62 SHAKESPEARE IN SOUTHERN AFRICA 

EPPEL, JOHN. Absent: The English Teacher. Johannesburg: Jacana, 2009. 

Reviewed by GERALD GAYLARD



Two Jam Doughnuts and a Soft Tomato 

Obsolescence and anachronism, perhaps unsurprisingly, have been prominent in Southern

African fiction of late, or perhaps just in Southern African fiction by white males. Most

famously apparent in Coetzee’s Disgrace and Vladislavic’s The Restless Supermarket, this

theme deals with the detritus of empire in the form of white males (David Lurie and Aubrey

Tearle) who find themselves redundant and retired, respectively, in the context of the new South

Africa‚  after 1994, and have to begin to scrape together some sort of new life. Much of the

drama and amusement, again respectively, comes from both characters being not much up to the

challenge. In both cases they are somewhat set in their ways and full of the assumptions and easy judgements that a lifetime cosseted within the safety net of apartheid’s sheltered employment allowed. Both rail against the plenitude of errors and injustices that accompany the inversion of the racial hierarchy that leaves them high and dry, and find themselves unable (and perhaps more importantly, unwilling) to overcome their ingrained prejudices and values. Moreover, both protagonists find their resources limited and both are thrown back on a level of basic skill that they have utterly forgotten about for many decades. However, the fact that both novels have been well-received – the former winning the Booker Prize in 1999 and the latter the Sunday Times Fiction Prize in 2002 – and have become mainstays of post-apartheid literary culture and education, suggests that the more things change the more they stay the same; in other words, decades, even centuries, of preeminence cannot just be swept away.

Now Zimbabwe has produced its own version of this ‘novel of obsolescence’‚ in the form of

John Eppel’s  Absent: The English Teacher which, similarly to Disgrace and The Restless

Supermarket, features a white male protagonist, George J. George, who struggles with his

seeming irrelevance in Mugabe’s Zimbabwe. As a member of a minority in this apparently

majority dispensation he is marooned, adrift, a seeming anachronism in a world that has no use

for him.

As in the other novels mentioned, this novel is at least partly autobiographical. Eppel was

born South African but raised in Zimbabwe and remains there as an English teacher at Christian

Brothers College in Bulawayo. However, like the South African texts, this novella is probably

best described as an ‘oblique self portrait’ (the way that the front cover blurb describes

Vladislavic’s  Portrait With Keys). The interesting thing about this novel is that this oblique

autobiography of time and anachronism is explicitly figured through literature, Shakespeare in

particular, and the teaching thereof. The fear  – nay, inevitability – of anachronism is apparent

from the poetic and metaphoric start; the first sentence runs thus: ‘When George J. George

mistook his white Ford Escort for the moon, he knew that his time was up”  (1). This makes it a

little different to Disgrace and The Restless Supermarket, which are not explicitly focused on the literary, although Disgrace references Romanticism in a subtle manner and The Restless

Supermarket has editing as its protagonist’s focus. Part of this literariness‚ is simply because

both Eppel and his protagonist are English teachers and a good deal of the action takes place in

the classroom or involves conversation about literature.

Expelled for allowing a student to erect a copper plaque of Ian Smith on his classroom wall

when the ‘Boys and Girls Come Out to Play Secondary School’ is visited by the ‘Deputy

Secretary for Education and Rural Beauty Pageants’, George is later arrested for crashing into

the ‘Wabenzi’  of the mistress of the ‘Minister of Child Welfare, Sweets and Biscuits’.

Imprisoned  – the chapter is titled ‘A Weekend in Elsinore’ (13) – George is able to secure a

release via the expedient of coaching the Chief Inspector with his Hamlet essay. Their

conversation runs thus:

CHIEF INSPECTOR: ... You see I have this assignment to do for the Open University, and

I have to submit it by Monday. I need your help ... It’s an essay

entitled, ‘The First and Last Words of Hamlet’, and I don’t know how

to begin it let alone end it!

...

GEORGE: Hamlet, as you know, plays many parts, but his chief role is that of

clown ... He is Shakespeare’s study of the young man; Antony is his study of the middle-aged man; Lear is his study of the old man ...

Hamlet’s first words are an aside, only the audience hears him. A little more than the word ‘kin’‚ is the word ‘kind’‚ – one letter more; a  little less than the word ‘kind’‚ is the word ‘kin’‚ – one letter less.

CHIEF INSPECTOR: Not so fast!

GEORGE: [With growing excitement] Sorry, but notice how close both words are, visually and aurally, to ‘king’.

CHIEF INSPECTOR: ‘The play’s the thing’.

GEORGE: Yes, and Zimbabwe’s a prison. (19-20)



Thus the novella suggests that Shakespeare, and by extension perhaps even George himself, is

not completely redundant and obsolete, primarily because of the education system. If nothing

else, colonial education has passed on English and its historical literature. Rather hilariously, the

Chief Inspector regards Shakespeare as a much better writer than Ngugi when he comes to write

another essay on A Grain of Wheat (101), though George does not agree with this assessment. Of course, Eppel suggests that literature is still relevant in more profound ways than just this

colonial heritage. The suggestion is that literature’s relevance also continues because of its

psychological and archetypal insight. Furthermore, because human kingdoms and regimes come

and go, and because literature as the art of plotting narrative over time is keenly aware of this, it

can provide poignant lessons for the future; Hamlet is relevant to the youth of Zimbabwe

because it speaks to their feelings of disenfranchisement and debates what they might do about

those feelings. Eppel’s thesis about Shakespeare’s work is encapsulated in George’s theory that

Hamlet ‘is Shakespeare’s study of the young man; Antony is his study of the middle-aged man;

Lear is his study of the old man’. This thesis advances an analysis of masculinity during periods

of regime change, suggesting that those who are unable to redefine their gender and sense of self  during periods of flux are likely to perpetrate disasters – a thesis with obvious relevance to

Zimbabwe, which has been ruled with crass machismo.

My sense is that this support for literature is not simply idle Bardolatry. Eppel obviously feels

strongly about literature, Shakespeare in particular, close reading and the importance thereof.

Yet his advancing of his cause is humorous to the point of self-deprecation and beyond. At no

stage do we feel lectured to as readers because the gentleness, the gentility, of this humanist-like

argument is always surrounded by the force of crude historical and contextual forces that run

roughshod over it. In other words, Eppel appears to have little confidence in the humanistic and

humane; perhaps this is a realistic view, particularly in a tyrannical context.

So, for all of his new critical erudition in conducting humanist and forensic deconstructions of

Shakespeare’s language, George is still on the tragic downward trajectory towards disgrace and

uselessness that so characterises David Lurie. Beauticious Nyamayakanuna, mistress of the

minister who gives her ‘expensive new cars in exchange for hanky-panky’  (27), settles out of

court with the smasher of her Mercedes: ‘George got to keep what was left of his Ford,

Beauticious ... got everything else including George‚s labour – for the rest of his life’ (28).

George then begins his piquant experience of being a servant for the new black petit bourgeois in what was formerly his own house. Moved from the house into the servant’s quarters, Beauticious ‘would pay him the minimum wage and supply him with 5 kilograms of mealie meal per month, and five leaves of spinach or rape per day, depending on availability’ (29). Worse, her Minister boyfriend would lecture him on his demeanour: ‘There’s nothing worse than a sullen servant’ (115). If there is any redemption at all in this spiral of demotion it is in the grace and humour with which George accepts his new position, a remarkable equanimity in the face of adversity that may well be Zimbabweans‚ greatest attribute – though it might also be said to have a major downside in a peculiar form of political quietism.

Moreover, more practically, George looks after an abandoned baby girl he names Polly,

literally a Bethlehem-like waif, a victim of the baby dumping all too tragically common in

Zimbabwe. He resolves to take this girl to the mission on what was his grandparents’  farm,

which is also her family’s point of origin, hoping that there she will be looked after and get an

education. He manages to succeed with this mission, escaping his domestic servitude, but dying

in the process. The ending is disconcertingly brusque:

The ruin was surrounded by whispering grass. He managed to climb over the low stone wall into what remained of the enclosure where his grandmother had been born, and there he died. George had done his duty. (145)

This novella may reference Daniel Carney’s Rhodesian ‘skiet en donner’‚  The Whispering Death and is indeed a whispering (in)version of Doris Lessing’s classic The Grass is Singing, in the sense that it involves a white man who is a servant to a black woman. George rejects this

emasculating fate, rejects Zimbabwe. Climbing over the ‘low stone wall’  which is a reference to

Zimbabwe (‘House of Stone’ in Karanga Shona), perhaps also Great Zimbabwe or the

‘Zimbabwe ruins’, George returns to his grandmother’s place of birth to die. Is it too much of a

stretch to argue that the name George is a synecdoche for the British crown, and hence to

associate his return to his ancestral roots with the British empire crumbling and eventually

coming full circle? Perhaps, but if it is too much of a stretch, then it is a reaching out that the

book endorses via all of its close reading. In the wheel of this circular return, George’s duty is

ironically not a national one but the rescuing of an innocent, presumably representing hope for

the future. In other words, Eppel – and this is characteristic of Zimbabwe today – rejects

nationalism because it is too associated with imperialism of all sorts. Rejecting ideologies,

George helps someone he personally knows. Literature, Shakespeare in particular, helps give

him the courage to take this oppositional path against hegemonic nationalist ideology. To put the same point differently, literature has both practical as well as individual (psychological,

affective) utility in Eppel’s estimation.

If any further proof of this ongoing relevance of the Bard and his work, as suggested by

Eppel, is required, then one need only note that George Charamba, permanent secretary at the

Ministry of Information in Mugabe’s government and writer of many vitriolic denunciations of

those who are apparently unpatriotic to the national cause (the ZANU PF cause), did an MA on

Dickens at the University of Zimbabwe. His party political vituperations for ZANU PF have

tended to be littered with quotes from Shakespeare and Dickens, alongside other writers in the

canon of English literature. Eppel’s ‘novel of obsolescence’ is surely part of a major recent trope in southern African literature; its distinctive contribution, which might be thought of as uniquely Zimbabwean, is to have brought a wild Dionysian courage, humour and humanity to this trope. That this contribution is uniquely Zimbabwean is apparent in the Weimar absurdity that George’s ‘pension payout, after forty years of full-time service, bought him two jam doughnuts and a soft tomato’  (28).