The mass withdrawal of capital and personnel at the end of the Cold War, and the ensuing economic slump and crime wave, all but eradicated the theatrical culture in East African cities. The expat actors departed in droves and the diminished expat audiences were uninterested in performances by African actors.9 Economic aid to Africa was cut in half during the 1990s, going from $30bn a year to $16bn, and money for cultural anti-Communist activity evaporated entirely.10 I went away to boarding school and my parents left, first for Europe then other parts of Africa, as part of this general exodus. Attempts to fashion a new theatre-going public by staging performances in Swahili, including Nyerere’s Julius Caezar, faltered; there were too few actors who could speak Nyerere’s classical Swahili verses, and they proved too obscure to draw a new generation of theatregoers. If Moi’s government dropped all attempts to censor theatrical activity, this was in part because it had ceased to matter.11
The abrupt withdrawal of Shakespeare from the front lines of East African life gives a strong indication of the extent to which his place there was sustained by power struggles rather than by disinterested love of his works. This, like so many other aspects of the story I have been pursuing, makes clear how difficult it is even to ask questions about Shakespeare’s universal appeal. The Victorians’ idolization of Shakespeare meant that he would have a place at the foundations of language learning in their colonies, and would serve as a totemic standard of beauty for the peoples over whom they ruled. In this respect there was a certain inevitability to the central place that he would have in East African history – first as something kept from the natives, then a test through which they could prove their allegiance to their colonial masters, then as something they could take over and make their own, and finally as something to be cast off, as the final and most internalized form of colonial power. It is possible that something would have served this role even had it not been Shakespeare’s works.
These rather bleak conclusions are, in a sense, the ones reached in Shakespeare’s most poignant description of the way culture moves between peoples. Faced with the threat of being taken captive to Rome by Octavius Caesar, Cleopatra evokes a nightmarish vision of the cultural conquest which will follow on from the military one:
… Saucy lictors
Will catch at us like strumpets, and scald rhymers
Ballad us out o’tune. The quick comedians
Extemporally will stage us, and present
Our Alexandrian revels. Antony
Shall be brought drunken forth, and I shall see
Some squeaking Cleopatra boy my greatness
I’ th’ posture of a whore.
Antony and Cleopatra (V.ii.213–19)
In the hands of the conquering nation, the culture of the conquered is reduced to the lowest possible level, a target for mockery and prurient, exotic sexual fantasies, a way to rewrite history and give the victor’s account of the past and the foreign. Here it is clear that the Egyptians and the Romans do not see beauty in the same things, and that the playwrights and poets, ‘quick comedians’ and ‘scald rhymers’, are using drama and verse as means of cultural domination.
In true Shakespearean style, however, these words are being spoken by one of the most complex and engaging figures ever to grace the English stage, at the end of a play that has by no means flattened the exotic world of Egypt in order to let European values triumph over it. Cleopatra has not been ‘balladed out of tune’, and if Cleopatra would have been played by a boy on Shakespeare’s stage, there is no sense in which we think of her and Antony in the reductive way she expects. Cleopatra’s bleak vision of cultures failing to see eye to eye is in stark contrast to the masterpiece of empathy in which the lines are spoken. In a similar sense, while it is inescapably true that the story of Shakespeare in East Africa is one caught up in colonial history and its failings, it is still hard to be entirely satisfied with these gestures to broad historical forces as the explanation for this astonishing series of events. The many accounts of reading, translating and performing Shakespeare here are not exhausted by a fuller understanding of the contexts in which they took place; too often this can explain how Shakespeare got into these hands or those, but it doesn’t explain what happened when he got there.
What, then, might be the nature of this universalism, this peculiar quality that repeatedly drew readers to his works? Part of this, of course, has to do with the breadth of Shakespeare’s canon and the relentlessly unmoralizing tone that can be found across his works, meaning that everyone can, to an extent, find their own Shakespeare. Stanley, Steere, Blixen, Farah, Nyerere and Tsegaye all turned to different plays, or read the same plays in markedly different ways, in pursuit of a particular Shakespearean voice that spoke to them. This might be said to constitute a very weak form of universalism – a universalism born not of a shared and distinct experience but of mutual contemplation of something so vast and varied as to accommodate every point of view. In a sense, however, this variety of interpretation comes close to demonstrating what the great critic Eric Auerbach suggested was the key component of Shakespeare’s literary power. Auerbach’s magisterial history of European literature, which is still introductory reading for literary students, was written with limited access to research materials during the Jewish scholar’s exile to Istanbul after he was expelled from his university post by the Nazis in 1936. Without unlimited possible avenues of research to distract him, and writing in fear that the culture he was studying might be destroyed by the Second World War, Auerbach produced a sweeping account of the Western literary tradition which few have managed to equal. For Auerbach, Shakespeare represents a pivotal moment in the history of the ‘mixed style’, which adamantly refuses to separate the comic from the tragic, the everyday things of life from the sublime events by which we define our existence. It is the very fact that Cleopatra finds herself contemplating the common theatre in the grand historical moment of her suicide that marks Shakespeare out from the rest. And it is only in the light of this aspect of Shakespeare’s realism, which Auerbach calls ‘godlike in its non-partisan objectivity’, that the variety of interpretation found in this East African history can be achieved. Shakespeare seems a semi-divine ‘creator of man’, as Pushkin and Haile Selassie suggested, because his writings never turn aside from the messy mixture of life; and in seeming like life itself, his works open themselves to as varied a reaction as life does. The critic Edward Said has pointed out that the kind of broad perspective that Auerbach achieved, drawing out the essential components of a culture stretching over 2000 years, was only possible when writing from outside that culture, from a vantage point that allowed him to rise above the noise of detail and gain a broad overview. In some sense, then, it is fitting to think that the proof of Auerbach’s conjecture could only be found by once again taking Shakespeare outside of the culture in which he was created, as happened during the stories I have been telling here.
I’m still, however, a little dissatisfied.
During the rainy seasons in Kenya, when the wet smell on the wind warned us indoors from our usual routines, I sometimes sought out the key to the storage room under our verandah. This place could not have been better designed for childish intrigue. The latch-key needed to be singled out from a bunch united by their forgotten uses, and the door, half obscured by bougainvillea, was made of wooden slats and lined inside with wire mesh, allowing the scent of dust and mould to seep out and bring the passer-by into its zone. The room was a puzzle of drawers and boxes, from out of and under which peeped the materials of make-believe. The skins of zebras and the skulls of larger beasts; crested brass buttons long separated from their uniforms; tribal shields and masks; light switches and bell pulls now lying in a heap and wrapped up in the pages of outmoded magazines. These were co-opted into a fantasy life that was already a mishmash of other people’s pasts played out in the African surroundings: to my habitual uniform of oversized T-shirt, made a tunic by the addition of a belt and short-sword, I took from this storeroom t
he decorations to be awarded for my acts of valour, and the totems for my private cults. Much later I learned that these things were the belongings of a settler couple who had once lived in the house and died on a steamer holiday to India; no one remained to claim their belongings, though it didn’t seem right to throw away the collected remnants of their lives. I didn’t need to know their story, however: anyone would have intuited the wonder and the sadness of the place, how it held symbols that were beautiful and significant to someone else but were quickly receding from the realm of the understood.
I think of that room now because this strange sequence of episodes is itself receding from the realm of the understood, and also because Shakespeare is the poet par excellence of this feeling, that beauty lies in the constantly frustrated search for meaning. For all that Shakespeare often cleanly captures the mixture of the comic and tragic, of the mundane and the sublime, there is nothing more ever-present in his plays than the border of meaning, the cliff’s-edge beyond which lies the incomprehensible realm in which answers are thought to reside. This feeling is often represented by a character in the plays who knows more than we do but who is ultimately unknowable by us – the Ghost in Hamlet or the witches in Macbeth or the fools in Lear and Twelfth Night; maybe even Caliban in The Tempest, who knows the island in a way that Prospero never can. They make present to us our own lack of understanding, a lack which we constantly attempt to drive away, like Hamlet or Lear or Macbeth trying to clear their minds of doubt. As Shakespeare got older, however, the number of these characters proliferates, and in the later plays the world is nothing but a collection of people who find each other utterly baffling. Antony cannot understand Cleopatra, and both are a mystery to Caesar, who in turn makes no sense to them. Leontes is driven mad by his inability to grasp Hermione, and his own mind-frame is a mystery to everyone else. Prospero, Caliban, Ariel, Miranda, Sebastian and Stefano each reside in a world that is all but incomprehensible to each of the others. Shakespeare perhaps most precisely captured this borderland between the most significant things and insignificance in Sonnet 64:
When I have seen by Time’s fell hand defaced
The rich proud cost of outworn buried age,
When sometime lofty towers I see down razed,
And brass eternal slave to mortal rage;
When I have seen the hungry ocean gain
Advantage on the kingdom of the shore
And the firm soil win of the wat’ry main,
Increasing store with loss and loss with store;
When I have seen such interchange of state,
Or state itself confounded to decay,
Ruin has taught me thus to ruminate
That Time will come and take my love away.
This thought is as a death, which cannot choose
But weep to have that which it fears to lose.
This seemingly simple elegy, about how general decay in the world reminds us of the losses that lie in store for us, has a sting in its tail. The final description of anguished love – that ‘weep[s] to have that which it fears to lose’ – is really a description of all experiences of beauty which force upon the present an awareness that it is the future’s past. It is thought ‘as a death’, confronted with its usually submerged sense of mortality by a premonition of that great slipping-from-the-grasp that awaits us all. But it is also this awareness of a future loss that causes us to gather to ourselves what we can; a suggestion that – along with the ideas of man as sapiens (knowing), habilis (handy) and aggressive, we should also add what the philosopher George Steiner calls homo quaerens, ‘questioning man’, the man who is never sated with seeking.12 In a sense, the experience of reading Shakespeare is rather like a form of exploration or an encounter with another culture: its essence, like the kingdom of Prester John, is always beyond the next horizon, like the right word is always just beyond the translator’s reach, and the meaning of history is always an instant away from our grasp.
Shakespeare, the old survivor, would live to fight another day. His new form, however, would be virtually unrecognizable to those who fought the culture wars of the 1970s and 1980s. The Shakespeare that began to creep back on stage in Nairobi, after the Phoenix Theatre was taken over by its current director, George Mungai, at the millennium, was neither a totem of European culture nor a radical attempt to make Shakespeare African, but rather a kind of theatre with which Shakespeare himself would have been more familiar – a kind that needed to make money in order to make sense. Touring the theatre out of hours – an experience that always has a touch of disenchantment – George tells me the thinking behind his recent Shakespeare productions. The plays have been performed in English but with African intonations, in African locations but ones not cleansed of the intrusion of the outside. A production of The Merchant of Venice with Gikuyu businessmen as suitors; a Macbeth with Zanzibari witches and Kamban assassins; a Romeo and Juliet set on the streets of Nairobi, where the lovers speak by text message. These productions don’t always make sense to outsiders. A production team recruiting African actors for a major Hollywood film set in Kenya were shocked to see a production of Othello, set in Maasailand, in which Iago won greater sympathy than the chothara (half Indian, half Maasai) Moor of Venice. They failed, perhaps, to see how the dynamics of the play might change if the outsider who takes the prestige and the girl comes from a more privileged ethnic group.13 I don’t suppose it matters, though. Like the shock of Indian Shakespeare to English reviewers in turn-of-the-century Mombasa, their incomprehension seems like a sign of health, a sign that the performers are brashly making the material their own, just as Shakespeare himself would have done.
It was from this reviving scene that an East African production of The Merry Wives of Windsor was sent to the London Cultural Olympiad in 2012, an uproariously funny take on bourgeois sexual antics in new-age Kenya. But given that Shakespeare has survived in East Africa in this hybrid, modern, African, English-speaking form, it was all the more notable that the Globe policy during the Cultural Olympiad was that all performances had to be in the language of the performing country, and that no English was to be spoken during the plays.14 This was a rule that, apparently, they were repeatedly called upon to enforce, as troupe after troupe played for laughs by including words that the whole audience understood. Their idea, I suppose, was to underline Shakespeare’s universal appeal by demonstrating how his works could be performed in so many different languages. But behind the neatly arrayed spread of Shakespeare from different cultures a much more complex story could be seen: many of the actors spoke fluent English (some better than the language of performance) and did their main acting in English; others even lived in London already; still others had developed their productions outside the country they supposedly represented, and many of the troupes did so with the assistance of professional theatre producers from the English-speaking world.
However good-natured this attempt to show the global appeal of Shakespeare while at the same time promoting English awareness of foreign theatrical traditions, it may have averted its gaze from the true nature of this latest phase in Shakespeare’s universalism. The Globe’s attempt to preserve cultural difference was nostalgic and artificial, and could only be sustained by the use of arbitrarily imposed and strictly enforced rules. In truth, of course, the most recent incarnation of Shakespeare’s universalism exists not despite cultural differences but because of an increasing lack of them. In the age of the internet, even attempting to ask the question of whether Shakespeare is universal is fraught with difficulty, because it means finding a society sufficiently isolated from English and American culture that its understanding of the works can be seen as a crossing of supposedly unbridgeable divides. In place of the constantly elusive proof that something in Shakespeare’s works transcends cultural differences and speaks directly to a common humanity, we have the somewhat thornier de facto universalism of Shakespeare’s works: available everywhere for free online and increasingly accessible to a world eager to participa
te in American economic success through its language and cultural history.
10
JUBA
Shakespeare, Civil War and Reconstruction
GUIDERIUS:
Fear no more the heat o’th’ sun,
Nor the furious winter’s rages.
Thou thy worldly task hast done,
Home art gone, and ta’en thy wages:
Golden lads and girls all must,
As chimney-sweepers, come to dust.
ARVIRAGUS:
Fear no more the frown o’th’ great;
Thou art past the tyrant’s stroke.
Care no more to clothe and eat,
To thee the reed is as the oak.
The scepter, learning, physic must
All follow this and come to dust.
Cymbeline (IV.ii.257–68)
I was preparing to draw a line under this story at the end of the Cold War when I came across a BBC World Service piece about South Sudanese independence.1 In explaining the decision to make English the official language of the world’s newest country after it split from the Arabic-speaking northern part of Sudan, the regional correspondent noted the remarkable part played by Shakespeare in this decision: the man charged with making English the working language of the Sudan People’s Liberation Army (SPLA), which formed the backbone of the fledgling state, had himself fallen in love with English and with Shakespeare while fighting the guerrilla independence war in the bush. Shortly after this, I also became aware that South Sudan’s first international outing as a country would not be a diplomatic or sporting event, but rather an adaptation of Shakespeare’s Cymbeline in Juba Arabic produced for the 2012 Cultural Olympiad. This evidently was an opportunity not to be missed, an opportunity to come face to face with this strange mixture of Shakespeare and African state formation that I had so far been studying as a fascinating but very much historical phenomenon.
Shakespeare in Swahililand Page 22
