“Tongo is a prison” – Revisiting Hamile: The Tongo Hamlet

Abstract

In 1964, the Ghana Film Industry Corporation (GFIC) produced an adaptation of Shakespeare’s Hamlet with staff and students from the  University of Ghana’s School of Music and Drama. Transposed to the far north of Ghana, Hamile: The Tongo Hamlet is described in the  film’s opening sequence as a straight adaptation with very little alteration: “The text is unaltered, except where it would not make sense  in a Frafra community, or where an archaic word obscures the meaning.” In this article, however, we explore how the repositioning of  Hamlet to Ghana’s Northern Region speaks to a brief window of radical postcolonial politics and culture. 1964 was also the year in which  Kwame Nkrumah, Ghana’s first president, declared a one-party state and himself president for life before his government was toppled in  a coup d’état in 1966. We argue not only that Hamile can be read as a profound reinterpretation of Shakespeare’s text but also that, given  the political context, the combination of the iconography of northern Ghana together with the ambition of Ghana’s nascent  creative institutions captures the highpoint of Nkrumah’s cultural policy. Indeed, the significance of the examination of this largely  forgotten film lies both in our positioning of it as a clear example of decolonial practice and in its own denial of radical adaptation.