But it is also here in Ethiopia, among the people with a most natural affinity for them, that Shakespeare’s plays become most estranged from Western ways of reading them, and this is what has drawn me into unknown territory. Ethiopia is outside of the Swahili-speaking former British colonies where I spent my youth, and so in some senses beyond the scope of this history; but because of its ancient traditions and its history clear of any real colonization, it was at the centre of thinking about what it meant to be African after colonialism. The decision by Nyerere and other pan-Africanist leaders to found the Organization for African Unity in Addis Ababa in 1963 was richly symbolic: here was a proud nation with a continuous history of sovereignty and a cultural legacy untarnished by occupation which could serve as a guiding light for the enterprise. This meant that Ethiopia was the natural place for ideas about what it meant to be African to make their own contribution to global conceptions of what it means to be human. As Haile Selassie recognized, quoting Pushkin in the year after the OAU foundation, this meant making Shakespeare their own: ‘After God Almighty’, the Emperor pronounced after having been presented with a ceremonial copy of the Works by the British Council, ‘[Shakespeare] was the greatest creator of mankind.’1 Ethiopia’s centrality to Africa’s future in the 1970s is also the reason that it is one of the fountainheads of my own African experience – it was here that my father arrived from America to be a student at Haile Selassie I University during the last years of the Emperor’s reign, full of hope for the African future, and fell in love with an area that he has never really left.
Ethiopia seems always to have provided a dreamscape to the world outside, a space characterized by both the wish-fulfilment and the strange distortions of the somatic. While it is true that the medieval legends of Prester John, the mythical priest-king in whose realm unicorns roamed, were only occasionally and incidentally associated with Ethiopia, it is also true that fuller European knowledge of these lands did little to make stories about the region less extraordinary. Travelling through Ethiopia today it is easy to see why this is. There is the intense and peculiar religiosity which keeps alive a widespread belief that the Queen of Sheba once ruled these lands, that its rulers are direct descendants of the son she bore King Solomon, and that the Ark of the Covenant may still rest here.* There is the ancient Julian calendar, which means Ethiopia is seven years behind the standard European (Gregorian) date and has a thirteenth month, and the mesmerizing Amharic script, a unique and ancient lettering system which feels to the illiterate like a queer blend of Hebrew and runes. This is, then, a culture with Christian heritage that developed over a thousand years without contact with Western Christendom. The result is a spectacular and uncanny world of things at once familiar and foreign, from religious icons in illuminated bibles to curse-scrolls and the intricate geometric tracery of the crosses. More recent history has made further additions to this strange collage. There is the vague presence of Rastafarianism, whose largely Caribbean faithful from the 1930s set up Haile Selassie as a god under his birth name ‘Ras’ – Prince – Tafari; the idea is usually met with polite scepticism from those who actually lived under the Emperor’s rule. There are the rusting fleets of Russian-made Lada taxis, ghosts of the Soviet-backed military regime that overthrew Selassie, caught in limbo like the Cadillacs which have remained unretired in Cuba since the fall of Batista. The trained eye might spot amongst the Ladas a few of the last blue-and-white Fiat taxis, relics of the Italian wartime occupation which were the main mode of transport during my father’s youth here. Each of these taxis advertises its ferocious allegiance to an English Premier League team, and I am repeatedly forced to spontaneously fabricate strongly held opinions in hopes of not being a disappointment to the driver. (To be fair, I do this in England as well.)
The first substantial European reports of the region were written by Francisco Álvares, a priest who accompanied Dom Rodrigo de Lima on his 1520 Portuguese embassy to Lebna Dengel, the negusa negast (‘King of Kings’) ruling over central modern-day Ethiopia. Álvares’ Verdadera Informaçam das Terras do Preste Joam (‘True Relation of the Lands of Prester John’) describes the course of their six-year stay in Lebna Dengel’s kingdom and provides a detailed (if idiosyncratic) account of the country and its culture. It is fair to say that Dom Rodrigo’s mission did not get off to the most auspicious start: after landing at Massawa (now in Eritrea) accompanied by the Armenian monk ‘Matthew’ (who had arrived in Goa a few years previously declaring himself to be an emissary from the Prester), the party were stranded for months in various coastal monasteries waiting for the ‘Barnagais’ (Bar Negus, ‘King of the Shore’, or coastal governor) to provide them with porters. Setting off inadvisedly during the rains to the roving tent-city that served Lebna Dengel as a capital, the party suffered robberies, stonings and mutinies, as well as the constant diversionary tactics of local governors; their guide and diplomatic contact Matthew also died, which was probably just as well, as it transpired that he wasn’t an ambassador from Lebna Dengel after all. The party were often shadowed on the road by ‘tigers’ (though it is obvious from context that Álvares must mean hyenas). Reaching the court did not improve matters for the Portuguese: Lebna Dengel thought the gifts they had brought him woefully insufficient, and he was mostly interested in learning of developments in the doctrine of Western Christendom since the Council of Nicea in 325, posing questions that the humble priest Álvares was ill equipped to answer. It also became apparent that the Prester had a custom of forbidding the departure of outsiders who arrived at his court. They found at the court an assortment of European adventurers who lived in comfortable captivity, known locally as the ‘Franks’; among these was the Venetian painter Niccolò Brancaleone, who had been there for forty years and whose work is thought to have had some influence on the later course of Ethiopian art.* It is clear from the ambassador’s increasingly anxious petitions for licence to depart that he feared the same fate.
Yet if the ‘Lands of Prester John’ (as Álvares insisted on continuing to call them) were not the mythical cornucopia Álvares might have expected, nor the wealthy ally against the Turk the Portuguese might have hoped, they were nevertheless an endless marvel. Among other wonders, he records a staff of gold hanging in the air without support (recorded by other witnesses as late as 1700), a delicacy made of half-digested grass from a cow’s stomach, the use of salt and pepper as currency, and the giant obelisks of Axum, carved in the style of arcaded buildings. At the top of one of these, he notes, ‘are five nails, on the side looking south, nailed to the stone in the shape of a cross. When it rains the rust from these nails running down the stone from the nails for a span is like congealed blood.’2 Though Álvares is no poet, he is often driven to striking metaphors to capture the strange sights of Abyssinia. He speaks of camels that ‘squealed as though sin was laying hold on them’, and ‘an infinite quantity of apes in herds … very large, the size of sheep, and from the middle upwards hairy like lions’ which ‘promenade’ on the flat ground and ‘scrape the earth so that it looks as though it was tilled’.* The party enjoyed brief local celebrity when their prayers appeared to drive off a swarm of locusts that yellowed the sky with their arrival and left the earth ‘as though it had been set on fire’. Álvares also speaks with awe of the quails and monks so numerous they cover the earth; of the latter, he says laconically that ‘From their age and from their being thin and dry like wood, they appear to be men of holy life.’ As a priest Álvares is mainly interested in (often minor) differences in religious practice, and he speaks at length about their stone church bells, the fifty days of Lent they observe, and the churches at Lalibela hewn out of the living rock by a king named for the swarm of bees which covered him as a child.*
Álvares’ account, and the accounts of travellers after him (Pedro Páez in the 1560s, and then Jerónimo Lobo in the seventeenth century and James Bruce in the eighteenth), was to stock the European imagination with a store of reasonably accurate but nonetheless baffling ideas
about Abyssinia. Following in their wake would come a line of chancers and dreamers who hoped that Abyssinia would tear the veil of bourgeois ennui which had settled over their lives in the West. Prominent among these was the French poet Arthur Rimbaud, who at the tender age of nineteen cast off his role as cause célèbre of the Symbolist movement to run Remington rifles to Emperor Menelik, a supply that may have contributed to Ethiopia being the only African army ever to defeat a modern European force, when Menelik triumphed over the Italians at Adwa in 1896. (Souvenirs of the Battle of Adwa are still among the prized merchandise of Addis Ababa’s antique shops.) Evelyn Waugh, who found himself an accidental expert in things Ethiopian after blagging his way into covering Haile Selassie’s 1930 coronation, records among other things in his travelogue Remote People a conversation with the Bishop of Harar, Haile Selassie’s tutor, who remembered his friend Rimbaud as having a bad leg and a native mistress, and being ‘very serious and sad’. Waugh the ‘expert’ was sent back in 1936 to cover the occupation of Abyssinia by another dreamer, Benito Mussolini, who hoped to revenge the shame of the Battle of Adwa and in doing so to set up Fascist Italy as a colonial power. Waugh produced two thinly veiled satires of his stumble onto the African political stage in his early novels Black Mischief and Scoop, novels that allowed him to replace his (now little remembered) novelist brother Alec in the public’s affection.
Italy’s long and tempestuous relationship with the region has left its mark on Ethiopia, and before the overthrow of Haile Selassie one was sure to find Italian restaurants and car mechanics in the most distant reaches of the country, the legacy of Italian prisoners-of-war who married locals and never left. Even today one is likely to be served the local chicken curry, doro wat, on a bed of spirali pasta. The defeat of the Axis powers, however, coupled with Haile Selassie’s affection for England after having run his government-in-exile from Bath, gave Ethiopia an increasingly Anglophone flavour from the 1940s on; among the British settlers was Sylvia Pankhurst, of the Suffragette dynasty, a prominent wartime supporter of Haile Selassie whose son Richard would become the premier historian of the region. This Anglophilia meant, then, that Ethiopia, like the rest of East Africa, developed a surrogate public school to which the country’s elite were sent; where Kenya had the Alliance School and Tanzania had Tabora Boys’, Ethiopia had the General Wingate School. It was here that the precocious young Tsegaye Gebre Medhin was sent in 1952 at the age of sixteen, and where shortly after his arrival he may have had his first formative encounter with Shakespeare, when the school’s production of Julius Caesar was granted an Imperial audience. Welcome as the mark of favour must have been, however, it faced the school with a rather urgent dilemma – namely, whether they were to mangle Shakespeare’s sacred text by cutting the scene in which Caesar is murdered, or to go through with a performance of regicide in a country where the very subject was taboo. In an elegant compromise, the eventual solution was for Caesar to be murdered behind a curtain.* It is impossible that a young man of a theatrical bent could fail to be struck by witnessing the Emperor as spectator to Shakespeare’s staging of a tyrant’s death, with only a literal veil obscuring the relationship between the royal observer and the murdered Caesar. Shakespeare himself seems to have revelled in the electric pleasure, somewhere between sacrilege and insurrection, of showing the all-powerful an image of their own death. His company, the Chamberlain’s Men, agreed to perform Richard II on the eve of Essex’s planned rebellion against the Queen, knowing perhaps that even Elizabeth saw herself in the isolated King; and Shakespeare also seems to have marked the beginning of James I’s reign with Macbeth, a bloodbath which prominently features the gory deaths of two Scottish kings as well as James’s ancestor Banquo. Indeed, one of the central merits of tragedy as understood by Shakespeare’s contemporaries was that it ‘showeth forth the ulcers’ of human weakness and so makes ‘kings fear to be tyrants and tyrants manifest their tyrannical humours’.3 Perhaps most tellingly, Shakespeare’s alter ego Hamlet – the inscrutable chameleon whose father is a Catholic ghost and whose name is almost that of the poet’s recently deceased son, Hamnet – is writer-director-producer of a performance designed to show the death of one king to another.
During the years that Tsegaye was at school there were no fewer than four translations of Julius Caesar into Amharic being undertaken simultaneously, with the play’s prominent regicide continually drawing both ire and interest. As one apocryphal story tells it, the censors were delighted to report after inspecting one script that only one small change need be made to what was evidently otherwise a masterpiece – that Brutus should be killed instead. It was perhaps because of saturation of Caesar plays that Tsegaye, after returning from studying at the Royal Court Theatre in London and the Comédie Française to be appointed Director of the National Theatre, chose to adapt Othello instead. It was, after all, a play that stood a better chance of being green-lighted for production by the Ministry. Yet for all that the play contained no overt representation of regicide, it was not true that Tsegaye’s quiescence had been bought with the directorship. He later confessed that he had chosen the play, not out of some reverent attachment to Shakespeare nor a desire to meditate on jealousy, but rather because he felt its ‘Byzantine intrigue’ of ‘cloak and dagger’ were close to the bone of Haile Selassie’s Ethiopia.
Artists often make use of a fortuitous resemblance between existing narratives and current circumstances to lend plausible deniability to public controversy, but there’s a fine line to walk between deniability and making sure the audience doesn’t miss the point. Shakespeare seems to have kept his nose studiously clean, but his fellow playwrights often landed themselves in Newgate prison for (say) giving buffoons Scottish accents too soon after James I’s accession. Indeed, these instances of overstepping the mark are often our only way of discovering the subversive messages being offered to contemporary audiences. While Tsegaye openly gestured in the direction of the court by staging his play in modern Ethiopian dress, this in itself was too general to land him in hot water. But the striking resemblance between Iago (played as a Fitawari Ethiopian officer) and the Emperor’s late half-brother, Dejazmatch Yilma, was too much for the censors at the Ministry of Information. Presumably they drew the unavoidable conclusion that if Iago was the Emperor’s illegitimate elder brother, then Othello must be the Emperor who displaced him. Certainly Tsegaye’s move had a ring of Shakespearean truth to it. While Iago’s reckless loathing for Othello is never really adequately explained, Shakespeare found a more compelling reason for this bitter passion when he returned to it in King Lear, in the bastard Edmund’s hatred for his younger brother Edgar. The Ministry, however, was evidently not impressed by the dramatic logic, and the production was discontinued.
There is, however, a strange and inexorable course followed by these things, and when reports of the production came to the Emperor’s ears a year later, he expressed a desire to witness it himself. The revived production was duly staged in the National Theatre; Haile Selassie came with his train of attendants to see it not once but twice; and he was so struck that he ordered the state press, Berhana Sälam, to print 10,000 copies of Tsegaye’s translation. Despite his titillating portrayal of a bloodbath at the Ethiopian court, the playwright had, at the tender age of twenty-eight, secured his place at the vanguard of Ethiopian cultural and literary life, and with the royal imprimatur to boot.
What the Emperor could not have known was that Tsegaye had at much the same time been witness to scenes that would make him a staunch opponent of his new Imperial patron. In an interview given late in his life, he recounted a trip he had taken to Asmara, through the northern Tigray province, in hopes of publishing a book somewhere outside of the strict censorship regime of the capital.
[W]e crossed this high plateau, across Alimata(?) mountain, and arrived in a small village, called Quaha(?). Again, it was toward evening. [long pause] And there was such a sound of humans screaming for food and help.
I was told to stay o
n the bus. Our bus was surrounded by police, to protect us from the people. They were surging forward, thronging toward the bus. [… The people on the bus] were handing out this bread with their hands, they were dropping bread and it was caught by so many hands trying to grab it, trying to get more. And some crumbs fell on the back of the head of a little woman who was carrying a lean, thin, hungry child. When the bread dropped, she tried to grasp it from the back of her neck, but the child had already grasped it and desperately stuffed it in his mouth. Then the police, who were carrying large sticks, struck this woman and she fell. Flat. The child was thrown off her back and onto the ground.
[… In the next town, Mekele] I sat up the whole night in a small cafeteria; they called it a hotel. The news was too much, something terrifying, something I had not heard of. And, of course, the police had surrounded the hotel; they were protecting us from the people.
But at dawn, the cafeteria service came in with a glass of tea and a piece of bread. I opened my window and I looked out toward where the noise was coming from, a sort of square. With my small piece of bread, I rushed toward where I saw a small human creature. The police had left it to die and were keeping the people away at the other end. This one was by itself.
I bent down and tried to lift it, to give it a piece of bread in its mouth. It bit it for a brief moment and its eyes opened and it fell in my hand. That’s it. That’s it. He died.4
Shakespeare in Swahililand Page 19