Shakespeare in Swahililand

by Edward Wilson-Lee

  While many Westerners today might reflexively associate Ethiopia with famine and drought, a legacy of the searing images circulated by television news and charitable campaigns in the 1970s and ’80s, this is only half the story. The central highland province, in which Menelik II chose to found his royal capital of Addis Ababa (‘New Flower’) at the end of the nineteenth century, is overwhelmingly fertile and verdant, with rich and well-watered valleys running between hills wooded with eucalyptus groves. But there was virtually no communication between the capital and those provinces of the Empire to the north and south which were especially prone to crop failures. Not only were the routes between the north and the centre treacherous, beset by bandits and (in the words of Álvares) so steep-walled that it was ‘as if it were the edge of a sword making this canyon and this valley’, but the only newspapers were small-circulation, state-owned pet projects of the Emperor, and they reported only news of which the court could be proud.5 Much as at European ancien régime courts, the provincial governors resided for the most part not in their regions but at court, for to be absent was to open oneself to slander and suspicion. Many of these governors knew enough about the famine to be profiteering off the crop failures by stockpiling what grain there was and jacking up prices, though they said nothing of this in the capital. But word increasingly began to filter through during the 1960s of experiences like Tsegaye’s, a knowledge that would transform Addis from a blissful haven into the centre of unrest.

  The disconnection between Ethiopia’s ruling families and the lands over which they held sway, though, was something written deeply into the fabric of Ethiopian society. As one account of an Abyssinian royal residence had it,

  Here the sons and daughters of Abyssinia lived only to know the soft vicissitudes of pleasure and repose, attended by all that were skilful to delight, and gratified with whatever the senses can enjoy. They wandered in gardens of fragrance, and slept in the fortresses of security. Every art was practised to make them pleased with their own condition. The sages who instructed them told them of nothing but the miseries of public life, and described all beyond the mountains as regions of calamity, where discord was always raging, and where man preyed upon man.

  Fitting as the words above are as a description of the complacent oblivion in which Haile Selassie had secluded himself, they are in fact from the 1759 novella Rasselas, Prince of Abyssinia, by the Father of English dictionaries, Samuel Johnson. Johnson, who had as a young and penniless hack translated a Portuguese history of Abyssinia, wrote the philosophical tale in the evenings of a single week, in hopes of using his commission to visit his sick mother and pay her debts. (She died on the evening of the seventh day.) The story follows the life of Prince Rasselas, who with the rest of the royal children is confined to a Happy Valley in which their every desire is catered for, but who conceives a hunger to see the world beyond the valley in order that he might make his choice of life with all the options before him. It had long been assumed that Johnson chose Abyssinia more or less at random, as an arbitrary home for his whimsical romance; but recent scholarship has established that the details of his youthful translation stayed with him to a remarkable degree.6

  There is, in any case, no doubt that Johnson’s Happy Valley was a representation of the real mountain fortress in which all heirs and possible pretenders to the Abyssinian throne were sequestered to ensure that they did not present a challenge to the sitting Emperor. The mountain, which features prominently in Álvares’ account (and which he sees as a model for European practice), evidently enthralled the Renaissance imagination. Giacomo Gastaldi’s monumental 1564 map of Africa, the eastern portion of which was developed from Álvares’ account, happily replaces the fantastical medieval landmarks of Prester John’s kingdom – the Fountain of Eternal Youth and Alexander’s Gate – with this equally marvellous reality, and Gastaldi’s example was followed until well into the nineteenth century. It was equally true, as in Johnson’s Rasselas, that princes did escape from their heavily guarded prison into the outside world, a world where they were anathema and it was death even to speak to them; in one case during the 1520 expedition a fugitive disguised himself as a bush, only to be captured by nearby peasants and blinded. As Álvares makes clear, however, it was not the hunger for knowledge and the enervation of ceaseless pleasure that drove these captives to escape; instead, for all the Prester’s protestations that they lived at ease and could want for nothing, it appears that these royal slaves regularly ran short of basic foodstuffs and lived in rags unsuited to the mountain climate.

  Happy Valley on the 1564 Gastaldi map. The label reads ‘Here is the mountain of Amara; the Lord Prester John keeps his children here under strict guard’.

  After hearing of his mother’s death, Johnson ended his novella abruptly by having Rasselas return to Abyssinia, having come to the conclusion that every possible choice of life has its own miseries and that the wilful ignorance of the Happy Valley was no worse than any other and better than most. Haile Selassie seems to have come to much the same conclusion in his later life. The court from which he ruled increasingly became a bizarre world shaped to fit one man’s fantasies. There was one attendant whose sole task was to wipe the Imperial lapdog’s urine from the shoes of visiting dignitaries, and another who looked after the fifty-two pillows of various shapes and sizes designed to prevent the diminutive monarch’s feet from dangling when he sat on his thrones.7 Like his ancestor Lebna Dengel, he kept a menagerie that included chained lions, though he executed some of these lions for failing to fight against an abortive palace coup in 1960. The Emperor’s decisions were communicated almost entirely via the Minister of the Pen, who could retrospectively be blamed for mishearing any policies that turned out to be unpopular; and, like his ancestor Solomon, the Emperor took pleasure in regularly dispensing verdicts in major and minor law cases from a platform in front of one of the palaces, draped in a floor-length black cape.

  The world outside the palace was not spared this bizarre effrontery. The Ethiopian church, which was the major landholder in the realm, had always decreed fasting for nearly half the year, but this burden was increased to nearly 300 days, hoping to cover the deprivation with an air of sanctity. And it was into this world of delusion and tyranny that Tsegaye brought his translations of Macbeth and Hamlet. On the one hand these were attempts to make Ethiopia’s mark on the world stage, and in late-life interviews Tsegaye spoke in one breath of his literary work and of the cultural precedence given to Ethiopia by another paleontological discovery – Lucy, the specimen of Australopithecus afarensis uncovered in the Afar Triangle in the north of the country by the American Donald Johanson. But the Shakespeare translations were also deeply concerned with the internal politics of the country, and were undertaken with all the urgency of political acts during the period of Tsegaye’s radicalization; they found, in the relationship between human weakness and political power, something universal, something which spoke as powerfully while revolution stirred in Ethiopia as it had during Shakespeare’s lifetime. His Makbez was completed in nine days in 1964, and Hamlét, widely considered his masterpiece, over the course of two months while on a tour of Israel. Both plays were published in 1972 by the Addis Ababa branch of Oxford University Press, at which Tsegaye himself worked as an editor, during a period when the capital was regularly shut down by student protests and violent police reprisals. In the National Library in Addis I inspected one of the few copies of Makbez surviving in world libraries, and it is immediately obvious that Tsegaye was pulling no punches: the cover shows a graphic depiction, in black and red, of a crown, a skull, and blood. It is no surprise that he was not given permission by the Ministry of Information to stage it, and that the few scenes included in a 1968 revue were censored after only three performances. The horrified fascination with which Macbeth considers his impending act of regicide in the ‘dagger’ scene, included in this selection, was evidently too much for the censors; its hallucinogenic contemplation of a ‘dagger of the mind’ is
perhaps too evident a metaphor for a vision that incites the viewer to violence, as is the clarion-call with which the speech ends: ‘Whiles I threat, he lives. / Words to the heat of deeds too cold breath gives’ (II.i.60–61).

  The cover of the 1972 edition of Tsegaye’s Makbez. (Oxford University Press, Addis Ababa, 1964 [i.e. 1972])

  The opening scene of Tsegaye’s Makbez. (Oxford University Press, Addis Ababa, 1964 [i.e. 1972])

  My main task in Addis is to unearth traces of these few performances, and those of the Ethiopian-dress Hamlét of 1967. The world in which these plays were created has largely been washed away by seventeen years of rule by the military-communist Derg Council, bookended by civil wars, though local peculiarities have of course survived that, to be found only slightly altered under the new regime of Meles Zenawi. What first strikes the traveller familiar with the rest of East Africa is the structure of the city: here there are not so much well-to-do neighbourhoods and slums kept entirely separate from each other, but rather a series of lavish islands – the palaces, the rail station, the university, the embassies and (today) the luxury hotels – set in an endless sea of humbler dwellings, from breeze-block buildings to lean-tos of cardboard and corrugated iron. Like many East African capitals, Addis was planned rather than growing up organically; but it was planned on a grand scale with little thought about what would inevitably fill the gaps. Whereas in Nairobi and Kampala one would never think to see slum dwellings from the presidential palace, there is a shanty town directly across from the gates of Zenawi’s residence, as there was (I’m told) even when it served as Haile Selassie’s Jubilee Palace right up to the moment of his overthrow and imprisonment. The British Embassy is reputedly the largest piece of sovereign territory outside of the British Isles, with its own golf course among other amenities; but it and the other embassies are placed at a great distance from the centre of town, positioned (as the story goes) over the river so that they would bear the costs of building and maintaining the bridge across it.

  This mingling and dispersal have given rise to their own peculiar forms of social and political life. Current anti-government sentiments (surrounding both the undemocratic character of Zenawi’s government and its response to an increasingly confident Islamic population) are given voice in so-called ‘conversation taxis’, crowded minibuses that provide the necessary anonymity for open political discussion. In the comfortable pre-revolutionary house where I am staying, and where the hostess, Yerusalem, proudly displays the dress uniform her grandfather wore at court, the local urchins have fashioned an opening in one of the fences to facilitate their entrance to the compound, where they play football and where Yerusalem sets out snacks for them.

  As in much of eastern Africa, however, an increasingly confident and necessarily resourceful young population is leapfrogging traditional paths of industrial development to build a digital culture of its own, creating a curious hybrid of new technologies and non-existent infrastructure. Smartphones are in every hand, even those of many who do not have homes, and these together with mobile banking have fostered a networked economy among people who lack many of the basics which endless attempts to ‘fix’ Africa assumed must come first. When I arrive at the National Theatre building there is a line, snaking past Maurice Calka’s glorious modernist sculpture of the Lion of Judah that Haile Selassie commissioned to sit outside his playhouse, which I later learn is made up of hopefuls for an Ethiopian equivalent of Pop Idol. It may be that the curious stares as I was ushered past the front of the queue – still something one can dishearteningly expect without question as a white person in East Africa – were drawn by the assumption that I had been dispatched by Simon Cowell as his surrogate. Inside there are the usual delays, requests for letters of introduction to see a rarely present director, the ‘archives’ in which unique documentary and photographic records are stacked and mouldering, the generous offers of help that are powerless to overcome decades of disorder, underfunding and neglect. I am reminded of Álvares’ description of the endless waiting for an audience with Prester John: ‘we all remained like the peacock when he spreads his tail and is gay, and when he looks at his feet becomes sad: so pleased were we with going, so sad at stopping behind.’8 But eventually I am given access, and in the entrance hall and in the broken-doored cupboards of dust-shrouded rooms I find images of these productions that bring them richly to life: an Othello sporting a squared pharaonic beard, and his counterpart, Iago, in the military attire of the Emperor’s dead brother; Horatio sporting a cape fixed at the shoulders in the aristocratic style.

  There is also an image of the 1967 Hamlét with Tasfaye Gassasa’s prince in Abyssinian short-cloak stunned by the entrance of the Ghost. Their shock may have been shared in some measure by the audience, as many observers saw in the Ghost a resemblance to Lej Iyasu, Menelik’s appointed heir, who was deposed in favour of the Empress Zauditu and her successor, Ras Tafari Makonnen. Iyasu lived on for nearly twenty years as a prisoner in a mountain fortress, like Rasselas and the other captive princes, and it was widely believed that Ras Tafari had him murdered in 1935 to prevent the Italians from using his claim as a front for occupation.* To draw a comparison between the Ghost and Iyasu was as much as to remind the audience of the shady path by which the throne came to Haile Selassie, and to paint the Emperor as the blood-stained usurper Claudius. Tsegaye followed up Hamlét by beginning to translate Lear, starting with the third act’s portrayal of the mad and abandoned king on the heath, and staging this in another revue in 1968 that was cancelled after three performances ‘for technical reasons’.

  Tsegaye’s focus on scenes of tyrannical power, human weakness and violence bring him rather closer to a novel theory that was making the rounds at the time, a rather darker theory of what humans share and what sets them apart from other animals. Along with the Piltdown case for human intelligence, and Leakey’s ideas about Homo habilis and his use of tools, the anthropologist Robert Ardrey had proposed in his book African Genesis that it was man’s propensity for violence that set him apart from other species – a theory whose most popular image came in the film 2001: A Space Odyssey, where the evolutionary leap comes by way of an ape who discovers that bones can be used as weapons.9

  Earlier in the trip I had accepted the invitation of a lawyer friend to sit in on the proceedings of the United Nations International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda. The Tribunal, which occupies an office-block-fortress in the northern Tanzanian city of Arusha, is finally winding down its prosecutions of those implicated in the 1994 genocide of hundreds of thousands of ethnic Tutsis. The public gallery is a silent box with a one-way window into the courtroom, across which curtains can be drawn when the proceedings are closed; its proximity to a kind of morbid theatre is hard to ignore. Jonathan Swift once wrote that three ‘engines’ had the power to hold an audience in rapt attention – the pulpit, the stage and the scaffold – and the Tribunal is an uncanny mix of all three of these.10 The details of the Rwanda Genocide are in some senses evidence of Ardrey’s theories about the violence at the heart of man, and evidence that is hard to answer. The Tribunal, however, also reminds one of the singular capacity of humans to reflect communally on past acts of violence and to seek for justice and redress after the immediate crisis has passed, a capacity which is of course central to the narrative construction of Shakespearean drama. Audiences of Shakespeare’s plays are, in some senses, juries in eternal preparation. The most striking thing about actual justice, however, is the deathly and untheatrical slowness of its proceeding. This is something I first learned working as a lawyer’s clerk during odd hours at university, but which is infinitely more stark in this circumstance: there are very few scenes of revelation and triumph, and the challenge is to hold the solid fact of the crime in mind as days, weeks, years pass, time spent painstakingly reconstructing the trivial and often banal activities which filled the time around the criminal act. One of the fantasies that theatre often enacts is of a world evacuated of these trivia, a world in which doin
gs stand bracingly clear of the tangle of circumstance, and judgement can be passed upon them with as much confidence as solving an equation.

  For all that there was universal shock when the end did come for the Ethiopian Emperor in 1974, it was nevertheless the case that the country was awash with stories of unseated kings in the years before, even if these stories could be passed off as homage to Shakespeare. The symbolic power of staging these narratives at the National Theatre was amplified by cinema screenings which reached a much wider audience. The British Council showed films that attracted viewers in their thousands, with Othello and Macbeth among the most popular titles. My favourite story is of a screening of the Russian director Grigori Kozintsev’s gorgeous and brooding 1964 Hamlet delighting crowds at Addis’s Cinema Adwa despite the reels being shown the wrong way around. While the anecdote was probably originally told as evidence that the audience were amusingly uncomprehending, I think the prospect of a back-to-front Hamlet (with Claudius and Gertrude’s deaths removed by officious censors) works rather well. In place of the well-known story of delayed revenge, we get the level-headed Hamlet of the last Acts dying in a duel at the mid-point, then living on through the first Acts as an increasingly frantic ghost at the Danish court, forever speaking to himself and unaware that he is one of the spectres he alone can see, haunting Ophelia to an early grave and finally expelled from the court on a ship bound for England. Hamlet’s observations on ‘The undiscovered country from whose bourn / No traveller returns’ – which always had been confusing anyway, given that he has just been hearing from a ghost who has returned – take on a fresh and rich irony when the play is reconfigured in this way.

  When the end did come, though, the efforts of the students and artists at the vanguard of protests against the Emperor did not win them any special recognition or protection. Instead, the Soviet-funded Derg military regime turned on the Ethiopian intelligentsia, branding them as bastions of bourgeois privilege and enemies of the Revolution. Many student activists were simply executed, including as many as a thousand during a single weekend after a protest on May Day 1977; the rest, those many of my father’s classmates who did not have an escape route, were sent out to provincial villages to instruct the masses, provided with a narrowly defined syllabus for re-education in the foundations of socialism that doubtless did nothing to endear them to communities where they were regarded as aliens and as spies. A lucky few, like my hostess Yerusalem, found a new life in the United States and elsewhere, forming a diaspora that are only slowly renewing their links. The university was closed, as were the presses. A withdrawal of aid from the United States in reaction to reported human rights abuses drove the Derg council into the arms of the Soviet Union, whose warm welcome caused the immediate defection of Somalia to US protection. Statues of Pushkin and Lenin came to replace Shakespeare as representatives of European culture.