Thread by @wmnjoya

This semester I'm teaching Shakespeare and the experience is enlightening, but also disturbing.

The most obvious issue is why I would be teaching Shakespeare in 2022 in Kenya. But changing is a choice between going through the bureaucracy of the education ministry and my sanity.

It's kinda obvious that sanity prevails.

But choosing sanity comes at a price. I have to research on how it doesn't make sense to teach Shakespeare, and how he is still in the syllabus.

So I found this piece by a Zimbabwean student Jordan Mubako. publicseminar.org/2019/06/learni…

Mubako says that "we strive for Shakespeare — are made to strive — because his place in our curricula leads us to believe deep down that his world is better than ours." In Kenyan parlance, it means we love English culture more than our own.

But it's more complicated than that.

It's not simply about loving a culture. In the minds of Kenyan educated people, and especially bureaucrats, they don't see England. They see global. Benchmarking. Quality. That's what Mutahi Kagwe calls forcing nurses to learn English to seek jobs abroad.

https://twitter.com/MOH_Kenya/status/1488499774206750721?s=20&t=ojUyTjrQqSh1sxg8h_t5_Q

So after I settled on that, I had to explain the historical context of Shakespeare. I started with the European renaissance.

I have studied the Renaissance in passing, but the experience I have had over the years made me pay more attention.

England has issues.

England is a johnny-come-lately on the European cultural landscape. It was a woman, Elizabeth 1, who provided the political stability for innovations in arts and science in continental Europe to inspire creations on the Isles.

England has a latent inferiority complex in relation to its neighbors across the channel. That reminded me of Brexit. But I digress.
I was intrigued to know that Elizabeth was the daughter of the infamous Henry 8 who beheaded some of his wives in his desperation for a male heir.

Despite all his efforts, Henry 8 was not only succeeded by a woman but she accomplished more than several men before her.

The story of the reformation and the church of England is also quite juicy. But that's another digression.

So back to the Renaissance.

The Renaissance was the rebirth of Roman imperial culture. The emerging influential families like the Medicis started exploring the remnant archives of the Roman empire that had collapsed 1000 years earlier. The European elite resurrected imperialism.

What I didn't know until now is that the medieval period is called the dark ages because it was the time when Europe had no empire. It was between the collapse of the Roman empire and it's renaissance.

That's kinda disturbing. It means Europe's identity is based on imperialism.

It's quite difficult to get access to the local non-imperial European cultures that were crushed by the monarchy and the church. Of course there's the witch burnings which the church used to kill indigenous European knowledges which women were custodians of.

A few months ago, I was following up on Irish culture to understand how the Irish have fought against English colonialism for centuries now. They have managed to protect their culture from English colonialism. It would be interesting to have more discussions on Ireland.

But back to the Roman empire.

The Roman empire has this strange thing that always shocks me: extremism. Roman imperial history is full of stories of war, men fighting to the death or falling on their sword in the name of principle and honor.

So if Renaissance was reviving Roman imperialism, it kinda explains why Shakespeare's tragedies have death, fights, people killing themselves and each other for love and empire.

I no longer see the art in that, just like I dont see faith in the blood baths of the Old Testament.

As I'm writing this, I thinking that maybe the comedies which have fairies, fantasies and magic are probably Shakespeare echoing indigenous cultures of the isles which the Renaissance probably overshadowed and even crushed. I'll look it up.

This isn't a rant against Shakespeare. It's a look into the questions which Shakespeare, AND teaching Shakespeare raises for us. The instinct of insecure Kenyans to defend Shakespeare without understanding my point is revealing about the colonial problem of education in Kenya.

Educated Kenyans instinctively know that they go to school not for the freedom that comes from knowledge, but because they fear missing out of this colonial economy. That fear makes them insecure and instinctively want to guard a colonial relic that just isn't working.

So far, the bottom line for me is that there's a difference between European cultures (note the plural) and European imperialism.

A few months ago, I wrote an article saying that Europeans will probably have to go to their fairies, druids and bards and find themselves if they want to get out of this imperial nightmare. They feel attacked by the global South because they don't have a culture of their own.

Since the Renaissance, the church and science have crushed indigenous European knowledges, so now they have no identity other than to be superior to black and brown peoples.

Even ordinary Europeans need to divorce themselves the European elite and return to their roots.
(END)