Shakespeare in Swahililand

by Edward Wilson-Lee

  As one quickly comes to realize in reading the accounts of explorers, naturalists, hunters and opportunists travelling the African wilderness, Roosevelt was following a tradition which had become firmly established between Burton’s time and his; the only unusual thing about the President’s actions was that he took so many books, whereas most travellers in the African interior publicly affirmed that they took Shakespeare as their only literary reading. Compiling an inventory of his own expeditionary supplies in 1886, Walter Montague Kerr protests at the meagreness of the baggage which accompanied him overland from South Africa to the Lakes, noting that his

  baggage … would have made a poor show beside the enormous stores carried by some expeditions to the interior of the dark continent … I also had some books – a small edition of Shakespeare, a Nautical Almanac, logarithmic tables, and Proctor’s Star Atlas.13

  Once again, a volume of Shakespeare is found nestled in among technical manuals, and after a while it does not seem out of place. It becomes, in effect, a cultural tool as necessary for survival as any of the cartographer’s manuals. Another traveller in the interior, Thomas Heazle Parke, writing from a sickbed just west of Albert Nyanza (in modern-day Congo), mentions that he is ‘filling up [his] time reading Shakespeare and Allingbone’s Quotations. The former, with the Bible, and Whittaker’s large edition, are the best books for Africa when transport is limited.’14 The printing of Shakespeare, like the Bible, in dense double columns on thin paper allowed for a great deal of powerful language to be squeezed into a small space. It is easy to forget, however, that Shakespeare’s works were made portable because they were thought to be indispensable, and not the other way around. Roosevelt captured this perfectly when he said that his three volumes of Shakespeare were ‘the literary equivalent of a soldier’s ration – “the largest amount of sustenance in the smallest possible space”’.15

  A riposte of sorts is delivered to this gung-ho world of expeditionary Shakespeares by one of the few female explorers to find a place in these overwhelmingly masculine ranks. Gertrude Emily Benham, who at the same time that Roosevelt was careening through East Africa on a private train was becoming the first woman to ascend Kilimanjaro (and who would later walk across the continent from east to west), similarly recorded the ‘few books’ that she took with her on this expedition and others: ‘Besides the Bible and a pocket Shakespeare, I have Lorna Doone and Kipling’s Kim.’ Unlike her male counterparts, however, Benham professed never to have carried firearms on her expeditions, nor to have shot any game; she traded her own knitting for local produce as she went, and testifies that she found all the locals she encountered pleasant and welcoming. Her Shakespeare, it bears mentioning, was not holstered in pig leather as Roosevelt’s was; the cloth covers of her own making, she says, were enough to keep them safe during her travels on every continent.16

  The nuances of these (male) travellers’ attachment to Shakespeare starts to become clearer in another passage where Parke, who served as medical officer on the celebrated Emin Pasha Relief Expedition of 1886–9, writes before setting out about how he came by the Works that he took with him:

  A former patient of mine presented me with a copy of Shakespeare, as a parting gift and remembrancer on my journey. I cordially appreciated the kind attention, and, now that I am about to penetrate the undiscovered country, from whose bourn so few white travellers have safely returned, I trust the perusal of the pages of the immortal dramatist will help me to while away many a weary hour.17

  Though Parke is clearly trying to be witty, he cannot prevent his anxiety about the expedition from showing through, and the passage is riddled with worries about mortality. Africa here becomes the underworld, which in Hamlet’s description is ‘that undiscovered country from whose bourn / No traveller returns’, and there is a sense in which the works, written by an ‘immortal dramatist’ and given as a talisman-like ‘remembrancer’, gives Parke hopes of returning from the underworld, like the Golden Bough which allowed Aeneas to visit his wife in Hades and return to the land of the living. This fear is captured succinctly in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, where the madness of the colonist-run-amok Mr Kurtz is attributed (in part) to his lack of books:

  How can you imagine what particular region of the first ages a man’s untrammelled feet may take him into by the way of solitude – utter solitude without a policeman – by the way of silence – utter silence, where no warning voice of kind neighbour can be heard whispering of public opinion? These little things make all the great difference. When they are gone you must fall back upon your own innate strength, upon your own capacity for faithfulness. Of course, you may be too much of a fool to go wrong – too dull even to know that you are being assaulted by the powers of darkness.18

  Kurtz’s famous final words – ‘The horror! The horror!’ – gesture to exactly what Shakespeare was supposed to conjure away: the chaos, depravity and existential nihilism that lay just at the doorstep of Victorian confidence.

  Parke may well have returned from his expedition with an even greater belief in Shakespearean magic than he had when he left, given that he survived relatively unscathed an expedition which shocked the world with revelations of barbarity unusual even for ventures of this type. The Emin Pasha Relief Expedition had departed in great fanfare to save a German national named Eduard Schnitzer, unremarkable before his life in Africa, who had set himself up as a petty king in the Sudan. Now named ‘Emin Pasha’, Schnitzer soon became embroiled in warfare with religious fanatics and ending up a hostage to his own subjects; he is the first upstart settler-king in this story, but he certainly will not be the last. The expedition quickly ran into trouble, however, and split into a vanguard scouting party (led by Henry Morton Stanley and Thomas Heazle Parke) and a rear column, in which the bulk of the Europeans remained with a small group of Zanzibari porters. Though they succeeded in building a makeshift fort, the rear column were constantly assailed by poison arrow attacks, and the maize they tried to grow was incessantly trampled over by elephants, reducing them to near-starvation only relieved by dire expedients including donkey tongues and grass. Their long wait inside their fort did, however, leave the rear column plenty of time for reading, and they had dutifully brought with them the Works, which by this point were almost issued as standard.* William G. Stairs, one of the Europeans in the rear column, dryly remarks in a diary entry on Monday, 29 October 1888, that ‘if we stay here much longer we shall all be great authorities on Shakespeare & Tennyson’.19 Though most of the Europeans did survive to tell the tale, the expedition became a scandal on its return to Europe, when it emerged that one of the officers in the rear column had beaten a man to death for the presumption of defending his wife from rape, and another had paid to watch a young girl being ritually eaten.

  Although not all of the exploratory expeditions were quite so despicable, those who read Shakespeare in the course of them were often drawn towards the darker reaches of the works. The Shakespearean magic that lies buried in Parke’s description comes out into the open in many of these stories, which multiplied as the tradition became established. Arthur H. Neumann, in his Elephant Hunting in East Equatorial Africa, recounts the following episode:

  Lesiat [his Ndorobo tracker] had for long been bothering me to give him a charm to increase his power in this pursuit [i.e. the hunting of elephants]. My assurances that I had no such occult powers merely made him the more importunate. He regarded my objections as a refusal to help him, and a proof of unfriendliness to him. When I was about to leave he became more pressing, promised to keep ivory for me against my return, as an acknowledgement, should I consent, and assumed a hurt air at what he regarded as my unkind obstinacy. Squareface interceded for him, explaining to me that the Swahili always accede to such requests, the most approved charm being a verse of the Koran, written in Arabic on a slip of paper. Not wishing to appear unfeeling, and seeing that no harm could come of it at all events, it occurred to me that a line or two of Shakespeare would probably be quite
as effective. Bearing in mind that the Ndorobo hunter owes his success – when he has any – mainly to the powerful poison with which his weapon is smeared, if he can only manage to introduce it, in the proper manner, into the animal’s economy, it struck me that the following quotation would be appropriate; and I accordingly wrote it on a slip of paper, illustrating it with a little sketch of an elephant:–

  I bought an unction of a mountebank

  So mortal that, but dip a knife in it,

  Where it draws blood no cataplasm so rare,

  Collected from all simples that have virtue

  Under the moon, can save the thing from death

  That is but scratched withal; I’ll touch my point

  With this contagion, that, if I gall him slightly,

  It may be death.20

  Neumann never mentions that he had a volume of Shakespeare with him, and though he gives the impression that he is able to pluck the perfect quotation from Hamlet out of thin air, it seems more likely that he had the works on hand for consultation than that he had these lines, which are rather unmemorable as far as Hamlet goes, by heart. Neumann is, like Parke, trying to be wittily xenophobic: the suggestion that ‘a line or two of Shakespeare would probably be quite as effective’ is intended to undermine the conjuring powers of the Koran, to show that Shakespeare’s stage poetry has as much power as these supposedly holy words. But, just as in Parke’s story, it is hard to escape the feeling that the belief in Shakespearean magic was not entirely ironic. It is a very dull reader who does not end this passage by wondering whether or not the charm worked, and it is tellingly frustrating that we never learn the outcome of Lesiat’s next hunt.

  The greatest Shakespeare expeditionary stories of all, however, come from Henry Morton Stanley, the man who had led the Emin Pasha Relief Expedition. In Stanley’s defence it should be mentioned that all of the atrocities recorded on that expedition took place while he was away from the main party leading a scouting mission, though Stanley did not manage to keep his hands entirely clean during his long and extraordinary career. The man who would become ‘Africa’s Most Famous Explorer’ was born out of wedlock as plain John Rowlands, and spent much of his youth in a Welsh workhouse; Rowlands invented ‘Henry Morton Stanley’ during his early manhood in the United States, where he lived in New Orleans and fought in the American Civil War (on both sides).21 This new identity came complete with a fantastically rich and loving family, and Stanley never gave it up even long after the truth became common knowledge in the Victorian rumour mill. He rose to prominence as a result of his 1871–2 expedition, which found the celebrated missionary David Livingstone on the shores of Lake Tanganyika after contact with him had been lost for more than a year, though there are doubts now that his famously nonchalant greeting (‘Dr Livingstone, I presume?’) was actually spoken and not cooked up later to add charm to the story. Stanley found, however, that his celebrity was a mixed blessing. He was never forgiven by the members of the Royal Geographical Society for his vulgarity in undertaking the Livingstone rescue on a newspaper’s dime and (more gallingly, one suspects) for having beaten the Royal Geographical Society at their own game. And though Stanley escaped much of the public opprobrium visited on other members of the Emin Pasha Relief Expedition, his reputation has been indelibly tarnished by his late-life association with Leopold II of Belgium’s Association Internationale Africaine, an organization typical in its muddling of philanthropy with exploitation but extraordinary in the level of the atrocities it committed – atrocities to which attention was drawn back in Europe by Joseph Conrad’s novel Heart of Darkness (1899). Having pioneered a route up the Congo from the west coast of Africa for the Emin Pasha Relief Expedition, Stanley would later put his expertise at Leopold’s disposal and set in motion the execrable history of the Belgian Congo.

  One of Stanley’s chief tasks was to negotiate with local chieftains treaties of mutual understanding that would allow Leopold’s Association to plant trading stations on their lands (and, perhaps more importantly, to prevent the French from doing the same). These stations would set a precedent for the regions being within the Belgian ‘sphere of influence’, a type of de facto power which Belgium and other powers later asserted as de jure political control using spurious legal logic and adding many forged treaties to those actually signed in Africa. Stanley was not above using literary magic to get these treaties signed, as he did on one occasion in the late 1880s. A local chief, Ngaliema, furious that Stanley had made agreements which undercut his power, approached Stanley’s camp with a view to scaring him off; but Stanley, forewarned of the attack, sat calmly in his tent porch with a gong, all the while placidly ‘reading the complete works of Shakespeare’. The chief was unnerved by Stanley’s calm demeanour, and demanded that Stanley strike the gong, undeterred by Stanley’s warnings that this was a dangerous request. Stanley finally obliged; at the sound of the gong, a multitude of armed men leapt out from where they had been hiding, convincing Ngaliema of Stanley’s sorcery.22

  Stanley’s little stage trick not only featured a volume of Shakespeare, but also has the feel of being borrowed from it, drawing both on the foliage-camouflaged army which brings Birnam Wood to Dunsinane to defeat Macbeth and on the ‘strange and solemn music’ through which the wizard Prospero controls both spirits and his adversaries in The Tempest. (Birnam Wood, as we shall see, later made its way into the folklore of the region.) If Stanley was taking his cue from Shakespeare, this would not have been the first time. An expedition which Stanley led in 1877 to see if the Lualaba River might have a claim to be the most southerly source of the Nile ended in a nightmarish descent of the Congo when the Lualaba drained into that river instead. From Loanda on the west coast of Africa Stanley sent a report to his employers at the New York Herald of an incident that had happened in the modern-day Democratic Republic of Congo:

  Loanda, West Coast of Africa

  Sept 5, 1877

  … A terrible crime in the eyes of many natives below the confluence of the Kwango and the Congo was taking notes. Six or seven tribes confederated together one day to destroy us, because I was ‘bad, very bad.’ I had been seen making medicine on paper – writing. Such a thing had never been heard of by the oldest inhabitant. It, therefore, must be witchcraft, and witchcraft must be punished with death. The white chief must instantly deliver his notebook (his medicine) to be burned, or there would be war on the instant.

  My notebook was too valuable; it had cost too many lives and sacrifices to be consumed at the caprice of savages. What was to be done? I had a small volume of Shakespeare, Chandos edition. It had been read and reread a dozen times, it had crossed Africa, it had been my solace many a tedious hour, but it must be sacrificed. It was delivered, exposed to the view of the savage warriors. ‘Is it this you want?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘Is this the medicine that you are afraid of?’ ‘Yes, burn it, burn it. It is bad, very bad; burn it.’

  ‘Oh, my Shakespeare,’ I said, ‘farewell!’ and poor Shakespeare was burnt. What a change took place in the faces of those angry, sullen natives! For a time it was like another jubilee. The country was saved; their women and little ones would not be visited by calamity. ‘Ah, the white chief was so good, the embodiment of goodness, the best of all men.’23

  Stanley certainly succeeds in reproducing the conventions which were by then becoming established: here is the small but well-thumbed volume of Shakespeare, here is the ‘caprice of savages’ and their slightly ungrammatical language, here are the serious-joking words about the magic Shakespearean totem – it is ‘medicine’, it must be ‘sacrificed’. Stanley repeated a condensed version of the story in his book of the expedition, Through the Dark Continent, in which he elaborates on his feelings at the moment of sacrifice:

  We walked to the nearest fire. I breathed a regretful farewell to my genial companion, which during many weary hours of night had assisted to relieve my mind when oppressed by almost intolerable woes, and then gravely consigned the innocent Shakespeare to the flame
s, heaping the brush-fuel over it with ceremonious care.24

  This account figures Shakespeare, the Man who is also Word, becoming Christ-like as he enters the inferno, guiltless but enough to sate the devils.

  Stanley in later life, here with the members of the Emin Pasha Relief Expedition. Stanley is seated in the centre with Emin Pasha to his left, and Dr Parke is seated second from left. (Photo by De Agostini Picture Library/Getty Images)

  The sting in the tail of Stanley’s story is that, like so much else in his life, it was a fabrication. As the modern editor of his Herald despatches notes, the account of this episode in his expedition diary has Stanley handing over no more to satisfy the furious natives than a sheet of paper upon which he had scribbled; this detail was subsequently revised for the newspaper account.25 Stanley’s instincts as a storyteller, as well as his finely honed sense of what he needed to do to fit in, told him that the mythic balance of the tale required the sacrificial victim to be Shakespeare. And the story itself is eerily reminiscent of the episode in Shakespeare’s Tempest in which the savage Caliban plots to overthrow the magician Prospero with a band of drunken accomplices:

  CALIBAN:

  Why, as I told thee, ’tis a custom with him

  I’th’ afternoon to sleep. There thou mayst brain him,

  Having first seized his books; or with a log

  Batter his skull, or paunch him with a stake,

  Or cut his weasand with thy knife. Remember

  First to possess his books, for without them

  He’s but a sot as I am, nor hath not

  One spirit to command – they all do hate him

  As rootedly as I. Burn but his books.

  The Tempest (III.ii.81–9)

  It seems that Stanley and the other early travellers arrived in Africa expecting to find superstitious and violent natives who demanded that they burn their ‘magic’ books, for this image of the ‘savage’ had resided at the heart of English culture for centuries.