bedside and the watching Solomon, claiming breach of contract, had his will of her. Of this incident was born Menelik, called ‘Ebna Hakim’, ‘Son of the Wise’.

  * Brancaleone is said to have caused a scandal by portraying the infant Jesus cradled in the Virgin’s left arm, as opposed to the superior right arm, in his mural at the Atronsa Maryam. He left Venice in around 1480, when the Venetian Renaissance was flourishing under the inspiration of Andrea Mantegna and Giovanni Bellini, and in the year after Gentile Bellini left for his important residence at the Ottoman court. As Brancaleone never returned to Europe, he was unable to act as a similar conduit for cultural exchange.

  * This is the first European reference to the Gelada baboon, notable for its habit of plucking grass for grazing, which Álvares mistakes for cultivation. Álvares either did not notice, or omits to mention, the onanism which is the Gelada’s other uncommon characteristic.

  * The name Lalibela means ‘the bee has recognized his grace’.

  * Though there are other reports of regicides being cut from Ethiopian Shakespeare performances, the Emperor evidently did not object to depictions of regicide per se, as he is recorded as enjoying the Marlon Brando/James Mason Julius Caesar aboard a US ship to New York in 1954.

  * In one of the endless mirrors that life held up to art in this story, Evelyn Waugh had constructed this precise plot in Black Mischief three years earlier, with the rightful heir, Achon, being dragged out of his mountaintop prison by the French to act as a stalking-horse for the Emperor Seth.

  9

  PANAFRICA

  Shakespeare in the Cold War

  The language I have learned these forty years,

  My native English, now I must forgo,

  And now my tongue’s use is to me no more

  Than an unstringèd viol or a harp,

  Or like a cunning instrument cased up,

  Or, being open, put into his hands

  That knows no touch to tune the harmony.

  Within my mouth you have enjailed my tongue,

  Doubly portcullised with my teeth and lips,

  And dull, unfeeling, barren ignorance

  Is made my gaoler to attend on me.

  I am too old to fawn upon a nurse,

  Too far in years to be a pupil now.

  What is thy sentence then but speechless death

  Which robs my tongue from breathing native breath?

  Richard II (I.iii.154–68)

  Like many people travelling to Nairobi for work – and, for that matter, many local professionals – I often arrange meetings at one of the new malls that have sprung up in the suburbs during the last decade and a half. These are arrestingly luxurious affairs, much more sophisticated than anything I’ve visited in England, featuring designer boutiques, fusion brasseries, antique shops worthy of Bond Street or Fifth Avenue, and frozen-yoghurt emporiums. They were just beginning to arrive when I was a child, though in much more modest form; I remember my first trips into their blank cool interiors of steel and glass, preserving like inverted aquariums a cube of high-spec design from the equatorial outside. I visited them as perhaps most children visit the zoo, ducking momentarily out of Africa into a world of gloss and industrial finish, and emerging with some souvenir of the impossibly distant world of Americana. They were self-consciously at odds with the gloriously non-standard Africa outside, where the logos of multinationals, Coca-Cola and Lucky Strike, were hand-painted onto the sides of buildings and buses in loose interpretations of the trademark. Though I did not realize it then, however, these new places were not made for me: they were, rather, the first expressions of an increasingly confident Kenyan elite, not content for Africa to be an English playground in which a few well-heeled white settlers played out their fantasies of Darkest Africa, and generating demand for those comforts they had seen on the new satellite TV channels and on trips to Europe and America. The terrace of the Artcaffe, where I took many of my meetings, was packed with the children of that generation: glamorous interracial couples, ordering dishes in an accomplished international gastronomic argot, plying their smartphones and waiting while friends and clients newly arrived from abroad crawled towards them through the sclerotic Nairobi traffic.

  Ten days after my last visit, the Westgate Mall which housed the Artcaffe was entered by a handful of gunmen from the Somalian al-Shabaab offshoot of al-Qaeda, scattering grenades and automatic gunfire. Shooting their way through the building, they secured a weapons cache that had previously been secreted in an empty shop and barricaded the entrances to the mall. The inverted aquarium became a scene of horror, and the world watched in real time as this happy little world imploded, first metaphorically and then literally. During the eighty-hour siege that followed, sixty-seven people were killed and a further 250 were injured. Although there are conflicting reports of the events at the Westgate, a number of the deaths have been blamed on Kenyan security services
, including those resulting from the collapse of three floors of the mall after a botched use of munitions by the army. The army and police are also accused of having looted the shops after the siege had ended.

  The Kenya in which the Westgate Mall had been built – and demolished – was one utterly foreign to that envisioned by the poets and independence leaders with whom the central part of this story has been concerned. It is, in a strange way, both more at ease with the former colonial masters and more isolated from the West than it has been for a century. If it is true that the al-Shabaab attacks in Kenya are just another front in a global war between Western capitalist nations and anti-Western forces, it is also true that they are more the product of a vacuum than a direct engagement, the hollow left by the momentous sequential withdrawals of British colonial power and American-led anti-Communist Cold War measures. It is within this eddying vortex that the final chapter of this strange story needs to be understood.

  On the afternoon of 10 July 1988, President Daniel Arap Moi of Kenya spoke to a press gathering on the lawn of the State House in Nairobi after hosting a competition between thirty-five primary school choirs.1 As well as congratulating the children on their singing, he exercised the trademark micromanagement of the autocrat by instructing the Ministry of Education to reorganize the festival so that the next year it would take place during the school holidays. Moi also used his speech to instruct the Ministry of Education to reinstate Shakespeare on the school syllabus. While Shakespeare’s plays were still taught in Swahili translations by Nyerere and others, the English originals had been taken out of schools following a 1981 Kenya Institute of Education report which attacked Shakespeare as a ‘colonial hangover’ who had no place in an independent Kenya. Moi disagreed. He saw nothing wrong with Shakespeare’s plays, which were written, as he said, by an ‘international figure’. It is telling that neither of the wide-circulation Kenyan dailies, the Nation and the Standard, reported on this aspect of the speech, while the Robert Maxwell-owned former ruling party newspaper the Kenya Times made it front-page news that was picked up by the Associated Press and republished worldwide. The message that Kenya still wanted to be part of ‘international’ culture was clear, and was clearly directed more at an international audience than a home one.

  For all that the intervention in the school syllabus by a President with supreme power who had never shown much cultural inclination seems odd, Moi’s Shakespearean diktat was merely a last-resort, high-profile move in a conflict that had been in process for some time. In this conflict, Shakespeare always stood as the point of no return, the test-case in which dissent meant a final denial of anything in common with the culture of the former European colonizers, a denial of the possibility of a shared, universal set of cultural values. Banish Shakespeare, as fat Jack Falstaff would say, and banish all the world. As early as the late 1960s, even when translations by Nyerere and Tsegaye Gabre Medhin were vaunting the power of African languages to take over Shakespeare and make it their own, academics in Kenyan universities were voicing increasingly strident condemnations of the lack of cultural independence that had been achieved with political independence. A 1974 conference on the teaching of literature in African schools pointed out that ‘of 57 texts of drama studied at [secondary school] level in our schools between 1968 and 1972 only one was African’.2 By the time these debates reached the Kenyan parliament in the mid-1970s, feelings were running so high that the initial calls to balance the syllabus had been replaced by demands to eradicate English literature altogether. Chelagat Mutai, the youngest MP in Kenya’s history and one of the seven ‘bearded sisters’ who led opposition to the government, demanded that Shakespeare be banned from the curriculum in order to preserve national culture; a respondent warned that ‘We should not Africanize for the sake of Africanizing’, a phrase which served as something of a talking point for Moi loyalists.3 Mutai was jailed the next year for ‘incitement’.

  The opposing sides faced off in various public arenas: the National Theatre embarked on a conscious programme of Africanization, ending their heavy reliance on non-African drama; English-language drama, however, simply moved across the street to the Phoenix Theatre, which was founded by James Falkland in 1983, was largely supported by Western embassies, businesses and patrons, and had an annual Shakespeare performance in Elizabethan dress, largely staged by expat actors. Ngugi wa Thiong’o, the celebrated Kenyan novelist who had taken a lead part in discussions on the inclusion of English literature on African school syllabuses, swore off writing in English in favour of his mother tongue, Gikuyu, and was himself jailed after staging a play about women’s and peasants’ rights, a play whose cast of 2000 perhaps made it difficult to distinguish from an anti-government rising. Ngugi lists a volume of Shakespeare among the few books he was eventually allowed during his incarceration, but Shakespeare was increasingly isolated among a sea of anti-capitalist and anti-colonialist literature, and it was whilst in prison that Ngugi turned against even Shakespeare, denouncing the ‘Shakespeare in Colonial Trousers’ that he had been force-fed at the Alliance School.4

  This was not, as one might be tempted to suspect, simply shrill indignation among intellectual elites over a matter of little consequence. The Cold War was after all a series of proxy battles, and though it was not often articulated, what was at stake was nothing less than the openness of Africa to Western influence, both cultural and (by extension) political and economic. The Cold War had flooded Africa with hundreds of billions of dollars of aid and development money, funds designed to prevent newly independent African nations from falling into the Soviet sphere of influence; the unintended (though perhaps inevitable) result was that dysfunctional kleptocracies were propped up with money for patronage that rarely came with strings attached, and the international community largely turned a blind eye to the brutal tactics employed to silence opposition.5 But the CIA felt strongly that the war would not just be won with promises of political allegiance from artificially prolonged pro-capitalist governments; they also believed that planting the cultural resources of Europe and America in the hearts and minds of nations being wooed by the Soviets would act as a guarantee of free-market ideals. During the heady decades of the 1960s and ’70s, the CIA channelled hundreds of millions of dollars into covert cultural operations through charitable foundations and other grant-giving bodies. In a curious way, the CIA shared Che Guevara and Julius Nyerere’s belief that culture was less universal and more determined by economic systems; their idea, however, was to ensure the continuance of capitalism by placing Shakespeare, Jackson Pollock and Louis Armstrong on the front lines.6

  Moi himself knew that demonstrative appreciation of Anglo-American culture was part of the dance. The Donovan Maule Theatre in Nairobi, which largely staged lighter theatrical fare for white settlers and expats, was repeatedly graced by visits from Moi and other government dignitaries when they staged Shakespeare; these productions, which were insufficiently profitable to pay for themselves, were regularly subsidized by the American oil company Caltex.7 That was not to say that Moi was not equally capable of playing the pan-Africanist card when it suited him, though he did so in a manner less accessible to the international public; speaking in Swahili shortly after having urged the Ministry of Education to reinstate Shakespeare in English, Moi baited his audience by saying that

  African history dates back just to 1900. Does it go beyond? You, the learned people, tell me. Kenya’s history starts at 1900. The rest, ‘beyond 1900 is dim’. And if it stretches back further, it becomes darkness. Many of our children learn about Shakespeare and other matters, such as those of Sir Walter Raleigh. All this is other people’s history. Where is your history?8

  Whatever Moi said in the privacy of his own tongue, though, his public actions came in a language that the international community could understand. The Ministry of Education bent to his will, and Shakespeare was reinstated to the national curriculum; Romeo and Juliet was scheduled to be examined once again, appearing for the first time in
the 1992 national tests.

  In the end, of course, it did not matter. One afternoon in 1989, after ‘Lillibulero’ had called us to attention for the World Service bulletin, my mother learned that Lithuania had declared independence from the USSR, and she danced around the kitchen as I sat uncomprehending on the linoleum floor. I may not have understood, as the grown-ups did, that the great international game of dominos, which had been played between Washington and Moscow for half a century, had finally entered a terminal phase that would bring down Soviet Russia. But few I think had thought this endgame through; few were aware that the end to the Soviet Union also meant the end to the munificence of USAID, the IMF and the World Bank that had sustained the Anglo-American presence in the wider world, not only in the form of intelligencers and civil engineering firms but also the wide array of social, cultural and environmental organizations that served as a fifth column in the anti-Communist efforts. This thinly scattered tribe, for whom ‘Lillibulero’ was almost a national anthem, were in fact toasting the beginning of their own end.