Read the book: «Shakespeare in Swahililand: Adventures with the Ever-Living Poet»

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

PRELUDE – Beauty out of Place

1 THE LAKE REGIONS – Shakespeare and the Explorers

2 ZANZIBAR – Shakespeare and the Slaveboy Printworks

3 INTERLUDE: THE SWAHILI COAST – Player-Kings of Eastern Africa

4 MOMBASA – Shakespeare, Bard of the Railroad

5 NAIROBI – Expats, Emigrés and Exile

6 KAMPALA – Shakespeare at School, at War and in Prison

7 DAR ES SALAAM – Shakespeare in Power

8 ADDIS ABABA – Shakespeare and the Lion of Judah

9 PANAFRICA – Shakespeare in the Cold War

10 JUBA – Shakespeare, Civil War and Reconstruction

APPENDIX – A Partial List of Theatrical Performances

Picture Section

A Note on Sources and Further Reading

Acknowledgements

References

Index

About the Publisher

PRELUDE

Beauty out of Place

Once on a visit to Luxor in southern Egypt I was stopped by a man who called out to me from where he sat, crumpled in the shade of an August afternoon, with a famous line from Shakespeare’s Macbeth: ‘Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow …’. It was the summer at the end of my first year of reading English at university, and though it was uncomfortable to stand in the throbbing heat swapping iambic pentameters, I was sure I was more than a match for this stranger with his long white kanzu shirt and papyrus mat. I responded with the next line, and he in turn; and, after that speech, we migrated on to others, though now I cannot remember which ones, and would almost certainly exaggerate my recitational prowess if I were to try to recall them. After a few minutes, we fell silent. I, at least, was probably out of breath (and lines) in the thick desert air, and panting like a lizard; I had no Arabic other than swearwords I learned at school, and if the man did have conversational English he showed no inclination to use it. We grinned at each other and I moved on, in search of another sweating glass of fresh iced lemon juice.

Odd as it seemed at the time, I am now very glad that I did not break the spell by drawing the encounter out. For although later I sometimes thought about what this moment might have been – an act of cultural comradeship or a defiant exhibition of superiority over the presumptuous tourist – it has more recently occurred to me that its poignancy was in part owed to its being out of place and unaccounted for. Shakespeare may have distantly heard of Luxor – though he would have known it as Thebes, from the ancient Greek romance Aethiopica which was popular in his day – but it is unlikely that he imagined lines written for performance in Shoreditch or Southwark would ever end up being spoken there, close by the feluccas sailing on the Nile and the acres of pharaonic ruins beyond. The poignancy was, I suppose, the experience of one’s own culture as something exotic, like Tarzan finding a relic of the jungle in an English country house. The fact that I was so unprepared for this, however, seems to be in retrospect the most remarkable thing. After all, I had been brought up in Kenya, and had lived my life in a jumble of African places filled with things from elsewhere. These had, of course, included Shakespeare, though it seems to me now that I had always managed to keep his plays separate from the place in which I lived. It was as if his words, wherever spoken, were a foreign soil, like an embassy.

Many years later – now settled and teaching Shakespeare’s works for a living – I happened upon the unexpected fact that one of the first books printed in Swahili was a Shakespearean one. Not a play, mind you, but a slim volume of stories from Charles and Mary Lamb’s Tales from Shakespeare, published as Hadithi za Kiingereza (‘English Tales’) on the island of Zanzibar in the 1860s. Once again I felt that odd stirring of a beauty out of place. I began a small research project into this volume, its translator (the Missionary Bishop of Zanzibar Edward Steere), and the fascinating milieu in which he printed his books, with the help of former slave boys off the African coast. What I discovered during the momentous travels that followed, through Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda, Ethiopia and Sudan, was a hidden history that brought both Shakespeare and the land I thought familiar into richer focus than I had ever known them.

In part this was the story we already know of Africa – of the explorers who staggered through the interior of the continent, and the various eccentrics who developed a hothouse version of English culture as they tried to rebuild the Sceptered Isle on the African savannah – but made fresh by the disarming strangeness of the real experiences lived by well-known figures, figures whose stories are often reduced to cartoonishly simple fantasies of the ‘Dark Continent’ or of Happy Valley. But it was also a story of Africa less often told: a story of Indian settler communities coming to a land every bit as strange as that braved by white travellers; of African intellectuals and rebels in fledgling towns that grew up in the early twentieth century; of the private lives of the first African leaders of independent nations, and the Cold War intrigues that shaped the region at the end of the last century. Uncannily, what united all of these figures was their fascination with the British culture which was transplanted, like some exotic seedling, with the successive waves of settlers. More than anything else, this meant that they read, performed and idolized Shakespeare, who represented the pinnacle of that British culture. Though there were other challengers for Shakespeare’s cultural pre-eminence – amusing episodes in which Tennyson, Burns and Chekhov raised their heads above the ramparts – none of them came close to unseating his place in East African life.

It was unimaginable that literary culture – let alone a single writer – should have assumed such importance in the politics and history of Europe or America at the time. Even the extraordinary story with which this book concerns itself might seem at first to be a series of coincidences, if the sequence of events didn’t seem to take on an unstoppable momentum of its own. In uncovering the details of these lives and events two things became clear to me. I saw a new story of the land in which I grew up, an account which helped capture its history and its character not by focusing on matters of high government far removed from most people’s lives, or describing the wilderness whilst ignoring the people and the towns, but instead by looking steadily at those moments when the many Africas I knew met: the bush and the tribal dwellings, yes, but also the towns and their neighbourhoods of bantu peoples and Indians and Europeans. The stories I came across when following Shakespeare through East Africa were not neat accounts of the progress of history, but rather stirring resurrections of how that history must have felt to the people who lived through it. These stories also promised access to something else, something close to the Holy Grail of Shakespeare studies: an understanding of Shakespeare’s universal appeal.

That Shakespeare is venerated throughout the world is not open for question – the Globe theatre in London, after all, staged each of Shakespeare’s thirty-seven plays in a different language as part of the 2012 Cultural Olympiad, and most of the countries from which the performers came already had long and rich traditions of reading and performing the works.1 But we have become less confident than we once were as to why this should be the case. In the nineteenth century the answer would have been easy: Shakespeare’s genius gave him access to a transcendent, semi-divine reservoir of beauty, a beauty which naturally appealed to all men because it was above petty distinctions between one culture and another, and safe from becoming outmoded with the passage of time. Looking back, however, it is clear that there was more than a hint of aggression in how Shakespeare’s universal appeal was asserted. It is, after all, as Kant points out, precisely in those matters of taste, so resistant to scientific demonstration, that we are most determined that others should agree with us; as W. H. Auden rather more wittily put it, ‘A person who dislikes … the music of Bellini or prefers his steak well-done, may, for all I know, possess some admirable quality but I do not wish ever to see him again.’2 In the twentieth century, a West chastened by reflecting on the atrocities of the Second World War and of colonialism – and former colonial subjects newly emboldened to speak – produced much less comfortable explanations for the global ascendancy of European culture and its totem Shakespeare: perhaps this ‘love’ of Shakespeare in exotic places was really just a pretence, a desire to curry favour with the British ruling class, who left their Shakespeare-worshipping public schools to administer an Empire which covered much of the globe? Perhaps even the colonial masters’ love of Shakespeare was not something they came to naturally, but something drilled into them at public schools because it served the purpose of that ruling class to assert that the world’s greatest mind was a white British man? Hard as it is to argue against this explanation (especially as a white man of British descent), it is less than wholly satisfying for all who have read Shakespeare with little feeling that they are being forced into it or trying to coerce others, and rather belittling for all those who aren’t white and male and British, whose passion for Shakespeare was in danger of being written off as mere craven pandering to the overlord. My experience of teaching Shakespeare has been that he, almost alone among writers, defies such cynicism: whenever the time rolls around again to lead a fresh batch of students through the works, I wonder whether the reverence in which he is held might be some grand collective delusion, a truism rather than a truth. But, every time, the dawning freshness of a turn of phrase, a short exchange or an orchestrated speech makes dull the cleverness which wrote these impressions off as nostalgic. So what is it, then, that makes the writings of this obscure glover’s son from a Warwickshire village retain their power wherever they go, and even when they are taken out of the tongue in which he wrote them and the stage for which he designed them? Do Shakespeare’s plays point the way beyond the jostling for power and prestige towards a shared humanity?

This book is the story of an attempt to answer these questions. In service of that attempt, it is also a travelogue and a cultural history of ‘Swahililand’, by which I mean those countries (Kenya, Tanzania and Uganda, as well as parts of Congo, Malawi and Sudan) into which the Swahili tongue was introduced by Arab traders and European missionaries and where it later became a pan-East African language of sorts.3 The narrative sometimes has to leave Swahililand to fill in back stories or to follow stories out of Africa to their conclusions elsewhere, but it remains rooted in and dedicated to understanding eastern Africa.

It also became clear to me early on that any attempt to survey this landscape with an impersonal and objective eye would be not only dishonest but also doomed to failure. The questions I was asking were of so basic a nature, the story I was telling of transplanted culture was so close to my own, that I could not pretend that my answers were unaffected by my own past. As I thought through these questions, about why certain phrases and stories are significant and beautiful to us, and how this relates to where the words came from and where they ended up, I caught the memories of my childhood creeping into my peripheral vision. It seemed disingenuous to exclude them, to pretend that my conclusions were reached through cold logic rather than by the insuppressible return of moments from the past, and so occasionally in what follows I allow these things to well to the surface, to give some sense of the tangle of emotions from which my judgements proceed: a sense of fierce belonging to the places of my youth, but one now made difficult by an awareness of the wider story of which it was a part; a devotion and an atonement. It is, I suppose, no different from anyone else’s love affair with the past.

The story reaches a climax, if not quite an end, in 1989, after which Shakespeare’s prominence through most of East Africa abruptly evaporated, bringing this bizarre sequence of events to an even more mysterious close. I remember very clearly sitting that year on the floor of our kitchen in Nairobi, perplexed by my mother’s joy as the BBC World Service gave daily bulletins on the collapse of the Soviet Union. I’m not sure I fully understand even now the exhilaration of this historical moment for many who lived through it; it is very difficult to inhabit the passions of the past, even though (as in this book) we cannot kick the habit of trying.

I am certain, though, that I did not understand it then. It seemed not to fit in with the house surrounded by woodland at the edge of Nairobi, with its makeshift cricket pitch between the washing lines, besieged by monkeys who would steal fruit from the kitchen table. That was a world of animals great and small, eating and being eaten and trying to stay clear of unruly children’s traps. It did not seem to fit in with the life of the city either, where people queued endlessly on broken pavement to watch films like Moonwalker and Coming to America, which the main cinema played continuously and exclusively in that year and the next. But even if I had understood the Cold War and what its end meant to those who had lived through it, it would not have explained to me why, during the devastating withdrawal of billions of dollars of aid money meant to keep African countries from defecting to Soviet allegiance, the President of Kenya spent part of his summer defending the greatness of Shakespeare as a writer. It would not have made any sense of the fact that a new English-speaking country would appear on the upper reaches of the Nile in part through a young boy soldier’s love for Shakespeare, and nor would it have solved the dozen other literary mysteries that I later came across during my travels through Africa and through the archives. For that I would have to start long before the Cold War, and to understand something not just of the high politics and the many societies that make up Swahililand, but also of how beauty works in the world, how, in the words of Shakespeare’s Joan of Arc,

Glory is like a circle in the water,

Which never ceaseth to enlarge itself

Till by broad spreading, it disperse to naught.

1 Henry VI (I.ii.133–5)

For this, I began by looking at first contacts between the British and East Africa, and the strange story of how Shakespeare became an indispensable bit of safari kit in the nineteenth century.

1
THE LAKE REGIONS

Shakespeare and the Explorers

… they take the flow o’th’ Nile

By certain scales i’th’ pyramid. They know

By th’ height, the lowness, or the mean if dearth

Or foison follow. The higher Nilus swells,

The more it promises; as it ebbs, the seedsman

Upon the slime and ooze scatters his grain,

And shortly comes to harvest.

Antony and Cleopatra (II.vii.17–23)

Although the world was beginning to open up during Shakespeare’s lifetime, with Jesuit missions to the Far East and growing settlements in the Americas, he lived in an age in which the Mediterranean still merited its name as ‘the middle sea’, the place in the centre of the world. Around this great inland sea all places of importance were arranged – notably excluding the backwater island which Shakespeare never left – and through it man’s greatest voyages had taken place. The classical geographer Pliny, still a respected authority in the Renaissance, declared that while men of the south were born burnt by the sun, and those of the north had frosty complexions, the blended climate of the middle lands made for fertile soils and minds. Only there, he contends, do the people have proper governments, while ‘the outermost people … have never obeyed the central people, for they are detached and solitary, in keeping with the savagery of Nature that oppresses them’.1 About half Shakespeare’s plays are set in his native Islands; the rest, with the important exception of that strange beast Hamlet, arrange themselves around the Med. Its waters were so thick with history and myth that Odysseus’ ten-year cruise from Asia Minor to the Greek Islands remained the archetypal sea voyage even long after Shakespeare’s contemporaries had circumnavigated the globe through far more treacherous waters. And into this central body of water flowed the most famous and strangest of rivers, the Nile.

Every year, at the end of summer, the waters of the Nile rose above its banks and flooded the plains of northern Egypt, a potent symbol of the unexplained and irresistible force of nature. ‘My grief’, says Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus at the sight of his raped and mutilated daughter Lavinia, ‘was at the height before thou cam’st / And now like Nilus it disdaineth bounds’ (III.i.70–71). The destructive power of the Nile, however, was matched by its near-magical fertility. As the annual flood subsided, the river left behind water and silt rich enough for agriculture to flourish in the middle of a desert land. The power of the Nile mud to make things grow was held in such high regard that naturalists from ancient Greece to Renaissance Europe believed it capable of spontaneously generating animal life, though (as was fitting for a river whose source lay deep in an unknown continent) the ‘fire / That quickens Nilus’ slime’ (Antony and Cleopatra, I.iii.67–9) could only produce monstrous serpents and crocodiles.

By the middle of the nineteenth century, much of the mythical aura had evaporated from the Nilotic delta. If the British biologist Thomas Huxley would soon suggest that all life did ultimately have its beginnings in the primordial slime, few believed any longer in life regularly emerging from the inanimate. Egypt had been invaded by Napoleon and had then fallen (as he had) under the growing British sphere of influence; its ancient artefacts were fast becoming familiar exotics in the museums of Europe. (By the end of the century, Sigmund Freud would plumb the middle-class European mind from a consulting room bursting with Egyptiana, including a mummy’s mask that he liked to stroke.) The Egyptian floodplains had been given over to the industrial-scale production of cotton and fledgling tourism was starting to be seen in Cairo and on the river. Much of the continent from which the Nile flowed, however, was still completely unexplored, and the undiscovered source of the great river remained a tantalizing symbol of the stubborn resistance of parts of the world to the increasingly bullish European powers. Sir Roderick Murchison, the President of the Royal Geographical Society, blended the languages of intellectual and financial speculation when he declared (in his presidential address of 1852) that there was ‘no exploration in Africa to which greater value would be attached’ than establishing the source of the Nile, and that the men who achieved it would be ‘justly considered among the greatest benefactors of this age of geographical science’.2

Though Vasco da Gama had pioneered the sea route to India around the Cape of Good Hope as early as the 1490s, European travel into the interior had not greatly progressed by 1800, and settlement was very thin and almost entirely restricted to the coast. Africa had, for a long time, been an extremely unattractive prospect to the white traveller: its landscape, its illnesses, and the extremes of its climate were death both to the unwitting European traveller and to the pack animals on which he was wholly reliant; and even if the central African environment had not proven quite so resistant, the interior of the continent offered few obvious prizes to adventurers, apparently having none of the great mercantile empires of the East Indies, nor the bottomless mines and rolling grasslands of the Americas. That Africa became suddenly and immensely attractive to Europeans and Americans in the mid-nineteenth century was the result of a number of factors which were closely related. The Industrial Revolution had both created new markets and reaped great wealth from them. Industrial philanthropy paid in large measure for the scientific and evangelical expeditions that made their way into Africa, and these expeditions saw the lack of ‘civilization’ in the continent as an opportunity rather than a deterrent. Africa would provide both souls for religious instruction and challenges to be overcome by the unstoppable leviathan of Western Knowledge. In the event, and not unpredictably, the altruism of these philanthropists was lucrative beyond imagining. Despite the fact that these ventures were thought of by contemporaries as foolishly benign, often being criticized for throwing good money after bad, they nevertheless produced raw materials which made new fortunes. Rubber, harvested from trees in the central African forest, was transformed by the discovery of vulcanization into an indispensable commodity; eastern Africa was found to be perfect for cultivating sisal (for rope fibre) and pyrethrum (for industrial pesticides). And if at the beginning of the century European governments were largely indifferent – even hostile – to the idea of colonies in Africa, by the end they were convinced of the vital strategic importance of not letting anyone else get there first. For Britain, the Nile would form the backbone of a British Africa which stretched from Egypt through Sudan to East Africa and Nyasaland, then down through Rhodesia to the Cape.3

East Africa, filled in with largely fanciful detail, on the 1564 Gastaldi map. (From the American Geographical Society Library, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee Libraries)

Henry Morton Stanley pictured consulting one such existing map on a cartographic expedition. (© Corbis)

The expedition which finally succeeded in locating the source of the Nile left the coast of modern-day Tanzania in 1857 and was led by Captain Richard Francis Burton. Burton was not yet forty, but he was already the Victorian traveller par excellence; most notably, he had undertaken the pilgrimage to Mecca – the Hajj – with a shaven head and in disguise, and his account of the feat had made him celebrated for both his daring and his phenomenal linguistic skills.4 In later life Burton would lead further expeditions throughout Africa and the Americas, while also finding time to translate the Arabian Nights and the Kama Sutra as well as writing learned treatises on Etruscan history, medieval literature and fencing. Even a bibliophile like Burton, however, could not afford to take much reading with him when heading into the African interior. The tsetse fly reliably killed off horses and pack-mules before they were a hundred miles inland, and the brigades of native porters also dwindled with terrifying speed as the journeys progressed. Some of them deserted early on while the coast was still in reach, undeterred by the loss of pay and the threat of execution by the expedition leader as he (often hysterical with fever and fear) struggled desperately to hold on to the remainder of his men. The rest of the native contingent was decimated by disease, starvation and punitive raids from the tribes whose land they were crossing. Available porterage was reserved, then, for ammunition, medicine and materials for trade with the locals, primarily American calico (called merikani) and copper wire, which was sold en route to tribes who wore it decoratively.

Burton did, however, find a little space for one or two volumes:

The few books – Shakespeare, Euclid – which composed my scanty library, we read together again and again …5

The volume of Shakespeare Burton took with him is lost, most likely destroyed in a warehouse fire which burned many of his possessions in 1861. (His edition of the Sonnets, which does survive in the Huntington Library in California, amusingly contains pencil corrections to Shakespeare’s lines where Burton felt he could do better.6) But the extensive quotation from the works in the expeditionary account he published on his return suggests how intimately he knew them and how constantly he read them on that expedition. The Lake Regions of Central Africa was, like most of these narratives, written at great speed on the steamer voyage home in order to avoid being beaten to the punch by competing accounts from fellow expedition members, and Burton seems to have followed his (also lost) expedition diary closely in writing it, taking the Shakespeare-heavy description of the interior direct from the diary pages where he reflected on each day’s events and reading.*

The competing account of the expedition, in this instance, was to come from the other European who accompanied him, John Hanning Speke, with whom Burton read Shakespeare intensively and repeatedly as the pair crossed the savannah scrubland. Their pages were undoubtedly marked, as mine were as I read my own Complete Works travelling through East Africa in their tracks, by sweat from the daytime and at night by winged insects drawn to the lamplight and trapped between the pages as they turned. There would have been periods, especially when their travel on foot was impeded by heavy rains which turned the dry land to bog, when reading would have been a welcome distraction from the frustrations of enforced indolence. It was important for expedition leaders to be close – they were, after all, heavily dependent on one another during long periods of malarial delirium – and their reading of Shakespeare seems to have been a central part of this: they read (as Burton says) ‘together’, and the way Burton quotes odd lines suggests this meant reading plays side by side and not simply passing the book back and forth to declaim famous speeches.

As the mention of Shakespeare alongside Euclid’s geometrical treatise (the Elements) suggests, however, Burton had no room for books which were not useful as well as beautiful, and Shakespeare’s lines are repeatedly called into service in The Lake Regions to provide English equivalents to local phrases and customs. In one instance, a Kinyamwezi saying (‘he sits in hut hatching egg’) is ‘their proverbial phrase to express one more eloquent – “Home keeping youths have ever homely wits”’.7 The line is taken from The Two Gentlemen of Verona, a not entirely successful comedy about friendship and betrayal that is thought to be one of Shakespeare’s earliest works. The frequency with which this play crops up in Burton’s Lake Regions is rather surprising, given how minor a work it is usually thought to be. This might be explained in part by the fact that it was printed as the second play after The Tempest in Shakespeare’s First Folio of 1623 and in almost every edition after that until the twentieth century; one is tempted to think that the Two Gentlemen was the beneficiary of many determined attempts to read the Works from cover to cover that foundered in the early pages.

Shakespeare’s story of the noble Valentine betrayed by his treacherous friend Proteus seems, however, to have struck a deeper chord after the friendship turned sour, in large part because Speke had the unforgivable good fortune to discover the major source of the Nile – which he named Lake Victoria Nyanza – on a side expedition of his own. Burton may well in that moment have recalled Valentine’s raw words at the betrayal of Proteus:

I must never trust thee more,

But count the world a stranger for thy sake!

The private wound is deepest. […]

(V.iv.70–72)