Lobola, Intombi and the Soft-Porn Centaur: Teaching King Lear in the Post-Apartheid South African Classroom

This essay centres on my recent experience of teaching Shakespeare’s King Lear in a final-year undergraduate course on Renaissance Literature at Rhodes University, South Africa. I focus on what I consider to be the most important challenge in teaching the literature of the early modern period: facilitating my students’ critical thinking about the connections between culture, politics, gender and representation, not only in relation to one text, but towards their understanding of the global impact of early modern European cultures. One possible approach, I suggest, is to highlight for students how the early modern period, and a text as controversial as King Lear, might be assessed in terms of their own complex cultural heritage as young South Africans. My deliberately provocative title, translated from the IsiXhosa, reads ‘The Bride Price, the Virgin, and the Soft-Porn Centaur’. As I will demonstrate, my title’s mixture of languages and allusions, in its appeal to both the local and the global, seeks to convey something of the heterogeneity of South Africa’s sociocultural environment.