To quote Shakespeare used to be a mark of proper education

I had never read William Shakespeare when I joined high school. Although I had been a member of the Kenya National Library Services in Kisumu, which was well-stocked with books from all over the world, I had read a number of novels in the African Writers Series but not any book by Shakespeare.

And so I became one of the many schoolboys who admired a classmate who apparently could easily quote Shakespeare. The line he liked most was: a teacher must be above reproach, like Caeser’s wife! Many of us had no idea what this meant. To later find out that the phrase didn’t really belong to Shakespeare was a lesson we lived with beyond school.

But we got to know more about Shakespeare later when he arrived at a crescendo! There was Romeo and Juliet. There was love in the classroom. Love from us Romeos in Kisumu Boys’ High School and the Juliets that the fence separating our schools couldn’t permit us to pine for till after school.

Didn’t we cite Shakespeare! We now knew where “being above reproach like Caeser’s wife” came from and its importance. We strutted around citing Shakespeare, performing our ‘education’; showing how different we were from fellow pupils in lower classes; writing class compositions on love, family feuds, sacrifice etc; composing letters to girlfriends in pompous English picked from here and there in the pages of Romeo and Juliet.

That difference that we tried so hard to be, that showing off about our schooling, I discovered after school, wasn’t peculiar to us. Shakespeare, I found out, was a friend to many other school leavers, the working, school dropouts, the old and young; all these people could quote or misquote Shakespeare. What mattered is that they quoted Shakespeare. It didn’t matter the context, the reason or the end result of quoting Shakespeare, it was often necessary that Shakespeare be quoted.

In many instances – a meeting of friends, in a Church, at a public political rally, in a bar etc – you would hear phrases like ‘much ado about nothing’; ‘as you like it’; ‘[the] comedy of errors’; ‘all’s well that ends well’; ‘measure for measure.’ These are phrases that many people today use without having to acknowledge the weight of learning Shakespeare at school.

It is a generation thing. But if you were to attend a court in Kenya, you will be regaled by the lawyers’ efforts – especially the older ones – to quote Shakespeare.

The famous SM Otieno case that pitted the lawyers Richard Otieno Kwach against John Khaminwa is remembered for the extent to which Shakespeare was ‘present’ in the courtroom.

Atieno Odhiambo and David Cohen, in their book Burying S. M. Otieno: The Politics of Knowledge & the Sociology of Power in Africa say this of how Shakespeare was/is used in Kenya, “The recitation and citation of Shakespeare in bars, clubs, and meetings in Kenya, and at home, connotes achievement, status, separation from the masses, and it does so without the complex implications, dire risks, and responsibilities entailed in quoting from the literature of on political economy, political science and sociology.”

These lawyers had read and reread Shakespeare at school and home and deployed his words as tools to disarm, charm or even socially harm others. By recalling the words of Shakespeare in the courtroom, they were saying, ‘I am of the world; especially the English world.”

This obsession with things English is a very Kenyan thing among the former colonial dominions of Britain. Of nearly all former British colonial subjects, Kenyans work so hard at acquiring the ‘Queens English’ (God bless her on her 90th birthday) that some completely lose any Kenyan ‘accent.’ What appears as a show on how to pronounce English correctly on one of the local television stations would make people indignant elsewhere or it would be taken as a highfalutin comedy (of errors)! Mainstream Kenyan theatre and several high schools still produce impressive performances of Shakespearean plays; often will all those hard to fathom English words.

But that is Kenya and English, and much of that English is best acquired through dear old William Shakespeare. A Kenyan child who studies for IGCSE will most likely quote Shakespeare before knowing a single memorable line from Ngugi wa Thiong’o (or any one of those Achebe proverbs much-loved by Africans who have read one book by an African author).

Shakespeare is a major author to be read on many university and college curriculum in Kenya and the rest of English speaking Africa and is often, together with Charles Dickens, the default authors for European literature courses.

In other words, if you could quote Shakespeare and Dickens, you are as good as any Englishman!

Julius Kambarage Nyerere popularized Shakespeare in Tanzania and Kiswahili speaking world with his translations of plays such as Merchants of Venice (Mabepari wa Venisi); Julius Caesar (Julius Kaisari), thus Africanizing some of Shakespeare’s works.

In fact these translations also explain why the two plays are among Shakespeare’s best known dramas in Eastern Africa. Would one be right to say that there is much ado about nothing out there in the state of Kenya; what with all these merchants loaning themselves other people’s money whilst knowing they won’t pay back a cent; whilst in the palaces of East Africa, the senators, advisors, hangers-on, jesters, racketeers and idlers lie to the kings about peace, love, unity, promise, hope and prosperity.

Let’s steal from Shakespeare, ‘does something smell in the state of Kenya?’ Shakespeare lives on, 400 years since his death.

The writer teaches literature at the University of Nairobi. [email protected]