ABSTRACT
This chapter looks at the British colonial use of William Shakespeare; translations of Shakespeare plays in to African languages for nationalistic purposes by African writers; the adaptation and tradaptation of Shakespeare’s stories to critique colonialism and post-colonial African governments and raise issues relating to social malaise. Shakespeare arrived in British colonial Africa in the early twentieth century, along with the government education system. In his memoir, pre-eminent Nigerian novelist Chinua Achebe describes life in the 1940s in one of the elite government boarding schools set up across the British colonies to create a cadre of young Africans who would be thoroughly inculcated with imperial values and culture. The Globe to Globe Festival was by no means unique in the contemporary period in continuing the old tradition of invoking Shakespeare for projects of cultural supremacy in relation to Africa.
