Shakespeare in Swahililand by Edward Wilson-Lee

 

Shakespeare in Swahililand is an interesting read—I don’t know a lot about Africa—and looks to me to be a good response to the foolish notion that Shakespeare’s status is merely due to institutions of power and colonialism. 

Here’s an interesting fact: 

“… one of the first books printed in Swahili was a Shakespearean one. Not a play, mind you, but a slim volume of stories from Charles and Mary Lamb’s Tales from Shakespeare, published as Hadithi za Kiingereza (‘English Tales’) on the island of Zanzibar in the 1860s.” (Prelude) 

Oddly enough, the 4 stories include are The Taming of the Shrew (unusual choice), King Lear (great), The Merchant of Venice (great), and Timon of Athens (why???). 

As I don’t know a lot about Africa, the book is full of surprises like that. Did you know, for example, that the love of Shakespeare in East Africa was spread by Indian settlers? 

“… the Indian settlers also brought with them their love of Shakespeare – or rather, it should be said, their two loves of Shakespeare, equally intense but not quite the same. The first of these, which would come to East Africa later, was a scholar’s love of Shakespeare, which came about through long hours of intensive reading of the works and which led to a nineteenth-century cult of Shakespeare that placed him on the level with the Sanskrit poet Kalidas and saw him venerated by (among others) the Bengali poet and novelist Rabindranath Tagore. […] 

The other love of Shakespeare, the theatregoer’s love of his plots and characters, developed alongside the official culture in the popular theatres of northern India, beginning with the Parsi theatres in Maharashtra and accumulating (according to one commentator) 6000 different versions of Shakespeare plays in Indian languages. […] It was this Shakespeare that arrived with the travelling theatre troupes, which began including Mombasa and Zanzibar on an itinerary which had already included stops in other British colonial hubs such as Aden…” (ch.4) 

Edward Wilson-Lee writes at length about the Indian productions and the changes—let’s say the Indianisation of Shakespeare’s plays—and also some contemporary reviews of these productions in British papers (which were negative). 

“… it is these very liberties taken with Shakespeare’s texts, the liberties which so dismayed the reviewers from the Standard, that meant Shakespeare was a living voice to these audiences and not being watched simply to venerate some lifeless idol.” (ibid.)

This is an important point. And over the past 400 years, different cultures have adapted Shakespeare and created new works based on his plays. Verdi for instance created the operas Macbeth, Otello, and Falstaff. Kurosawa made Throne of Blood and Ran based on Macbeth and King Lear respectively. Disney’s The Lion King was inspired by Hamlet. 

Edward Wilson-Lee also writes about how Shakespeare speaks to people: 

“Ngugi [wa Thiong’o] remarks that even as a schoolchild he mapped the Shakespeare he was watching and reading onto contemporary African politics, imagining the band of woodland exiles in As You Like It were the Mau Mau rebels with whom his brother was encamped in the northern highlands.” (ch.6) 

The plays resonate with people, regardless of background. Milton Obote (later prime minister and then president of Uganda) acted in Julius Caesar at Makerere University at the time when he “was forming a political organization to stage protests against the Ugandan Lukiko elite as puppet-tyrants for the colonial overlords.” (ibid.) 

Another example: 

“I have come to Dar [es Salaam] on the trial of Julius Nyerere, the first President of Tanzania, who translated Julius Caesar and The Merchant of Venice into Swahili in spare evening moments during the very years that he was taking his country from British colony to independent nation and then to grand experiment in African Socialism.” (ch.7)

One of the interesting things the book shows, which the haters of Shakespeare and Western culture don’t seem to know or don’t want to acknowledge, is that Shakespeare does speak to people from different backgrounds and across the political spectrum, even people in the anti-apartheid movement and national independence movements. 

“The most famous case of this is perhaps on Robben Island, a penal colony off Cape Town, where in the late 1970s Nelson Mandela and thirty-three other political detainees marked their favourite Shakespearean passages in a copy of the Works that was passed around among the prisoners and became known as ‘The Robben Island Bible’.” (ch.6)  

I have heard of “The Robben Island Bible” before, though I forgot its name. This is Mandela’s favourite passage: 

“Cowards die many times before their deaths; 

The valiant never taste of death but once. 

Of all the wonders that I yet have heard, 

It seems to me most strange that men should fear, 

Seeing that death, a necessary end, 

Will come when it will come.” 

(Julius Caesar) 

When some people speak about the “blind reverence” for Shakespeare and try to reduce his popularity and influence around the world to “power structures” and all that, they don’t seem to understand how condescending they sound and, more importantly, that it betrays an embarrassing lack of imagination—just because they themselves don’t particularly like Shakespeare, they cannot imagine that others could genuinely love his works—like all those who call others pretentious for expressing love for classical music or Ulysses or Ingmar Bergman (related: see my letter to the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust). 

As Edward Wilson-Lee says: 

“Hard as it is to argue against this explanation (especially as a white man of British descent), it is less than wholly satisfying for all who have read Shakespeare with little feeling that they are being forced into it or trying to coerce others, and rather belittling for all those who aren’t white and male and British, whose passion for Shakespeare was in danger of being written off as mere craven pandering to the overlord.” (Prelude) 

I’ve been reading this book as a part of Shakespeare Day celebrations. Many of you may find it interesting. 

PS: I recently listened to an audio recording of Antony and Cleopatra, with David Harewood and Frances Barber. Frances Barber is Cleopatra! What a woman. What a performance. Check it out, folks.