The camp authorities had made a mistake in choosing an inveterate rebel to write their propaganda for them: Gakaara had, as a young man, been expelled from the Alliance High School for taking part in a protest against the removal of sugar from the students’ daily rations, and later agitated from within the British Army against the slave-like treatment of the black soldiers who were shedding their blood for Britain in the East African Campaign. He was, however, at Alliance long enough to have his first introduction to theatre through the school’s heavily Shakespearean drama and reading programme, and it is hard not to see in his play’s conclusion an echo of those Shakespearean plays – The Tempest, Measure for Measure, Cymbeline, Macbeth – that end with a central villain collapsing under the weight of their guilt.
For all that the colonial authorities did little to bring the Gikuyu around to their way of thinking, their campaign against the Mau Mau uprising did succeed in sowing discord among the many different constituencies who wished for an end to British rule, revealing stark differences in how each group saw Kenya’s future and its place in the world. One of the most fascinating episodes of the Emergency saw two of these contending visions come face to face during the trial of Jomo Kenyatta, where the authorities employed as their Gikuyu translator none other than the celebrated fossil-hunter Louis Seymour Bazett Leakey. The trial was, in effect, a shock-and-awe campaign by the British government intended to nip the independence movement in the bud. Although Kenyatta had aspirations for a political route towards African independence that set him apart from the Mau Mau militants, he refused to accede to British demands that he publicly denounce the Mau Mau. In order to avoid making the trial a focus of anti-colonial sentiment, it was held in remote Kapenguria on the Ugandan border, thirty miles away from the nearest communications and drinking water.
Despite the fact that they were seated on opposite sides of the bar in this desert tribunal, Leakey and Kenyatta had up to this point led uncannily parallel lives. Although he was white, Leakey had been born and raised in Gikuyu country and had been inducted as a member of his Gikuyu age group a few years after Kenyatta himself had undergone the ritual; Leakey always considered himself a ‘white Kikuyu’, and later nominated Gikuyu as one of the languages in which he would be examined while at Cambridge. (The scarcity of Gikuyu speakers also led briefly to his being appointed his own examiner.) It is even said that he maintained throughout his life and everywhere in the world the idiosyncratic walk of the African bush, where one foot is placed in front of the other to walk the tightrope of the thin savannah paths. Kenyatta’s wife had been educated at the mission school run by Leakey’s sisters, and both men had written ethnographies of the Gikuyu tribe in the 1930s; there was even a confrontation between the two at a seminar Kenyatta gave at the London School of Economics, where they engaged in a heated discussion about female circumcision which, being held in Gikuyu, was wholly lost on the rest of the audience.
Their shared tribal loyalties could not, however, prevent them from formulating vastly different visions for the African future after this. Kenyatta for his part put away his former identities, including that of Shakespeare-loving English novelist, and began to mould his image as a fully African politician with no room for compromise with the culture of the colonial oppressor: he would be Jomo, not Johnstone, and his robe and sceptre would be the leopard skin and fly-whisk of a Gikuyu chief. In essence Kenyatta had reached the same conclusion as Blixen in her own thinking on the Gikuyu. For African societies to grow independent and strong they must assert themselves as incompatible with the ways of their colonial masters; there could be no universal political system or set of ethical standards, and by extension no shared culture.
Leakey’s thinking seems to have gone in a very different direction, though it was by no means the case that he was sympathetic to (or even quiet about) the colonial regime, for all that he was by training a palaeontologist and that he worked with the authorities against the Mau Mau. He had come in for a barrage of criticism from British reviewers when a 1936 book declared that Kenya would never be a ‘white man’s country’, and throughout his career he would furiously refute public slights against Africa and its people with his own beliefs in African superiority. And though his career was dedicated to the ostensibly objective arena of hard science, of data collection and analysis, his chosen field of early human evolution had always been hopelessly entangled with contending beliefs about what it means to be human. This fact had been forcefully brought to the public’s attention in the same year as the Kenyatta trial with the debunking of Piltdown Man, the most notorious palaeoanthropological forgery of the twentieth century. The Piltdown ‘fossils’, which had emerged between 1908 and 1915 from various gravel pits in East Sussex, were claimed by their discoverers as evidence not only that man (as distinct from various earlier evolutionary forms) had first emerged in Britain, but also that the crucial leap was a change in brain size.15 This discovery not only promised to allow British archaeologists to claim precedence over their counterparts on the European continent, who had recently uncovered enviable specimens of Cro-Magnons and Neanderthals in France, but it also bolstered the cherished claim that it was intellectual capacity which sorted the sheep from the goats in evolutionary terms. As had once been suggested using the example of Shakespeare, the distinguishing mark of humankind was British Genius. Piltdown Man had, from the very beginning, prominent detractors among the archaeological community – including Leakey – and it was finally exposed in a 1953 Time article as the fraudulent assembly of a medieval human skull and an orang-utan jaw.
But if Leakey was outspoken in his protests against the shoddy archaeology and wishful inferences in the Piltdown affair, there was more than a touch of ideological zeal in his own conviction that he would uncover the earliest evidence of man in East Africa. He retained a prominent strain of his parents’ missionary faith alongside his scientific training and, like the Jesuit Father Teilhard de Chardin, who was involved in the Piltdown discoveries, he argued that evolution was compatible with the Christian creation story (by imagining the ‘days’ of God’s work as millions of years). His popular accounts of human prehistory always gestured to the biblical stories on which he was raised, from Adam’s Ancestors to his never-performed play about man’s East African genesis, Eve’s Children. There is even an unmistakably biblical air to the salt flats and desert gullies from which Leakey’s revelations about man’s past emerged. The overwhelming impression given by visits to these sites – Olorgesailie, Baringo, Olduvai – is of an apocalyptic landscape, flashbulb-bright and bare, the anxiety of the top crust giving way underfoot only made worse by the occasional flamingo carcass preserved in the salt.
That Leakey’s claims about man’s earliest ancestors living in East Africa’s Rift Valley appear to have been right should not distract from the fact that his firm conviction arose in part from the same desire as the Piltdown forgers – to lay claim to mankind’s origin and thus to give his East African homeland a kind of authority in the matter of what it means to be human. Even the names given to these discoveries are evidence of an attempt to bend the history of man towards Leakey’s own vision: Kenyapithecus africanus, the Kenyan-African Man; Homo habilis, the man who triumphed not by his intelligence but by his handiness, his ability to survive in the bush. Leakey was always fairly frank about the political implications of his work; on the occasion of being presented with an honorary degree by the newly installed President Julius Nyerere of Tanzania, he used part of his speech to make explicit the part that palaeoanthropology could play in the fight against the apartheid regimes in South Africa and Rhodesia:
People frequently ask me why I devote so much time to seeking out facts about man’s past. … The past shows clearly that we all of us have a common origin and that our differences in race and colour and creed are only superficial.16
Like Steere’s belief that a shared God must make a shared culture possible, palaeoanthropology offered a way past the brutal nationalism of the middle
of the twentieth century by suggesting that we were, at heart, all the same. If languages and cultures could truly speak to each other, this would have to be through a shared root; but now it was not so much a divine master-language as a common genetic predecessor who gave us a similar physiological makeup. Leakey opposed to Kenyatta’s stance on cultural uniqueness a vision of a shared humanity, though one which East Africa has a right to define by virtue of priority. And for all that this seems a very long way from Shakespeare, these were in essence the two visions of Africa along which the culture wars following independence would be fought – one which believed in a universal human culture to which Africa should and must stake its claim, and one which felt that such claims were mere extensions of the colonizers’ power over their former subjects.
Louis Leakey’s son Richard with the skulls of Australopithecus and Homo Habilis. (© Marion Kaplan/Alamy Stock Photo)
Laurence Olivier as Hamlet with the skull of Yorick. (© Underwood & Underwood/Corbis)
* Ngugi’s recollections, in the second volume of his memoirs In the House of the Interpreter (1950–53) are echoed by many other major East African novelists, such as Abdulrazak Gurnah (Desertion, pp. 146–7 and 214–15, and By the Sea, p. 177) and M. J. Vassanji (The Book of Secrets, p. 246).
7
DAR ES SALAAM
Shakespeare in Power
BRUTUS:
Remember March, the ides of March, remember.
Did not great Julius bleed for justice’ sake?
What villain touched his body, that did stab,
And not for justice? What, shall one of us,
That struck the foremost man of all this world
But for supporting robbers, shall we now
Contaminate our fingers with base bribes,
And sell the mighty space of our large honours
For so much trash as may be graspèd thus?
I had rather be a dog and bay the moon
Than such a Roman.
Julius Caesar (IV.iii.18–28)
On my first evening in Dar es Salaam I meet a teenage prostitute with the unlikely name of Agrippina. I am staying at a hotel recommended by a local friend, who probably only knows the bar for its popular weekend happy hours; during the week, however, the bar evidently serves as a place for tourists to meet local girls. It is too late for me to go anywhere else, so I sit alone at a table and try to avoid the glances of women who would not even notice me back at home. I have seen this all before – perhaps first becoming aware of it in Havana, where the achingly beautiful local girls make eyes at slovenly European men wearing money belts and floral-print shirts – but it never fails to make the throat tighten. The sad scene is only made worse by the speakers blaring Tom Petty and Bruce Springsteen songs about young couples in industrial America fighting uphill battles against poverty and low expectations. Sex tourism plagues East Africa these days, though it is little seen by the average visitor, restricting itself to particular spots reserved only for those purposes.
My attempt to read Julius Caesar in my copy of the Works is (understandably enough) seen as a pitifully thin cover-story, and after several near passes without success Agrippina sits down at my table and asks for a light. (That smoking provides entrées for prostitutes was not among the main reasons I gave it up soon afterwards.) She tells me her name and that she is nineteen, though it is obvious from her limbs that she has not yet grown that far into womanhood. Between my awkward attempts to be polite, my intrigue at her name and her tenaciousness, we speak for a little while. She is from Zanzibar and has a brother studying in Texas. In response to a question I tell her that I am married, and she laughs to hear that my wife and I are childless after three years. She tells me that she will not marry until she is forty-five, as marriage is when you have to say ‘it is over’; and that she has four children – two boys and two girls – the first of whom she had when she was eleven. She can’t tell me much about how she came to have such a name – the name of a Roman empress (Nero’s mother and Caligula’s sister), as well as of the daughter of the Agrippa who defeats the lovers at Actium in Antony and Cleopatra; her father, she thinks, was interested in Roman history. There is, however, an excruciating fitness to the name, which means ‘born through pain’.
I am torn between desperately wanting to keep her from going about her business and feeling guilt for occupying her time when I have no intention of coming to terms with her. After a few minutes I make my excuses and return to my hotel room, refusing her offer to help me with my reading. The bar is rather empty that evening, and she is evidently deflated by the fact that her attempt has failed. The experience is in the truest sense of the word abysmal.
I have come to Dar on the trail 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. Biographies of Nyerere – as Baba wa Taifa (‘Father of the Nation’) – tend to be hagiographical affairs, even more so now that there is an active campaign by the large community of Tanzanian Catholics to have him canonized by the Vatican.* So although accounts of Nyerere’s life routinely mention the Shakespeare translations among his achievements, and gesture proudly to their status as canonical texts in Swahili literature, there is little detail to be found on the extraordinary circumstances of their origin.
The fact that Nyerere found time to render more than 5000 lines of dense Shakespearean verse into Swahili is itself astonishing, given that he was at the time also negotiating the transition to independence, drafting and redrafting constitutions, setting up the Organization of African States, and spearheading pan-African efforts to end colonialism on the continent and drive Apartheid from the south. Even these activities were ones he took on in addition to the day-to-day business of running the country, and in doing so of formulating and moving towards a kind of African Socialism which he hoped would add economic independence to the new political freedoms. Nyerere came late in life to politics after a career as a teacher, and he was from early days known by the affectionate title of Mwalimu, ‘teacher’. The endearing image of the scholar-statesman, however, does little to explain what it would have meant to translate Shakespeare of an evening while spending the days forging a new nation. Why had he chosen these specific plays, and what do these readings by a brilliant man in a unique position at a watershed moment in history reveal about the Shakespearean texts we think we know so well? He would have known these plays intimately, as perhaps only a translator can, after considering how best to preserve the dense meaning of each word and phrase as they are delicately transferred to a foreign tongue. How, then, did Shakespeare’s profound treatment in these plays of tyranny, insurrection, friendship and the role played by money in our lives colour his experiences during the years he was overthrowing the colonial state and crafting a new form of African society with which to replace it? And how did it all go wrong – how did the path from Julius Caesar lead to the Tanzania I found today, with its Agrippinas and its endless traffic jams snaking through the slums between the main roads?
Kambarage Nyerere was born on a rainy day in April 1922 in the small village of Butiama, a little way inland from the shores of Lake Victoria; he did not take the name ‘Julius’ until the age of twenty-one, when he was baptized into the Catholic faith to which he had been converted during his schooling by the missionary White Fathers.1 He delayed his baptism until after the death of his father, a minor local chieftain who would not have approved of his son’s departure from the polytheism of his ancestors. Nyerere was one of the chief’s twenty-two children by one of his many wives. Following the custom of the Zanaki tribe, the wives’ houses were arranged in circular wings extending away from the chieftain’s house around a central boma enclosure, with odd-numbered wives on the left and even on the right. As the child of the chief’s fifth wife, Julius Nyerere would have grown up on the left-ha
nd side of his father’s house. Life in this kind of extended family is hard to imagine for those to whom the nuclear family has come to seem almost inevitable. Ngugi wa Thiong’o writes touchingly of his childhood in a Gikuyu homestead of four wives and twenty-four children, where the children were identified by their biological mother but raised by all the mothers in a strict matriarchy.
After a largely tribal childhood, Nyerere was sent at the age of twelve to the Native Authority School in Musoma, and then (after displaying outstanding promise) to the elite Tabora Boys’ School, described at the time by the visiting naturalist Julian Huxley as ‘the Eton of Tanganyika’.2 The young Nyerere was considered exceptionally bookish by boys at a school which had absorbed the sporting ethos of the English public school; in order to avoid the bemused surveillance of the other boys, he set up a study in a nearby cave, as a private retreat in which he could read undisturbed. One wonders if, even at so young an age, he would have sensed the Shakespearean significance of mixing caves and books. He later returned to Tabora as a teacher at another school (St Mary’s), after taking a degree in education at Makerere College across Lake Victoria in Uganda.3 A letter written in 1946 for the college annual, Makerere, upon his return to Tabora gives some flavour of the fiercely humble young man and the strong sense of duty he felt to his yet-unborn nation:
Shakespeare in Swahililand Page 16