Not Quite the Gabbling of "A Thing Most Brutish": Caliban's Kiswahili in Aime Cesaire's A Tempest

In the foreword to his 1962 novel Uhuru, Robert Ruark goes to great lengths to contextualize his largely unfamiliar title for Western readers. He claims it was "the one word most frequently heard in East Africa" in the early 1960s, and that it meant, "roughly, 'freedom,' and [that it was] used and abused according to personal inclination" (v). The ambitious novel depicts the disintegration of British control over colonial Kenya through the personal disintegration of Brian Dermott, a Hemingwayesque white hunter whose life of relative ease is threatened by the momentum of Kenya's pending independence, or, Uhuru. Dermott is haunted by memories of hunting—specifically, of hunting Mau Mau freedom fighters whose resistance throughout much of the 1950s contributed greatly to Kenya's independence in 1963—and as Uhuru looms, Dermott faces the realization that his Kenya is vanishing. Dermott and his colleagues do not believe in the Africans' ability to preserve what the British (believe they) have built, and there are few expectations that a sovereign African country will be able to effectively determine its own development. Ruark's Uhuru, then, suggests ambivalence regarding Kenya's imminent independence: While there is anxiety and a sense of pending loss for men such as Brian Dermott and for the weakening British colonial empire, there is an implicit hope and a sense of expectation among the inhabitants of this emerging African nation-state. The title of this former Book-of-the-Month Club selection also adds to the exotic, African-adventure motif created through Ruark's descriptions of lands, beasts, and natives. In choosing the Kiswahili word Uhuru for his title, Ruark anticipates an emerging symbolic currency in both the word itself and the Kiswahili language in general.¹ Certainly Kiswahili had begun appearing in Western texts prior to Ruark's novel, but in Uhuru we sense something deeper, something more substantial than fleeting references.² We can sense anxiety in the titular presence of the word, and in the context of 1950s revolutionary fervor throughout the African Diaspora, Uhuru threatened to demolish the common representation of the childlike, faithful, and loyal African.

Uhuru, then, is as much a concept as it is a word, and even though Ruark focused on the threat implied by Uhuru, other writers came to believe in the far-reaching symbolic power of the word and even viewed the use of Kiswahili as an Uhuru in itself. That is to say, during the often-tumultuous independence and Black Power movements throughout the African Diaspora during the 1960s and 1970s, the use of Kiswahili among non-native writers and speakers expanded and came to serve as a symbolic resistance to the presumed supremacy of the European cultures and languages.³ In this essay, I intend to analyze the specific use of Kiswahili in Aimé Césaire's A Tempest, and I will argue that at the center of Césaire's revision of Shakespeare's The Tempest is a single word—Uhuru.⁴ Postcolonial critics have had much to say about the various revisions and analyses of Caliban, and I want to add to this dialogue by focusing particular attention on his opening line. Uhuru is essential to Césaire's revisionary project because it gives Caliban a voice, specifically an African voice, and it contributes to Césaire's overall project in creating a diasporic textual counter to Shakespeare.⁵ In brief, Césaire Africanizes Caliban, and crucial to the overall effectiveness of this rhetorical strategy are both Uhuru and Kiswahili. Césaire was one of many writers using Kiswahili for its symbolic power during the 1960s and 1970s, and even if Kiswahili did not quite become an active lingua franca through their literary texts, it did achieve an increasing currency as, perhaps, the "authentic African language." Césaire's revision of Shakespeare offers a particularly apt model...