It was not, however, without some trepidation that I arranged my travel to the new capital of South Sudan, Juba. This was, after all, an area that had only recently emerged from a thirty-year civil war of extraordinary brutality, and it was evidently not yet open to the casual visitor. The process for obtaining a visa at the London embassy – on the third floor of a nondescript office building in St John’s Wood – was rudimentary and evidently designed with diplomats, corporations and aid workers in mind. This impression is confirmed on arrival at Juba Airport, where I must be one of the few travellers without a local ‘handler’ to smooth my passage through customs. These handlers, mostly young men from the exceptionally tall Dinka people, form a striking welcoming party, combining a taste for sharp Western suits in extravagant cloths – silver or bright yellow – with the ritual facial scarring that distinguishes one clan from another, for those who can read the signs.
The man who drives me to the ‘camp’ where I am staying, one of the few institutions that outsiders can book to fulfil their visa requirements, is not Sudanese but rather Gikuyu, a member of Kenyatta and Leakey’s sharp-eyed tribe who are proverbial in their ability to spot the main chance. While this one-storey town in the middle of a vast scrubland might not seem the obvious place for a goldrush, any fool in Africa knows that the birth of a country is a time when fortunes are made. Independence from the Arabic Sudan run from Khartoum gives the Juba government access to potentially massive oil resources – though some of these are still under dispute in the border regions – and the West has a vested interest in a functioning state friendlier to them than the Chinese-leaning government in Khartoum. Enormous grants are distributed by USAID, the World Bank and the IMF, and infrastructure contracts or mining concessions are secured by international companies well versed in this kind of feeding frenzy. Doubtless money is creamed off by the government as it passes between the international funds and the international companies they pay – widely accepted as the price of doing business in Africa – but all too often one gets the feel of money being brought in the front door and swiftly moved out the back by much the same people. But even if this is a closed-circuit economy, where only major international institutions and government officials get a share of the official spoils, the corporate and diplomatic agents have generous per diems that mean small-time operators can also get a look-in. The five-minute taxi ride from the airport costs $20; the air-conditioned shipping containers which serve as accommodation in the heavily guarded ‘camp’ start at $150 a night, though I doubt if that raises many eyebrows among the management consultancies and US congressional delegations who have taken over large parts of the compound. Later, visiting one of the supermarkets where you need a passport and dollars to shop after winding through the streets of lean-tos on the one paved road, I witness the largest selection of Champagne magnums I’ve ever seen outside of Harrods. As there is virtually no internal transport network in South Sudan, all this has to be flown in at great expense, primarily (I understand) from Nairobi and Lebanon. All of this has sprung up overnight; when my father visited five years back to survey what wildlife had been left intact by the war, he lived for several days off a sack of roast groundnuts, all that was to be had from the local stores. The edict from the Ministry of Broadcasting that prohibits photography anywhere in South Sudan without a special permit reinforces the impression that, as so often before in Africa, this fledgling nation is being carved up in a way no one is supposed to see.
This is, of course, only the latest in a series of political experiments in this region, stretching back to where this story began – with an attempt, by the same British governments which sent expeditions and built railroads to discover and secure the headwaters of the Nile, to defend its lower stretches and the passage to India by taking over this Ottoman-held territory and administering it in a joint ‘condominium’ with Egypt. Britain was eventually prompted to take over as sole administrator, in part because of public outcry at home over the fate of General Gordon of Khartoum and his troops, who were massacred in 1885 by Mahdist Islamic forces. But because British interests were largely focused on the Arab north, instead of the Nubian (and eventually Christian) south, their withdrawal in 1955 at the end of Empire left a country of two separate peoples, a separation that was reinforced by a ‘Closed District Ordinance’ that prevented immigration and intermarrying between the north and south. This disparity was only made worse by the overwhelming dominance of the Arabic north. The unsurprising result was civil war, though perhaps no one could have foreseen the extraordinary brutality of the Sudan conflict in the second half of the twentieth century, which mingled an anarchy of cattle raids and attempts to impose Sharia Law from the north with inter-tribal conflicts in the south and the kind of wholesale slaughter seen at other times in the Congo and Rwanda. Elements of this caught the attention of the outside world, such as the extraordinary scale of suffering among refugees in Darfur province, but at many times the conflict was so intractable, complex, and grotesque that the collective mind of the West simply turned away in horror.
Shortly after I arrive at the camp a ferocious rainstorm forces me away from the Nile-side table, where I have been making notes for my meetings, to take shelter under the thatch roof of the camp bar. Huddled away from the misting downpour and shouting over the resonantly African sound of heavy rain on corrugated iron, I strike up a conversation with an aid worker. She tells me she works in conflict resolution – something, she adds dryly, with a certain amount of job security in these parts. She tells me that the locals have 700 different words for cattle and that many place names are simply words for shades and types of cow; also that arguments over place names, which figure highly in local notions of sovereignty, are one of the main sources of conflict between local tribes. Islands of sedge float by on the swollen Nile, and the hunched egrets stand still in hope that theirs isn’t the next to be swept away. I think of the shanty huts that fill the low-lying places outside the camp.
After the rain subsides I manage to track down Brigadier General Awur Malual, who is not in Juba but engaged in army manoeuvres in the west of the country. I do, however, manage to speak to him by satellite phone, and he is (as I had been led to believe) very loquacious and even eloquent. He tells me that, for all that Arabic had been the lingua franca of the south since the time of Ottoman rule, English had been widely used among Sudanese liberation fighters from the time when his father had taken up arms following independence from Britain in 1955, a symbol of resistance to the Arabic north. His own education was in Arabic in the 1970s, but he had begun using English when he joined the SPLA in 1983 at the age of eighteen, after the Khartoum government’s refusal to abide by the 1972 Addis Ababa agreement establishing a South Sudanese autonomous region led to a fresh round of fighting. Brigadier, as he is cordially known despite not standing on ceremony, had fought almost continuously between then and when the ceasefire was signed in 2005.
We speak for some time about his experience as a fighter; he is reticent and modest in his descriptions, and I do not press for more. I have read some accounts of the war, including the many appalling stories of the ‘lost boys’, those children and adolescents orphaned by the fighting who grew up variously recruited into the SPLA ranks and criss-crossing the barren, savage and gunship-raked conflict zone to reach one of the refugee camps in bordering regions. There are episodes in these accounts beyond the capacity of most to listen to without shutting down, and so I am grateful not to be exposed. Like many of the SPLA soldiers, Brigadier seems to have moved fluidly as a young man between periods in the camps, where rest and recuperation could be had, and the areas of Sudan where the resistance was concentrated. It was, he tells me, on the way to one of these safe havens at Kurmuk on the Ethiopian border in 1991 that he lost the first volumes of Shakespeare he had carried with him during his time as a soldier. ‘When we started trekking to go to Ethiopia, we were actually carrying some cartons of books, but because the area is always swampy and drowning so some of the b
ooks were eaten by rain or got lost while trekking to Ethiopia.’ His unidiomatic but highly resonant description cannot fail to recall Prospero’s drowned books, the source of all his magic. When Brigadier reached the border the volumes were replaced by an English missionary and he rejoined the fighting.
What strikes me in Brigadier’s account is its similarity to the stories with which this book began, stories by the likes of Henry Morton Stanley in which Shakespeare was being read in unthinkably harsh conditions, and being read as a kind of protest against the hardships being encountered, as well as a talisman to keep them from total dissolution by the horrors around them. Stories like these characteristically focus on the destruction of these beloved volumes – as Stanley had in his tale of the burnt Shakespeare – in part because this is reading defined not so much by the intimate encounter with each page as by the defiant act of reading at all, a drama intensified (in truth and in the telling) by reading the words most dense with significance at the edge of a wordless and unsignifying abyss. This is, of course, at the heart of many sacred textual traditions: the Pentateuch was revealed to Moses while Israel wandered in the Sinai desert, and the Koran to Muhammad in the Cave of Hira, and Jerome, compiler of the Vulgate Bible, is conventionally pictured in a desert with his book. Dante receives his vision of Hell, Purgatory and Heaven when in a selva oscura, and the Welsh Bards were said to be given their poetic powers after spending a night alone on windswept Snowdonia. Shakespeare is often pictured as a poet in a garret, recording the plays revealed to him by his genius, because the idea of him mingling with the crowd seems wrong. Nor should we assume that the information age is beyond this ritual belief that the most intense significance has some profound connection with the void. When the Voyager spacecraft was sent out in 1977 with its recordings of Bach and Chuck Berry, the chance that it would ever be heard or understood by extraterrestrials was less than slender; what was guaranteed was that a crucible of human culture would venture once more into the dark, all the more defiantly set off by being the something in an infinite nothing. If the English-speaking nation of South Sudan needed a foundation myth, Brigadier’s swamp-eaten Shakespeare certainly hits many of the right notes.
We must, however, be careful not to will these stories into existence. I had expected Joseph Abuk, the translator of Cymbeline for the South Sudan Theatre Company’s London production, to add to my fund of Shakespeare-in-the-bush stories – indeed, the press surrounding the Globe production repeatedly mentions him reading Shakespeare under the stars in the wilderness. But when I press him on this he quickly admits that it was the invention of a Western reporter with a story they had wanted to pursue. Abuk, who despite being the national poet and having served briefly as the Minister of Culture has to wait at the gates of the camp until I come to vouch for him, seems painfully resigned to having his story written by others. ‘Whatever you want to write will be okay’, he says. I am reminded of Caliban’s damning final judgement on Prospero in Aimé Césaire’s Une tempête:
And you have lied so much to me
(lied about the world, lied about me)
that you have ended by imposing on me
an image of myself.2
He has the milky eyes and faraway look that cataracts give to many East African elders, and he speaks slowly, enjoying the small amount of food he accepts from the lavish buffet, while the story of the South Sudan Cymbeline unfolds. The simple story of a new nation telling its history to the world through Shakespeare quickly becomes more complicated. There is, to begin with, the language question: though Abuk, who spent most of his life as part of the cultural scene in Khartoum and first read Shakespeare in the Arabic translations of the Egyptian al-Nahda cultural renaissance, says Juba Arabic was the obvious choice as the language for the play, he admits that this wasn’t popular with the SPLA government, for whom Arabic was a reminder of the northern oppressor. Some concession seems to have been made in that Abuk wrote the play in Roman characters, but many of the actors had to have this re-transcribed into Arabic in order for them to read it. Though it remains unspoken, the reason that the play could not have been put on in the new nation’s official language – English – is obvious: this would simply not have been exotic enough to figure in the Globe’s demonstration of Shakespeare’s universalism. The Anglophone audience demands that Shakespeare’s universalism be heralded in strange tongues, even if for those cultures English in some sense provides a communal identity and a release from oppression. It is also obvious that the choice of Cymbeline, one of Shakespeare’s least known plays in part because it is almost impossible to stage successfully, was driven by circumstance as much as by choice: not every nation represented at the Globe could have Hamlet, so some nations needed to be nudged towards the backwaters of the canon.
For all these limiting factors, Abuk is clearly a natural dramaturge, and he speaks compellingly of the connection between Cymbeline and South Sudan. Shakespeare’s late tragicomedy is, after all, a story of plucky young Britain’s defiance of the Roman Empire, and so offered easy parallels for a young nation trying to escape from the dominance of colonial overlords, both from Khartoum and beyond that from London; the Romans were dressed in the khaki uniforms of the British Imperial police. On a more detailed level, Cymbeline’s villainous queen, who acts as spokesperson for the rebellion but has her own interests at heart, was quickly seen as a parallel for the widely disliked wife of John Garang, the resistance leader who died shortly before independence and whose status as father of the nation is celebrated in the vast and closed-off John Garang memorial square. Yet though Cymbeline may have been offered to the South Sudanese as a parable of an underdog nation’s triumph – and this was, indeed, how it was played in London during many times of patriotic fervour in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries – neither Shakespeare’s play nor the South Sudanese take on it was that simple. Cymbeline was written at a moment when England was having to set aside the anti-Catholic fervour by which it defined itself under Elizabeth I in favour of the more conciliatory approach taken by James I, and it ends with the triumphant British army voluntarily resubmitting itself to Roman rule. It is a play which shows itself to be deeply unsure about British identity and its reliance on foreign imports; those who resist any outside influence are revealed to be traitors, and those who survive are much more open to what Rome can offer. It was rather fitting, then, that the South Sudan production, which resulted from an invitation from the former colonial master to perform Shakespeare in the motherland, didn’t adopt any simple ideas of Sudanese national identity. For those who knew how to spot it, the actors in the play were distinguished by the beads of the Nilotic Dinka and Nuer peoples, or the barkcloth skirt of the Bari, or a Lotuka helmet made of spent bullet cartridges.
For all that the South Sudan Cymbeline was not the spontaneous and simple overflow of patriotic feeling that it might have been, it has nevertheless been a source of great pride to the new nation. The government, Abuk tells me, is warming to the idea of Juba Arabic – which was not even included on the list of the twenty-five languages of South Sudan at a recent UNESCO conference – after the warm reception it brought the country on the world stage. We discuss a plan to publish the Juba Cymbeline as a monument to the newly founded nation. There are also plans, I hear, to build a national cultural centre for the performing arts, using traditional materials and local craftsmen, but based on the design of Shakespeare’s Globe theatre on the South Bank in London. The London-based firm of architects who have developed the idea is called Metaphor.
Once again I am struck, as I have so often been during this journey, by the infinite resourcefulness and variety that readers have brought to their readings of Shakespeare, and the majestic consistency with which the works have risen to the task. In a century and a half during which eastern Africa had witnessed the most rapid and radical transformation of any human settlement in history, Shakespeare had provided an amulet against the dark recesses of an unknown continent and the human heart, a primer for child
ren’s reading in a foreign tongue, a prompt for fantasies in the wilderness and urban revelry, a tool for testing what we share with others and a weapon used by colonizer and colonized, a cover for resistance to foreign and domestic tyranny, and a way for people without power to take for themselves something from the world of power. Even if Shakespeare can not be said to be universal in any simple sense – in that his global celebrity can never be fully extricated from the political history that produced it – there is surely a hint of the miraculous in the fact that I share something with a man like Joseph Abuk, whose life could hardly have been more different from my own. The achievement, of course, is all on the side of Abuk and his ilk, all those many readers whom I’ve met (or got to know) during my research: I came by this inheritance easily, and their fluency in it makes cheap any claims that might be made for my own Shakespearean knowledge. It has also seemed wondrous that, through all these various changes of use, Shakespeare’s works have never once felt out of place. The surprise that initially came with finding Shakespeare in these places and forms was quickly replaced by an awareness that Shakespeare now meant the poet of Mughal railroads or the Ethiopian court, of Swahili and Maasailand. Like language itself, which changes in the speaking and makes all previous versions obsolete, the Shakespeare made in Africa has come to replace the one that was taken there. It is a strange and beautiful renewal: he is much the better for it, and I am grateful to have seen this latest bloom.
Shakespeare in Swahililand Page 23
