12. See the review of Nyerere’s translation of Julius Caesar, Sunday News (Dar es Salaam), 8 September 1963; and Mazrui, ‘The African Symbolism of Julius Caesar’, in The Anglo-African Commonwealth, pp. 121–33.
13. See Ali A. Mazrui and Lindah L. Mhando, ‘On Poets and Politicians: Obote’s Milton and Nyerere’s Shakespeare’, in Julius Nyerere: Africa’s Titan on a Global Stage (Carolina Academic Press, 2013), p. 212 (in an essay first published in 1971), where Mazrui focuses on Nyerere’s link to his namesake ‘Julius’ and confines his discussion to the first part of the play, where the dangers of a personality cult forming around a leader are discussed.
14. ‘Sitaki Kutishwa Kwa Migomo’, Ngurumo, 20 November 1961, p. 1, quoted in Molony, Nyerere, p. 39.
15. The literature on Renaissance friendship is vast; those interested in reading further might start with Cicero’s De Amicitia and Montaigne’s essay ‘De l’amitié’ (translated as ‘On Affectionate Relationships’ in M. A. Screech’s edition of the Essays (rev. edn; Penguin Classics, 2013)), and consult Jacques Derrida’s Politics of Friendship (Verso, 2005) and Edward Said’s essay on ‘Secular Criticism’ in The World, the Text, and the Critic (Harvard University Press, 1983); and (on specifically English literary takes on friendship), Lorna Hutson’s The Usurer’s Daughter: Male Friendship and Fictions of Women in Sixteenth-Century England (Routledge, 1994) and Thomas MacFaul’s Male Friendship in Shakespeare and his Contemporaries (Cambridge University Press, 2007). There is also an interesting discussion of friendship in an African context in the final chapter of David Schalkwyk’s Hamlet’s Dreams.
16. See Meek, Brief Authority, p. 171, and Nyerere’s speech to the Legislative council on 18 October 1961, printed as ‘The Principles of Citizenship’ in Nyerere, Freedom and Unity/Uhuru na Umoja, pp. 126–9.
17. See ‘Democracy and the Party System’, in Nyerere, Freedom and Unity/Uhuru na Umoja, pp. 195–203.
18. Molony, Nyerere, pp. 70–71.
19. See ‘Ujamaa – The Basis of African Socialism’, in Freedom and Unity/Uhuru na Umoja, pp. 162–71. For background on Marxist attitudes to the family, see Friedrich Engels, The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State (compiled after Marx’s death from his notes).
20. The information for this passage comes from Che Guevara’s own diaries (available in an English edition as The African Dream: The Diaries of the Revolutionary War in the Congo (Harvill Press, 2000)), as well as Paco Taibo’s Senza perdere la tenerezza: vita e morte di Ernesto Che Guevara (Il Saggiatore, 2009), Jon Lee Anderson’s Che Guevara: A Revolutionary Life (Bantam Press, 1997) and Aleida March’s Remembering Che: My Life with Che Guevara (Ocean Press, 2012).
21. March, Remembering Che, p. 125.
22. Ibid., p. 126.
23. Taibo, Senza perdere la tenerezza (my translation). Aleida’s mention of their programme of reading together is mentioned in Anderson, Che Guevara, pp. 674–5; and Coleman Ferrer also mentions Che’s reading habits in an interview in Jorge G. Castañeda, Compañero: The Life and Death of Che Guevara (Bloomsbury, 1997), pp. 326–8.
24. March, Remembering Che, p. 121.
25. Interestingly, in an article written in 1974 the Cuban writer Roberto Fernández Retamar suggested that Caliban was the most apt symbol for Cuba’s hybrid identity. See Retamar, ‘Caliban: Notes Towards a Discussion of Culture in Our America’, Massachussets Review, vol. 15 (1974), pp. 7–72.
26. See Mazrui and Mhando, ‘On Poets and Politicians’, p. 212. Faisal Devji argues that this associates Shylock specifically with the Indian shopkeepers who were seen to be at the root of East African capitalist evils; this argument does, however, turn on Nyerere having misunderstood (or ignored) the fact that the ‘Merchant’ is Antonio, not Shylock. See ‘Subject to Translation: Shakespeare, Swahili, Socialism’, Postcolonial Studies, vol. 3, no. 2, p. 182. Interestingly, a fictional version of this history does take place in V. S. Naipaul’s A Bend in the River (André Deutsch, 1979), where one of the characters joins a theatre troupe in London after studying in Oxford and spots the similarity between the position of the East African Indians and Shakespeare’s Jews: ‘Another time there was the idea of rewriting The Merchant of Venice as The Malindi Baker, so that I could play Shylock. But it became too complicated’ (p. 177).
27. For an excellent recent discussion of this, see Emma Smith, ‘Was Shylock Jewish?’, Shakespeare Quarterly, vol. 64, no. 2 (Summer 2013), pp. 188–219.
28. Montaigne, ‘On Affectionate Relationships’, pp. 211–12.
8. Addis Ababa: Shakespeare and the Lion of Judah
1. Richard Pankhurst, ‘Shakespeare in Ethiopia’, Research in African Literatures, vol. 17, no. 2 (1986), pp. 169–86, at p. 175. Pankhurst’s excellent article is the only source for most material on the Shakespeare translations and performances of the 1960s and 1970s, and though I have confirmed many of the findings and been able to add details and context here and there, my account here relies heavily on his work.
2. The translations here are taken from the Hakluyt Society edition, The Prester John of the Indies: The translation of Lord Stanley of Alderley, 1881, rev. and edited with additional material by G. F. Beckingham and G. W. B. Huntingford (2 vols, Cambridge University Press, 1961). The quotations in this paragraph are from vol. 1, pp. 157, 69, 97, 132 and 70.
3. Philip Sidney, The Defence of Poesy, in Sidney’s Defence of Poesy and Selected Renaissance Literary Criticism, ed. Gavin Alexander (Penguin Classics, 2004), p. 27.
4. Wendy Belcher, ‘Interview: Ethiopia’s Poet Laureate Tsegaye Gabre-Medhin’, Ethiopian Review, September 1998. There is some confusion over the ostensible date of this episode; Tsegaye affirms both that it happened in 1959 and that it happened when he was twenty-nine years old (i.e. in 1965). It is possible that Tsegaye was using the Ethiopian calendar, in which case this episode would have taken place in 1966.
5. Prester John of the Indies, vol. 1, p. 258.
6. See Wendy Belcher’s Abyssinia’s Samuel Johnson: Ethiopian Thought in the Making of an English Author (Oxford University Press, 2012), which notes the many parallels between Johnson’s writings and the histories of Abyssinia with which he was familiar, which included not only the history by Jerónimo Lobo that he translated (via Legrand’s French), but also the sections of Álvares and Pedro Páez that had been excerpted in the great travel compilation Purchas’ Pilgrims. Belcher makes the further claim that Johnson had a fuller and deeper trans-historical affinity with the Habesha people of northern Abyssinia and its culture and customs, which she argues offered Johnson an alternative ancient Christian heritage beyond the European Protestant–Catholic divide.
7. We are reliant for many of the details of life in Haile Selassie’s late court on Ryszard Kapuściński’s extraordinary book The Emperor: Downfall of an Autocrat (Quartet, 1983), which purports to transcribe interviews with courtiers conducted just after the Emperor had been dethroned by the Derg in 1974. While it is immediately apparent that Kapuściński’s uniformly eloquent informants, with their strange blend of naïveté and knowing irony, are at least to some extent an imaginative recasting, the book remains our only source of information on many aspects of court life.
8. Prester John of the Indies, vol. 1, p. 281.
9. Robert Ardrey, African Genesis: A Personal Investigation into the Animal Origins and Nature of Man (Athenaeum, 1961).
10. Jonathan Swift, ‘A Tale of a Tub’, in Major Works (Oxford World’s Classics, 2003), pp. 87–8.
9. Panafrica: Shakespeare in the Cold War
1. Ali Mazrui (‘Shakespeare in Africa: Between English and Swahili Literature’, Research in African Literatures, vol. 27, no. 1 (1996), p. 64) mistakenly suggests that this speech is reported in the 26 July 1989 edition of the Daily Nation, but no such report appears there; the speech, in fact, took place on 10 July 1988 and was only reported in the Kenya Times, on 11 July 1988. I am grateful to Megan Halsband at the Library of Congress for sending me the relevant pages of the Kenya Times.
3. Kenya Gazette, 12 June–25 July 1975, cols 1178, 1331.
4. Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Detained: A Writer’s Prison Diary (Heinemann, 1981), p. 132.
5. See, for instance, Michela Wrong, In the Footsteps of Mr Kurtz: Living on the Brink of Disaster in the Congo (Fourth Estate, 2001); Ngugi, Detained.
6. See Frances Stonor Saunders, Who Paid the Piper? (Granta, 1999).
7. See Annabel Maule, Theatre near the Equator, pp. 105 and 134, where she records performances of The Merchant of Venice (1964) and The Taming of the Shrew (1971) subsidized by Caltex, the first attended by J. M. Otiendo as Minister for Education and the second by Vice-President Moi.
8. Foreign Broadcast Information Service Daily Reports, 20 July 1989, translated from a speech in Swahili at Kiharu on 14 July.
9. See, for instance, ‘Kenyan expats kiss the good life goodbye’, DailyTelegraph, 16 July 2001, which suggests that ‘The number of white settlers in Kenya, as opposed to foreigners on two-year contracts, is widely believed to have shrunk from about 50,000 in 1963 to fewer than 8,000 today.’ For obvious reasons, the number of departing expats is rather difficult to record precisely from published migration data, as many kept British citizenship and so were not recorded as migrants on returning to Britain.
10. See the OECD report on African Economic Outlook for 2005/6, especially Figure 6 (p. 22) and Table 11 (pp. 566–7). The fall in aid flows from around $30bn in 1990 to around $16.7bn in 1999 was also exacerbated by the changing value of the dollar; by some indexes (such as the economic power of the dollar during the period), the fall in aid would actually be closer to a reduction by two thirds.
11. George Mungai suggests that the end to government censorship of the theatre came about in 1992 through the challenge of a lawyer on the Board of Governors of the Phoenix, who pointed out that there was no constitutional basis for the use of these powers nor for the habit of Special Branch in regularly shutting down theatrical performances.
12. George Steiner, Grammars of Creation (Faber, 2001), p. 16. As the philosopher Giorgio Agamben points out, the epithet Sapiens, added to the tenth edition of Linnaeus’ Systema Naturae, appears ‘not [to] represent a description, but […] rather an imperative’, simplifying the adage nosce te ipsum (‘know thyself’ or, as Hobbes suggests, ‘read thyself’) which had appeared in the margin next to Homo in previous editions. In other words, this was not Man the Wise, but rather an injunction upon man to become wise. Giorgio Agamben, The Open: Man and Animal (Stanford University Press, 2004), p. 25.
13. See Ania Loomba’s analysis of Janet Suzman’s Johannesburg production of Othello (A. Loomba and M. Orkin (eds), Post-Colonial Shakespeares (Routledge, 2003), p. 148), where she points out that Othello is ‘not just a play about race in general but a play about a black man isolated from other black people’, something which both explains the significance of the adaptations in the Phoenix production and may account for the fact that Othello does not figure as prominently as one might expect in the history of East African Shakespeare.
14. See Susan Bennett and Christie Carson (eds), Shakespeare Beyond English: A Global Experiment (Cambridge University Press), Introduction, p. 7.
10. Juba: Shakespeare, Civil War and Reconstruction
1. Rosie Goldsmith, ‘South Sudan Adopts the Language of Shakespeare’, 8 October 2011, www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-15216524 (accessed 8 October 2015).
2. Translation by Clayton Eshleman and Annette Smith.
Index
The page numbers in this index relate to the printed version of this book; they do not match the pages of your ebook. You can use your ebook reader’s search tool to find a specific word or passage.
Abrahams, Peter 128–31
Abuk, Joseph 238–9, 241–2
Abyssinia see Ethiopia
Achebe, Chinua 145
Adam’s Ancestors (Leakey) 157
Addis Ababa 189, 205–6, 236
Aden 49, 94
Advisory Committee on Native Education 126n
Adwa, Battle of (1896) 193, 194
Aero Club of East Africa (Nairobi) 129–30, 144
Africa
colonialism in 4, 57–8, 137, 146–8, 188, 215, 264
evangelizing in 40
explorers, travellers and hunters in 3–4, 6, 7, 10–28, 70–83
known as ‘the Dark Continent’ 25, 28, 54, 63, 65, 68, 82, 83, 178
as primitive and decadent 10–11
stories and tales concerning 16–17, 21, 53, 63–74, 77–83, 117–22, 127–31, 133–4
African Association 167
African Game Trails (Roosevelt) 11, 13–14
African Genesis (Ardrey) 208
African Socialism 176, 179
Africander Corps 78
Agamben, Giorgio 278
Agha Hashr Kashmiri 96, 98–9, 100, 102
al-Mahasin, Abu 86
al-Nahda 238
al-Shabaab 215
Albert Nyanza (Congo) 15
Alibhai-Brown, Yasmin 141
Allan Quatermain (Haggard) 65–6, 265
Alliance High School (Kenya) 142, 153, 194, 218, 262
alligators 61 and note
Allingbone’s Quotations 15
Álvares, Francisco 191–3, 200–1, 207, 276
American Civil War 36
Amin, Idi 138–9
Anecdotes of Destiny (Blixen) 133–4
Antony and Cleopatra 1, 2, 96, 163, 173, 221–2, 223, 225
Apartheid 148, 157, 164, 176
Arabian Nights (trans. Burton) 6
Ardrey, Richard 208, 209
Aristophanes 178
Aristotle 140
Armstrong, Louis 218
Arusha 209
Arusha Declaration (1967) 179
As You Like It 55–6, 80, 135–6, 140, 142
Asmara 197–8
Associated Press 216
Association International Africaine 21
Atronsa Maryam 192n
Auden, W. H. 10
Auerbach, Eric 223–4
Baden-Powell, Robert 78, 80, 81
Balliol College (Oxford) 146
Banda, Hastings 141
Barghash, Sultan of Zanzibar 43, 49, 50n
Barriers to Democracy (Nyerere) 167
BBC World Service 232
Beard, Peter 133
Beit el Ajaib 58
Bellini, Gentile 192n
Bellini, Giovanni 192n
A Bend in the River (Naipaul) 74
Benham, Gertrude Emily 15
Benita (Haggard) 88n
Berhana Sälam 197
Bhul Bhuliya (Twelfth Night) (Mehadi Hasan) 102, 103–5, 269
the Bible 33–4, 63, 68–9, 82, 157, 237
Black Hermit (Ngugi) 142
Black Mischief (Waugh) 194, 208n
Blixen, Karen 12, 30–1, 111–16, 117–19, 121, 122, 125, 130, 133–4, 155, 222, 269
Bohannan, Laura 119–20, 121, 122, 130, 133
The Book of Secrets (Vassanji) 142n
Boy Scouts 78
Boyes, John 77–83
Brancaleone, Niccolò 192 and note
British Council 189, 210
British Library (London) 102–3
British Museum (London) 40
British South Africa Company 71, 75
Bruce, James 193
Buchan, John 88
Buganda 88–9, 138, 139
Burns, Robert 115
Burton, Richard Francis 6–10, 11, 29, 61, 86, 113, 178
Busaidi dynasty 36
Butiama 164
By the Sea (Gurnah) 47
Caesar’s Column (Donnelly) 72
Cairo 3
Calcutta 102
Calka, Maurice 207
Caltex 219, 277
Camöes, Luís Vaz de 62n, 87
cannibalism 25
Cape of Good Hope 3, 59, 60
Cape Town 148
Castro, Fidel 176
, 177
Césaire, Aimé 183–4, 238
Chamberlain, Joseph 73n, 79
Chandos edition of Shakespeare 22–3, 260
Cholmondeley, Hugh, 3rd Baron Delamere 113
CIA (Central Intelligence Agency) 177, 218
Cibber, Colly 80
Clark, Edma Grace 127
Clinton, Bill 72
Cold War 215, 218, 219–20, 232
Cole, Berkeley 113
Coleridge, Samuel Taylor 62
Collier, John Payne 62
Columbus, Christopher 69
The Comedy of Errors 34–5, 104
Committee of Nine 176
Complete Works of Shakespeare 7, 8, 28, 162
Congo 21, 72, 76, 235
Conrad, Joseph 16–17, 21, 53, 72, 74
Constant (ship) 59
Coriolanus 141
Cuba 176, 178, 190
Cunard, Nancy 128
Cymbeline 106, 132, 150, 154, 231, 232, 238–42
da Gama, Vasco 3, 86–7
da Silva, John Baptist 45–7, 52, 59
Daily Nation 216, 277
Dante Alighieri 12, 178, 237
Dar es Salaam 162, 176, 177
De Beers 71
De Brunhoff, Jean 127–8
Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (Gibbon) 18n
Delamere, Hugh see Cholmondeley, Hugh, 3rd Baron Delamere
Derg Council 205, 210–11
Desert Island Discs (BBC radio programme) 12
Desertion (Gurnah) 142n
Dickens, Charles 79
Dil Farosh (The Merchant of Venice) (Aga Hashr) 98–9, 102
Dinesen, Ingeborg 115
Dinesen, Isak see Blixen, Karen
Dinka people 232, 240
Donnelly, Ignatius 72
Donovan Maule Theatre (Nairobi) 218–19
Dragon (or Red Dragon) (ship) 59, 60, 62
Durban 80
East African Association 125, 126
East African Railways 89–90
East African Standard 98, 99–100, 102, 106
East India Company 34, 59, 62
Eastern Art Theatre Company 95
Egypt 3
Eid al-Fitr 42, 58
Elements (Euclid) 8, 30n
Shakespeare in Swahililand Page 27
