From the Folger Shakespeare Library, this is Shakespeare Unlimited.

I'm Michael Whitmore, the Folgers Director.

This podcast is called, I Speak of Africa.

When the British came to colonize the African continent in the middle of the 1800s,

they brought many staples of Victorian England along with them,

including rigid class hierarchies, boarding schools, the Anglican

Church, and Shakespeare.

These various impositions were taken up by Native Africans with varying levels of emotion,

shaping life in Anglophone Africa in ways the British might have imagined would last forever.

They didn't.

And as we will hear, after the British left power, it was

often Shakespeare who leaders in African countries summoned to push back against the colonial

experience, using his words to promote unity, elevate native languages, and critique the politics

of the time. In this podcast, host Barbara Bogave talks with Jane Plasto,

Professor of African Theater at the University of Leeds.

They're joined in their conversation by the voices of writers and scholars

from throughout Britain's former African colonies

who help put the continent's long engagement with Shakespeare into perspective.

Let's start in the present-day Shakespeare scene in Africa with one important African writer

who we interviewed for this podcast and who contributed a fascinating chapter in a book that you

edited about Shakespeare in Africa. Femi O'Shaffeson is his name.

Now, we're going to play some comments from him in a bit.

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