Williams Dissertation

UC Berkeley UC Berkeley Electronic Theses and Dissertations Title Don't Show A Hyena How Well You Can Bite: Performance, Race and the Animal Subaltern in Eastern Africa Permalink https://escholarship.org/uc/item/0jf3488f Author Williams, Joshua Publication Date 2017 Peer reviewed|Thesis/dissertation eScholarship.org Powered by the California Digital Library University of California Don’t Show A Hyena How Well You Can Bite: Performance, Race and the Animal Subaltern in Eastern Africa by Joshua Drew Montgomery Williams A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Performance Studies and the Designated Emphasis in Critical Theory in the Graduate Division of the University of California, Berkeley Committee in charge: Professor Catherine Cole, Chair Professor Donna Jones Professor Samera Esmeir Professor Brandi Wilkins Catanese Spring 2017 Abstract Don’t Show A Hyena How Well You Can Bite: Performance, Race and the Animal Subaltern in Eastern Africa by Joshua Drew Montgomery Williams Doctor of Philosophy in Performance Studies Designated Emphasis in Critical Theory University of California, Berkeley Professor Catherine Cole, Chair This dissertation explores the mutual imbrication of race and animality in Kenyan and Tanzanian politics and performance from the 1910s through to the 1990s. It is a cultural history of the non- human under conditions of colonial governmentality and its afterlives. I argue that animal bodies, both actual and figural, were central to the cultural and political project of British colonialism in Africa – and in particular eastern Africa, which continues to be imagined in many circles as both “safari country” and the “cradle of humankind.” I build on extensive archival research to suggest that artistic and scientific activity in colonial Kenya, from the amateur and professional theatre to the natural-historical research conducted at the Coryndon Memorial Museum, helped to define a category of sub-political being that I call “the animal subaltern.” The animal subaltern is a concatenation of all forms of animal life lived below the horizon of “the human.” During the colonial period, this included the wildlife of eastern Africa, the pre-human hominids whose fossilized remains paleoanthropologists like Louis Leakey unearthed, and “natives,” whose political subjectivity the colonial state was determined to suppress. I argue that the forced contiguity of these variously inflected forms of life had a pervasive, if uneven, racializing effect: all of these beings became black. In the post- Second World War struggle for political, cultural and economic independence in eastern Africa, members of the animal subaltern contested their exclusion from the category of the human. I read the work of the Kenyan writer and intellectual Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o and the Tanzanian playwright Ebrahim Hussein as important interventions into this unfolding struggle and its implications for the postcolonial future of their communities. Finally, I consider the environmental activism of Kenya’s “Rhino Man,” Michael Werikhe, whose performative blurring of the distinction between human and animal in the 1980s and 1990s helped to inaugurate a new model of interspecies solidarity that continues to play itself out to this day. 1 TABLE OF CONTENTS List of Figures ii Acknowledgements iii Introduction 1 1. New Domestications: Staging an Animal England in Colonial Kenya 20 2. An Empire of the Lifelike Dead: Staging the Animal Subaltern 40 in the Coryndon Memorial Museum 3. Killing Themselves in Order to Live: Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o’s Animals 59 and the Becoming-Human of Black Resistance 4. Everybody and Everything Had Sprouted Feathers: Animal Monstrosity 83 in the Plays of Ebrahim Hussein 5. No Rest Until the Cause is Won: Parahumanity, the Rhino Man 106 and the Politics of Personhood Epilogue 125 Bibliography 130 i LIST OF FIGURES Fig. 1 Annabel Maule and Pyewacket (1953) 24 Fig. 2 Cast List for Aladdin (1955) 28 Fig. 3 Claribelle the Cow in Jack and the Beanstalk (1955-1956) 36 Fig. 4 Rabbits in Babes in the Woods (1956-1957) 37 Fig. 5 “Uganda Railway” Cartoon (c. 1900) 47 Fig. 6 Klipspringer at the Coryndon Memorial Museum (1956) 51 Fig. 7 Lions at the Coryndon Memorial Museum (c. 1955) 52 Fig. 8 “The New Safari” Cartoon (1953) 65 Fig. 9 “Tribalism” Election Poster (c. 1965) 104 Fig. 10 Caltex Oil Fundraising Advertisement for the Rhino Man (1991) 109 Fig. 11 Michael Werikhe with Snake (1990) 114 ii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Any individual is plural. Recent research has found that slightly more than half the cells in the human body at any time are bacterial1 – which is to say in some important sense non-human. And yet these tiny fellow travelers are in us and of us – which is to say in some other, equally important sense human after all. Broadening the scope of inquiry even slightly reveals millions of organisms traveling in our wake, an astonishing network of care that extends outward from the Demodex mites that scrub dead skin from our eyelashes to the many non-human mammals we have known and loved and eaten and worn. And then of course there are those who share with us the vexed category of human being, without whom we would not exist, without whom nothing we do would be possible. I have been privileged to have an extraordinary network behind me throughout the process of writing this dissertation. Very little of this work belongs to me alone, except perhaps the typos. Regrettably, much of the labor that sustained me was anonymous or otherwise invisible to me; I can only express my gratitude in the most general of terms. There are, however, some members of my endlessly plural community that I can name and to whom I can offer particular thanks. First and foremost, I must thank my chair, Catherine Cole, who guided this dissertation from before the beginning to after the end, and who has helped me in profound ways to understand what it means to do the work we do. I am exceedingly grateful for her patience, forbearance, generosity, curiosity and endlessly helpful advice. This dissertation would have been impossible without her. I also want to thank the other members of my extraordinary committee – Brandi Wilkins Catanese, Donna Jones and Samera Esmeir – for their faith in this project and for the combination of intellectual rigor, political conviction and personal warmth they model for their students. The Department of Theater, Dance and Performance Studies at U.C. Berkeley provided a home for this research even when I thought I was doing something quite different. I am so grateful for the support of the faculty and staff, who inspired me in countless everyday ways and did their best to ensure that I submitted more or less the right forms at more or less the right time. Grants and fellowships from the Townsend Center for the Humanities, the Center for African Studies, the Institute of International Studies, the Program in Critical Theory and the Hellman Fellows Fund enabled me to conduct the research that led to this dissertation and provided me with generous interlocutors for my ideas along the way. I am also fortunate to have had the opportunity to teach some of Berkeley’s phenomenal undergraduates, who challenged me to think more clearly and more politically at every turn. Luckily for me, my teaching career took me to Harvard University in the last year of writing this dissertation, where I found another batch of colleagues and students to inspire me anew. My field research in Eastern and Southern Africa was sustained by friends, colleagues and mentors at the University of Nairobi, the University of Dar es Salaam, the Kenyan National 1 Ron Sender, Shai Fuchs, and Ron Milo, “Revised Estimates for the Number of Human and Bacteria Cells in the Body,” PLoS Biology 14, no. 8 (August 19, 2016). iii Archives, the Archives Section of the National Museums of Kenya, the Nakuru Players Theatre, the Mombasa Little Theatre, Oxford University Press East Africa, the University of the Witwatersrand, the University of Cape Town and the Johannesburg Workshop in Theory and Criticism. I would like to acknowledge in particular Immelda Kithuka and Geoffrey Iruri at the National Museums of Kenya, for the easy access they afforded me to their rich collections; S.G. Kiama at the Wangari Maathai Institute for Peace and Environmental Studies at the University of Nairobi, for his enthusiasm for and support of my research; Fleur Ng’weno, for our spirited conversations and for the loan of her Werikhe materials; and Collins Dennis Oduor at the Players Theatre, for his friendship and for knowing where all the old playbills are stashed. I would also like to thank Jay Taneja and Emily Kumpel, for helping me make a home in Nairobi. On my last few visits to Kenya, I felt the loss of Deno Kimambo very keenly; he is deeply missed. I would not study the things I study were it not for Mahiri Mwita, Ebrahim Hussein and Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o. Mahiri Mwita’s influence on my life – as Swahili teacher, as mentor, as editor, as tour guide, as beer recommender, as friend – is frankly incalculable. Before too long, an entire generation of U.S. East Africanists will owe their start in the field to him. Ebrahim Hussein and Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, towering figures in the history of African literature and performance though they are, have been more generous with their time and more open to my ideas than I had any right to expect them to be. Their work is a model of the courage it requires to take a stand as an artist and intellectual; I continue to do my best to make myself worthy of their example and the faith they have placed in me.

Load more