ABSTRACT
Africa is a continent of fifty-four nations, more than five thousand languages, and an equally myriad set of histories and cultures. Any one article can therefore obviously only encompass limited perspectives. My writing here focuses on sub-Saharan Africa, which is the region I have been associated with for more than three decades, and it will not consider Shakespeare in relation to South Africa, both because the large number of Anglophone settlers in that country make it anomalous in relation to the rest of Africa and because existing scholarship on Shakespeare and South Africa far exceeds that from all the rest of the continent. 1 My central contention in this chapter is that, though Shakespeare was imported to Africa alongside British colonialism, and has in many times and places on the continent been an important site/sight of cultural contention, for most young Africans today his work is seen as a historical irrelevance. In seeking to explain why this is the case – and why it has not always been – I will focus on four aspects of the African encounter with Shakespeare, all of which are significant because they are relevant to a number of nations, playwrights, and directors and because they point to how Shakespeare in Africa has been not just a cultural icon but a site of political struggle. This chapter will therefore look at the British colonial use of Shakespeare; translations of Shakespeare plays in to African languages for nationalistic purposes by African writers; the adaptation and tradaptation of Shakespeare’s stories to critique colonialism and post-colonial African governments and raise issues relating to social malaise; and finally, the continuing neo-colonial imposition and manipulation of Shakespeare by white people in relation to Africa. My analysis forms part of a “cultural materialist” tradition in that it “champions counter-hegemonic appropriations of Shakespeare and (ab)uses of Shakespeare in the service of dominant power” (Lanier 2014: 24).
