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)
In the first volley of a spat that was to continue for many years, Burton attempted in the Lake Regions to discredit Speke by rather ungenerously arguing that his discovery had been down to luck and not skill. In this he compares him not to The Two Gentlemen of Verona’s treacherous fair-weather friend Proteus, but (even more gallingly) to a maidservant in the play:
The fortunate discoverer’s conviction was strong; his reasons were weak – were of the category alluded to by the damsel Lucetta, when justifying her penchant in favour of the ‘lovely gentleman’ Sir Proteus:
I have no other but a woman’s reason.
I think him so because I think him so.8
The pettiness of Burton’s sentiment might almost distract us from the exquisite strangeness of the whole situation: that a man ravaged by physical hardship and fever, surrounded by danger in an inhospitable land, racked by wounded pride and doubtless the feeling that he was both betraying his friend and being betrayed by him, should reach angrily for lines written for Elizabethan Londoners several hundred years earlier.
During the months I spent preparing for my first research trip to East Africa, I made my way through dozens of expeditionary accounts by Burton and those who came after him, looking for the books that they took with them on these jaunts out into the unknown. Reading about Burton’s strong attachment to his Shakespeare, even when isolated in ways scarcely imaginable to modern minds, stirred my own memories of reading in remote places. I trace the beginning of my own true devotion to literature to a volume of Auden’s poetry given to me to read while in the Jiddat al-Harasis desert in Oman (though that properly belongs to another story). But the accounts of bush camps by Burton and others also cast new light on my own childhood, much of which was spent on safari in eastern Africa. I was born into a family of conservationists – my own literary work is something of an anomaly, and a confusing one for them – so I spent most school holidays with my parents in areas chosen for their remoteness. These were, of course, entirely less dangerous affairs than the Victorian expeditions: convoys of Land Rovers, tented camps often with generators and two-way radios, and usually no more than a few hours from something recognizable as a road. What had not changed, however, since the time of those early adventurers, was the curious blend of luxury and primitiveness which characterized these travels. Even in the days of Land Rovers food supplies sometimes ran low, and among my clearest childhood memories is a scene of Samburu warriors in northern Kenya bringing to our camp the goat for which my father had bargained, its square and staring eyes as it bled out into a lip in its throat. Nothing was wasted, down to a coin-purse from the scrotum, and the goat meat was later fire-roasted by a cook as the adults had cocktails at sundown.
This blend of the primitive and the decadent seemed unremarkable to me at the time – simply part of how things were done – and it was only later that I became aware that many in Europe and America escape into nature with the conscious design of depriving themselves of life’s comforts. An early twentieth-century traveller, the self-styled backwoodsman Theodore Roosevelt, complained repeatedly about the self-indulgence he encountered during his two-year hunting safari in Kenya, which he gave himself as a present on his retirement as US President in 1909:
At Kapiti plains our tents, our accommodation generally, seemed almost too comfortable for men who knew camp life only on the Great Plains, in the Rockies, and in the North Woods. My tent had a fly, which was to protect it from the great heat; there was a little rear extension in which I bathed – a hot bath, never a cold bath, is almost a tropic necessity; … Then, I had two tent-boys to see after my belongings, and to wait at table as well as in the tent. … The provisions were those usually included in an African hunting or exploring trip, save that, in memory of my days in the West, I included in each provision box a few cans of Boston baked beans, California peaches, and tomatoes.9
The fine living which so disappointed Roosevelt would come to seem rather tame in comparison to the hedonism of later settlers, who added the fashionable sins of narcotics and promiscuity to these gastronomic indulgences; but it was certainly not entirely new either. While the porters held out, Burton’s readings of Shakespeare would have been considerably enlivened by the bottle of port he insisted on drinking each day in the belief that it would stave off fever. Something of Burton’s belief remained in my youth in the settler habit of drinking endless gins and tonic purportedly for the quinine in the Indian tonic water. But even as the medical justifications fell away, it remained customary for some of the trappings of safari life to be, if anything, more luxurious than they would be at home, even if the good wine had to be drunk from tin mugs.
These habits of indulgence also extended to art. For Burton it was Shakespeare; for Denys Finch-Hatton, the hunter whose relationship with Baroness Blixen was made famous in her memoir Out of Africa, it was the Greek poets and a gramophone that supposedly fascinated the houseboys on Blixen’s farm:
It was a curious thing that Kamante should stick, in his preference, with much devotion to the Adagio of Beethoven’s Piano Concerto in C Major; the first time that he asked me for it he had some difficulty in describing it, so as to make clear to me which tune it was that he wanted.10
Roosevelt may have considered his expedition to be a pattern of self-denial – though many struggled to agree, given that he bagged thousands of trophies from 269 species, some from the cowcatcher of his own private train – but he had less stringent standards when it came to cultural cargo. For his two-year hunt he commissioned a fifty-five-volume ‘pigskin library’; this was a veritable ark of Western culture to be carried into the wilderness, though Roosevelt (in his characteristic disregard for the proprieties of polite society) brashly mixed the undisputed classics of the Western canon with lighter fare from soon-forgotten authors. When the selection of books for the library, which are now kept at Harvard, occasioned a public debate with Harvard’s then president, C. W. Eliot, on Roosevelt’s return, Roosevelt quickly conceded that much of the selection was merely a matter of personal taste. The inclusion of three volumes of Shakespeare, however, caused no controversy; as Roosevelt suggested, there were only ‘four books so pre-eminent – the Bible, Shakespeare, Homer, and Dante – that I suppose there would be a general consensus of opinion among the cultivated men of all nationalities in putting them foremost’.11 For Roosevelt, as for the guests on the long-running BBC radio show Desert Island Discs, the need for Shakespeare was taken for granted when links with civilization were broken.
A souvenir print showing Roosevelt on his African adventure. (Library of Congress LC-DIG-ppmsca-36551)
Despite the fact that the library weighed sixty pounds and that it required a porter all of its own, Roosevelt insisted (as Burton had) on the practical nature of the volumes:
They were for use, not ornament. I almost always had some volume with me, either in my saddle-bag or in the cartridge-bag which one of my gun-bearers carried to hold odds and ends. Often my reading would be done while resting under a tree at noon, perhaps beside the carcass of a beast I had killed, or else while waiting for camp to be pitched; and in either case it might be impossible to get water for washing. In consequence the books were stained with blood, sweat, gun oil, dust, and ashes; ordinary bindings either vanished or became loathsome, whereas pigskin merely grew to look as a well-used saddle-bag looks.12
There is a curious sense in Roosevelt’s African Game Trails that these refined products of European literary culture somehow belong among the ‘blood, sweat, gun oil, dust, and ashes’, that reading them in the most inhospitable climes demonstrated both that the works’ seeming delicacy was illusory, and that the reader’s poetic soul was immune to the lures of barbarism.
Shakespeare in Swahililand Page 2
