/ 17 July 2007

The role of Shakespeare in Africa

South Africa, Shakespeare and post-colonial culture

by Natasha Distiller

(The Edwin Mellen Press)

About halfway through this book, I was still wondering why Natasha Distiller had felt the need to write it when — out of left field, so to speak (actually right field) — there arrived in my inbox a press release that provided at least one possible answer. Noting, accurately, that the relevance of Shakespeare in the South African educational curriculum ”often raises questions from various sectors”, the release posed, rather less accurately but still pertinently, one such question: ”Why should Shakespeare be recommended as a national setwork year in and year out, when we have internationally renowned works from African writers like Chinua Achebe and Wole Soyinka?”

Apparently no ”internationally renowned works” by any South African writer occurred to whoever penned this release. This is a blind spot that incidentally illustrates a point made by all the radical theorists Distiller surveys and assesses, namely that the worshipful obeisance to ”the international” — more usually Europe and North America, admittedly, than Nigeria — that is characteristic of the colonial mindset invariably involves an implicit denigration and even outright occlusion of the local.

Getting closer to a running concern of Distiller’s is the question’s bald assumption that curricula must decide to include either Shakespeare or Achebe/Soyinka. Why not both? Or why not neither? This has a bearing on one of Distiller’s most challenging questions in relation to studying Shakespeare: Why should we go to the trouble of doing so at all? The bite in her query — to which I’ll return — is that it is prompted not by conservative approaches to Shakespeare but by the explicitly political and progressive projects of radical critics who, like Distiller herself, reject approaches to the plays that promote passive acceptance of oppressive, hierarchical structures of power and politics, race and class, gender and sexuality.

As it happened, the press release turned out to be announcing the publication of new editions of Shakespeare’s plays aimed at schools. The professor of English heading this venture justified it in this way: ”Instead of trying to ‘Africanise’ Shakespeare, we encourage learners to be inspired, by their enjoyment of Shakespeare, to read works by African writers that raise similar issues or develop similar situations. This gives the text currency and links it to contemporary African issues, which schoolchildren can relate to and engage with.”

Wondering which features of Shakespeare’s texts the professor is hoping schoolchildren will enjoyably relate to and engage with — regicide, incest, civil war, a propensity to speak in iambic pentameters — led me to the thought that to unpack all the problems in merely those two professorial sentences would take something very like Distiller’s 260page study.

Most notably, perhaps, this justification for new school editions of Shakespeare — which are just about the last thing I should have thought most South African schoolchildren need right now — leaves Shakespeare comfortably ensconced very much where he was before all those uncouth radicals began their assaults on the citadel of High Culture several decades ago.

After all, how — ludicrously — does that formulation assume that African children will be led to read African writers? Well, they’ll be ”inspired” to do so ”by their enjoyment of Shakespeare”. This is the colonialist mindset par excellence: to get to the colonial periphery, whether literally or imaginatively, you have to go via the imperial or metropolitan centre — even, apparently, if you’re already on the periphery. And what you’ll find there will no doubt be informed by and subordinated to the centre.

Yet ”what have we Africans to do with this?”, as Ingrid de Kok asks in her poem Merchants in Venice. In one of many moments of brilliance, Distiller chooses this poem as a kind of preface to her book: what we in Africa have to do with Shakespeare and the kinds of literary, cultural and theoretical work his plays have generated — in South Africa and elsewhere — is her central subject.

”The main business of this book is to theorise and illustrate the working of culture in a situation of socio-political inequality,” she says in her opening sentence, and she quickly identifies where she is coming from: ”The post-colonial condition and vocabulary may indeed be a product of international capitalism, but this does not render its every move worthless. The political tradition informing my work is clear in what I call the ‘radical’ Shakespearean scholarship of cultural materialism, which is my point of departure …”

This is admirably, and courageously, explicit: except in the radical work with which she (partly) aligns herself, it is not at all common for literary critics to expose their ideological underwear.

But this strength in Distiller’s book is arguably one of its problems, too. The misgiving I expressed at the beginning of this review arose from the sheer familiarity of the terrain she covers. The first two chapters especially evoke this response: all the huge subjects suggested by the title of the book get surveyed here — from post-colonial to culture, from hybridity to essentialism, from liberalism to humanism and, of course, thereby to liberal humanism.

All this is done with enviable deftness, learning, subtlety and nuance, but it does seem like reinventing the wheel to argue, say, that liberal humanism has both political limitations as well as oppositional potential. Or, to change metaphors, since Distiller says early on that the radical scholarship that informs these chapters is her ”point of departure”, these parts of the book feel rather like an overloaded cargo plane trying to find the right runway from which to take off.

The press release discussed earlier might well prove me wrong, though: if such depressingly reactionary stuff is still possible in South Africa in 2007 — that is, still seemingly impervious after about 40 years to the sort of scholarship Distiller draws on — then perhaps she’s right to hammer away at the same targets.

But one result is that, when the book gets to how various South African writers, such as Sol Plaatje, Es’kia Mphahlele, Peter Abrahams and many others, engaged with Shakespeare, her conclusions still feel familiar. In particular (and to put her frequently subtle points too crudely) we know that many of these writers found in Shakespeare resources of liberation and strength — ways of resisting the oppressions of apartheid or colonialism, in other words.

Distiller uses such platforms to argue that South African radical critics (especially Martin Orkin and David Johnson), in showing and denouncing how Shakespeare in the academy and in schools has been put to quite different and thoroughly conservative ends, tie themselves into theoretical knots because they have imported foreign theory into the South African context in their attempts to prise Shakespeare away from the local Englit zealots, and have done so without sufficient attention to the local.

I don’t think that does adequate justice to the historical rigour of either scholar’s work. And I would have thought, too, that one of the most brilliant sections of Distiller’s book demonstrates how right (and how pioneering) one aspect of Orkin’s and Johnson’s work is. Her deeply depressing account of how South African schoolteachers and learners view Shakespeare amply supports her conclusion that radical work from the academy has simply not permeated anywhere close to schools, and that if some of the tritely moralistic lessons for which Shakespeare is apparently valued constitute the only reason for his being on the curriculum he should be jettisoned forthwith. But isn’t that what Orkin and Johnson have been saying for quite a while now?

Yes, I know Orkin in particular has also argued for his retention — but so does Distiller. Yet it surely doesn’t help her argument for a locally nuanced, politically engaged Shakespeare to wheel in Stanley Fish, as she suddenly does in her final chapter. She finds ”in some ways compelling” Fish’s criticism that literary criticism can never bring about political change. I wonder what she makes of Alan Sinfield’s riposte to Fish — that Fish condemns radical theory for failing to bring about the degrees of political change that even actual revolutions probably don’t manage.

In other words, I don’t think Distiller convincingly answers the question she uses to lash Orkin, Johnson and others — namely, why should we bother with Shakespeare at all?

I had a clear sense throughout the book of what Distiller is against, but by the end remained unclear about what she is for. In this respect, her book might well exemplify some of the key difficulties Shakespeare, literature and the humanities in general face in post-apartheid South Africa: Where are they headed, in short?