The Big Read: Histrionics don't help history

30 March 2017 - 09:53 By Jonathan Jansen
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SHADES OF MEANING: John Kani as Othello was 'the native who caused all the trouble' with his apartheid-era interracial kiss
SHADES OF MEANING: John Kani as Othello was 'the native who caused all the trouble' with his apartheid-era interracial kiss
Image: BBC WS/VIMEO

After playing the lead in Janet Suzman's courageous 1987 production of Othello, John Kani playfully anticipated the response of white South Africa: "There goes the native causing more trouble and this time he has Shakespeare to do it for him."

The laws banning interracial intimacy had hardly been overturned. However, social mores extracted a heavy cost on those who loved across the colour line. It was not surprising, therefore, that when Othello the Moor passionately kissed Desdemona (Joanna Weinberg), white South Africans would walk out on Shakespeare's play in a huff.

Suzman was of course publicly challenging the state's obsession with policing racial intimacy.

I thought of the passions of the Bard when a newspaper reported this week that the minister of basic education was considering a curriculum review with decolonisation in mind. In response to a question in parliament, she is quoted as saying that "the consideration of the works of Shakespeare is an aspect of the overall literature review process targeted for 2020 and thus concrete work on this shall only begin in 2018".

Targeted? Now this is political speak - the wording is vacuous and timelines sufficiently stretched that populist statements of this kind escape the scrutiny of accountability.

In fact the spokesman for the department hastily responded on my Twitter account that the minister did not say Shakespeare was on his way out and that I should not believe everything printed in the newspapers.

The linking of decolonisation and the works of Shakespeare is nothing new and will continue to be raised in times of social crises. When you cannot solve the hard problems of economic inequality, the curriculum is fair game. When you wish to deflect from corruption in the state, the content of teaching and learning is sure to inflame passions. And when you cannot transform the quality of education in schools occupied by the majority, slamming a 16th-century playwright is good populist politics.

At one level, hitting on Shakespeare is ridiculous. Simply add on to and enrich the public school curriculum with the great works of African novelists, poets and artists. What stops you as the government in charge?

Where are the great works of academic scholarship and artistic endeavour by South Africans in the past decade? Bring those productions to the table and make them part of the curriculum.

But this is politics - it is not enough to broaden the repertoire of literature taught and learnt in schools; it is equally important to ridicule and tear down supposed enemy knowledge: in this case, the timeless works of William Shakespeare.

Nothing exposes our miseducation as much as to think of Shakespeare as simply an alternative prescribed work. His works are staggering in their scope, effect and endurance across the English-speaking world. The Bard's messages are universal, having to do with human nature, human passions and human failings. Those themes speak across time and space, teaching us about language, culture and politics down the ages.

By insisting on the refrain of decolonisation as "the evil West and the rest of us", it is easy to forget how anachronistic the language of an early post-colonial period is today. Here you find an intellectual laziness clothed in political opportunism that transposes the rhetoric of anti-colonial struggle holus-bolus into contemporary society.

More than ever before, our knowledge is enmeshed through research partnerships and curriculum exchange. There is no imperial power imposing colonial knowledge on witless and powerless natives.

Nowhere is this simple fact more evident that in the global leadership role of black South African scholars in the health sciences - from breakthrough cardiogenetics research at the University of Cape Town to path-finding Aids research at the University of KwaZulu-Natal.

Think also of the great African archaeological discoveries made regularly at Wits University, or the new historiographies of Southern African mining industries led by the University of the Free State.

Those researchers work in collaboration and competition with their peers in the Western world and together solve pressing human problems. None of these and many other African achievements in our universities ever come up in the drumbeat of decolonisation.

Janet Suzman's adaptation of Othello during the anti-apartheid struggle shows precisely how our literature is entangled and appropriated - and why Albert Memmi's erstwhile binaries of "the coloniser and the colonised" completely misses the ways in which knowledge itself is being transformed inside our institutions - in dialogue and exchange with an interconnected world.

We need to stop fighting with yesterday.

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