Shakespeare.za: digital Shakespeares and education in South Africa

ABSTRACT

This article considers the opportunities presented by – and the obstacles preventing – the adoption of online resources in teaching Shakespeare in South Africa. Taking into account Shakespeare's controversial place in South African education, it addresses the widely differing contexts in which Shakespeare might be encountered in the country's classrooms. The author discusses his own experience of digital platforms in teaching Shakespeare to undergraduate university students and in developing the website Shakespeare ZA (http://shakespeare.org.za/), reflecting on the mutually informing relationship between digital engagements with Shakespeare-in-performance, multilingualism, reading practice and ‘literacies’ more broadly construed.

KEYWORDS:

• Shakespeare
• South Africa
• education
• digital
• literacy

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 Regarding the controversy over pit latrines, see Qukula (2018). Member of the Executive Council (MEC) for Education in Gauteng Province, Panyaza Lesufi, launched a R17 billion (US$1.2 billion) digital classroom campaign in 2015, declaring: ‘We are officially burying the chalk board … Gone are the days when [learners] have to write in exercise books and hand in the assignment’ (Quoted in Mhaka 2016, n.p.). Critics have argued that the distribution of tablets is no panacea, especially in the absence of adequate teacher training (see Alfreds 2015). Other pilot programmes, such as Information and Communications Technology for Rural Education Development (ICT4Red), have demonstrated that it is possible to overcome the digital divide. The Equal Education movement has pointed out, however, that expenditure on digital technology is ‘not necessarily the best direction of funds’:

If conditions for learning and teaching were better, if there were flushing toilets across the province, if schools had reliable electricity and sources of water, all of those things could lead to learners wanting to come to school more and a more conducive learning and teaching environment. (Quoted in Wild 2015, n.p.)

2 The Bantu Education Act of 1953 (later renamed the Black Education Act) made clear the apartheid government's strategy to disempower black South Africans by preventing them from receiving a decent education.

3 The Shakespeare Schools Festival South Africa (SSF-SA) was piloted in 2009 and launched in 2010, based on the model of the erstwhile Shakespeare Schools Festival in the UK. Learners perform thirty-minute condensed versions of Shakespeare's plays. See www.ssfsa.co.za

4 In a new departure for the National Children's Theatre, productions of Coriolanus (2016, directed by Rohan Quince and Nicola Pilkington) and Antony and Cleopatra (2018, directed by Neka da Costa), co-produced by the NCT and Renos Nicos Spanoudes, travelled to schools across South Africa.

5 Ironically, some iterations of Bantu Education resulted in the teaching of Shakespeare's plays in translation – John Kani, for instance, likes to tell the story of how as a schoolboy in the 1950s he thought B.B. Mdledle's version of Julius Caesar in isiXhosa was the original.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Chris Thurman

Chris Thurman is Associate Professor and Head of the English Department at the University of the Witwatersrand. He is also a columnist for Business Day. He is the editor of South African Essays on ‘Universal’ Shakespeare (2014) and the journal Shakespeare in Southern Africa. Thurman is president of the Shakespeare Society of Southern Africa.