Shakespeare in Swahililand

by Edward Wilson-Lee

  We are unlikely ever to be able to sort the truth of these accounts from the fantasies derived from the books that the explorers carried with them. Yet the truth of these stories is very much secondary to the purpose Stanley and others evidently expected them to serve. Instead of being straightforward accounts of what had happened in Africa, these stories form a kind of argument for how the ‘Dark Continent’ and its peoples should be understood. If Shakespeare is the universal genius of man, and his worth is evident to all humans, then those who do not appreciate him are, by extrapolation, in some sense not human. This insidious logic was nothing new; indeed, much the same tactic had been employed in Shakespeare’s time to suggest that the inhabitants of the New World could not be human because they broke the deeply embedded European taboo of cannibalism.26 Shakespeare’s characters are themselves not immune to these chains of reasoning: it is constantly asked in The Tempest whether Caliban, whose name has not moved far from ‘Cannibal’, is fully human or not, and it is clear that the answer to this question will determine how he is treated by the European colonizers. When Prospero and Miranda call him a ‘slave’, they are not simply describing Caliban’s status as a captive but accusing him of a moral impoverishment which justifies the removal of his freedom and his rights. He was (Prospero claims) treated ‘with human kindness’, and Miranda ‘took pains to make [him] speak’; and yet despite his aptitude for language, his ungrateful assumption that he was their equal (and could thus look on Miranda with desire) proved that their ‘human kindness’ – that quality of empathy which is both the mark of the human and only granted to other humans – was misplaced.

  But thy vile race,

  Though thou didst learn, had that in’t which good natures

  Could not abide to be with; therefore wast thou

  Deservedly confined into this rock,

  Who hadst deserved more than a prison.

  The Tempest (I.ii.357–61)

  Caliban, according to this argument, should look upon his enslavement as an act of mercy, after his criminal lust for the colonizer’s daughter had earned him a worse fate. His savage hate of books – which Stanley echoed in his account of the Dark Continent – was an inescapable counterpart to this same unredeemable incivility.

  This was, it must be said, a depressing place to start my quest to understand Shakespeare’s universal appeal – with that very universalism being used as a tool to exclude from the bounds of the human. But though attempts to define what it is to be human have often been used in this way – to lever one group of people apart from the rest and deprive them of the right to be human – this does not characterize all thinking on the subject. It doesn’t, in fact, even characterize all thinking on the subject in The Tempest. Indeed, Caliban’s second appearance in the play (II.ii) sets about parodying and upending the righteous judgements earlier levelled against him by Prospero and Miranda. The castaway Trinculo, coming upon a Caliban who is pretending to be dead, engages in an extended forensic analysis of the creature at his feet.

  What have we here? A man or a fish? Dead or alive? A fish: he smells like a fish; a very ancient and fish-like smell; a kind of not-of-the-newest poor-john. A strange fish. Were I in England now, as once I was, and had but this fish painted, not a holiday fool there but would give a piece of silver. There would this monster make a man; any strange beast there makes a man. When they will not give a doit to relieve a lame beggar, they will lay out ten to see a dead Indian. Legged like a man, and his fins like arms. Warm, o’my troth! I do now let loose my opinion, hold it no longer: this is no fish, but an islander that hath lately suffered by a thunderbolt.

  The Tempest (II.ii.24–34)

  Trinculo’s speech moves from lampooning the kind of judgement that decides on the essence of a thing by a few trivial external features (Caliban is a fish because he smells like a fish, he is dead because he is lying down) to turning the judgement back upon Shakespeare’s audience. Trinculo’s daydream – in which he takes Caliban to England to exhibit him to paying crowds – is, of course, a direct reflection of The Tempest’s audience, who themselves have paid to see this ‘spectacle’ of Caliban. It is clear that exotic peoples are made ‘monsters’ in England because there’s money to be made from it – indeed, the word ‘monster’ means ‘something to be shown to a spectator’ – and this was as true in Stanley’s day as in Shakespeare’s. But it’s also clear that it is the leering crowd that is in danger of losing its humanity in this bargain: in paying to see the ‘strange beast’ of a showman’s exhibit ‘When they will not give a doit [a small coin] to relieve a lame beggar’, they reveal the loss of charity, of that ‘human kindness’ that makes them ‘human kind’. Throughout the play, as the presumption that the European spectator is the arbiter of humanity ebbs away, we are given hints of qualities which Caliban does exhibit, qualities Renaissance thought toyed with as central to human nature – laughter, the love of wine, a sense of the political, and the ability to appreciate natural beauty and music – and which are increasingly attractive versions of humanity when set against the duplicity of the European settlers.27

  So even if Shakespeare had been introduced to Africa by the explorers as a token of difference, as a demonstration that the Dark Continent could not absorb his genius, that didn’t mean that everyone would be content to treat him in that way. Readers, in my experience, are unruly things, whose cooperation should not be counted on. I had generated a list of leads, of half-known stories and rumours, which gave reason to hope that Shakespeare’s career in East Africa would be a lot richer and more varied than this, and that he would soon be prised from the hands of his cultural guardians and turned over to real encounters with Africa and its peoples. With this in mind, I packed my copy of the Works in the leather shooting bag I’ve always used as a satchel – a habit of which Roosevelt would doubtless have approved – and set off to follow in the tracks of Burton, Stanley and the tribe of readers that sprang up in their wake.

  * The few other writers whom Burton occasionally uses to flesh out his description of Africa – Marlowe, Byron – give us a sense of the rather macho flavour of his Shakespeare.

  * Amusingly enough, the German expedition, purportedly also mounted to rescue Emin Pasha (though in reality using this as a cover to extend German influence in Uganda through secret negotiations with the Kabaka), was also suffering infinite delays, time which the expedition leader spent reading the works of Shakespeare and Gibbon’s Decline and Fall, borrowed from the English mission in Kampala. See Carl Peters, New Light on Dark Africa: Being the Narrative of the German Emin Pasha Expedition (trans. H. W. Dulken, Ward, Lock, 1891), p. 429.

  2

  ZANZIBAR

  Shakespeare and the Slaveboy Printworks

  Sir, he hath never fed of the dainties that are bred in a book.

  He hath not eat paper, as it were; he hath not drunk ink.

  His intellect is not replenished; he is only an animal – only sensible in the duller parts.

  Love’s Labor’s Lost (IV.ii.21–3)

  Carrying Shakespeare into Africa felt momentous for Burton and Stanley in part because they were escorting a treasure into the unknown, where it did not seem to belong. Their feelings were not, one suspects, altogether different from those of the missionaries who dedicated themselves to bringing the Gospel into strange lands, though of course the explorers showed little wish to share Shakespeare’s powerful language with the natives they met. Burton carried Shakespeare with Euclid because both were felt to contain unalterable, universal truths – in beauty as in geometry – and the unshakeable nature of the works was demonstrated by carrying them into unsettling places.* Yet though it is possible that the first white travellers met peoples who had not seen paper books before (if not likely, given that Arabic slaving caravans had long been visiting these areas), the sense that the works were wholly alien to Africa was largely an adventurer’s fantasy during the time of the later safaris. By the time Roosevelt visited in 1909–10, a generation of young Afr
icans were not only familiar with Shakespearean narrative, but had even been learning to read and write Swahili using the stories of Shylock and Lear.

  It was to understand the setting in which this schoolbook – the Hadithi za Kiingereza, or ‘Tales from the English’ – was printed that I first returned to East Africa. Though Africa would long since have swallowed up any traces of Burton and Stanley’s encampments, the Hadithi was printed in a town which might retain traces of its genesis. Frustratingly, not a single copy survives of the book’s first edition, printed by Edward Steere on the island of Zanzibar in 1867, and we are reliant on later editions for details of its contents.1 Though a tragedy, this is no great surprise: such a slender volume, with pages sewed together by Steere’s own hand, was designed for immediate use by the boys liberated from slaving vessels; copies of it would have quickly disintegrated in the dust and heat and sweat of excited, fearful, frustrated hands, and it was likely that no one thought it worth preserving a copy of such an ephemeral thing for the record.2 Karen Blixen’s Beethoven-loving houseboy, Kamante, was shrewd in casting doubt upon the merits of his mistress’s typed manuscript pages:

  ‘Look, Msabu,’ he said, ‘this [a leatherbound hardback Odyssey] is a good book. It hangs together from the one end to the other. Even if you hold it up and shake it strongly, it does not come to pieces. The man who has written it is very clever. But what you write,’ he went on, both with scorn and with a sort of friendly compassion, ‘is some here and some there. When the people forget to close the door it blows about, even down on the floor and you are angry. It will not be a good book.’3

  Although the episode is intended to demonstrate Kamante’s charmingly naïve assessment of a book by its cover, he is of course right: literary longevity has everything to do with a good solid binding. Though reasonably good records were kept of the missionary printing activities during the later years of Steere’s stay in Zanzibar, the early print experiments like the Hadithi were not seen for what they would become: among the earliest physical relics of Swahili, a language spoken today by over a hundred million people in eastern Africa. It is one of the ironies of history that the true character of each age is lost in those things thought not worth preserving, and this was the fate of the first Swahili Shakespeare.

  Steere’s thin Zanzibari pamphlet consisted of four stories, taken from the pages of the popular children’s book Tales from Shakespeare by Charles and Mary Lamb: The Taming of the Shrew (Mwanamke Aliyefunzwa), The Merchant of Venice (Kuwia na Kuwiwa), The Tragedy of King Lear (Baba na Binti), and The Life of Timon of Athens (Kula Maji). Steere’s choice of these four stories seems baffling at first. They are not unified by genre, including as they do two comedies and two tragedies (though Timon is a slippery fish and doesn’t sit easily in any category). Yet the idea that Steere might have chosen these four widely differing plays to give a sample of Shakespeare’s range is also unconvincing: while the Merchant and Lear are undisputed high points of Shakespeare’s writing, it seems certain that no one choosing four Shakespeare plays to take to a desert island would settle for The Taming of the Shrew and Timon of Athens. The answer, it seems, must lie elsewhere, and my first guess is that these four plays suggested themselves to Steere as Shakespeare’s clearest parables for everyday life: each of them is, in this highly simplified form, a morality tale about the proper relations between individuals, their families and the societies in which they live, and each offers a message that Steere might have expected to be acceptable to readers in an Islamic society. Taming warns of the dangers of unsubmissive women, and offers a path to bring them back to the desired obedience, while Lear shows the disastrous consequences of allowing children to wield power over their parents. The Merchant of Venice corrects the evils that arise in society from usury – a practice forbidden by Islamic law – and Timon demonstrates the fickleness of earthly possessions while portraying the sin of ingratitude. If this was Steere’s motive in choosing these four tales, he would have been following a time-honoured missionary practice of focusing first on elements likely to be familiar to the culture to be evangelized, just as the early Apostles had portrayed Christ as a warrior when it helped to get more bellicose peoples on board. Whatever Steere’s motives, they seemed to have struck a chord, as the collection was later taken up by the Society for the Promotion of Christian Knowledge and printed in regular editions (including at least eight between 1940 and 1972), forming part of their schoolbook distribution in eastern Africa, which would exceed 100,000 books a year in the middle of the twentieth century.4

  Hadithi za Kiingereza. (Reproduced by kind permission of the Syndics of Cambridge University Library)

  The language of the Hadithi is simple in the extreme, easily legible even to me with the impoverished Swahili that I have retained from my childhood. Each tale begins with a storybook formula: ‘Palikuwa na mtu, akikaa Venezia, mji wa Uitalia, jina lake Shailoki, kabila yake Myahudi; kazi yake kukopesha fedha na mali’ – ‘In the beginning there was a man, living in Venice, a town in Italy, named Shylock, of the Jewish people; his business was to lend money and property.’5 The use of this opening formula is striking, because Steere used the same words a few years after his Swahili Shakespeare to translate the haunting first words of the Gospel of John – ‘Mwanzo palikuwa na Neno, Neno akawa kwa Muungu, Neno akawa Muungu’ (‘In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God’).6 To the young boys and girls who were his first readership, the boundaries between Steere’s evangelizing mission and his role as a cultural ambassador must have seemed very hazy indeed, introduced as they were by the same man with identical formulas. There were no simple, physical signs by which to distinguish storybook Shakespeare from the Word of God: each of these early Swahili books is a flimsy, pocket-sized pamphlet, and while the title of Hadithi (‘stories’) might seem to signal that these are lighter fare, things may not have been so simple to children who had heard of the hadith that are the foundations of Islamic law. Hoping to find out more about Steere and the world into which he brought this oddity, I started my travels where the Hadithi did – in Zanzibar.

  Shakespeare set two of his finest plays, The Comedy of Errors and The Tempest, on magical islands where all expectations are confounded, and he could have done worse than take his inspiration from Zanzibar, which was in his lifetime receiving its first visits from merchants of the newly founded East India Company.* The main city, called Stone Town to differentiate the whitewashed coral stone palaces on the seafront from the earthwork dwellings that once lay inland, is a labyrinth of narrow alleys winding between high smooth walls, topped by arabesque parapets. These walls are punctuated only by brass-studded heavy wooden doors and windows opening onto fretwork balconies, which for all their artistry give the stranger few distinguishing marks by which to find his bearings. Shakespeare’s own disorienting island of Ephesus provokes his traveller Antipholus to describe the feeling of getting lost in just such a warren of streets in some of the finest lines from this underrated gem of early Shakespeare:

  I to the world am like a drop of water

  That in the ocean seeks another drop,

  Who, falling there to find his fellow forth,

  Unseen, inquisitive, confounds himself.

  The Comedy of Errors (I.ii.35–8)

  Getting lost today in Stone Town can be a befuddling affair: one is as likely to happen upon a palace as a slum tenement, a mosque blaring anti-Western rhetoric from the loudspeaker as a European church in the neo-gothic style. To add to the effect, this puzzle of streets smells strongly – as indeed the whole island does – of cloves, which with other spices (cinnamon and nutmeg) are the main local crop.

  I came once to Zanzibar as a child, and my sense of it as a place of wonder was doubtless set by those early memories. We arrived for our visit on a hydrofoil, a ship-sized hovercraft which a local entrepreneur had recently acquired on credit to ferry passengers from the mainland to Stone Town. The hydrofoil disappeared soon after with its insolvent owner,
to the befuddlement of the local police, who had little means of following an ocean-going hovercraft. It turned up years later, I believe, off in the Gulf, as an air-conditioned pirate ship for the modern day. Of Zanzibar itself I remember taxicabs carpeted inside with Persian rugs, and the catamaran fishing dhows spilling their resplendent cargo on the shore.

  The Zanzibar archipelago is made up of two main islands – Unguja and Pemba – lying off the coast of modern-day Tanzania, and the location of these islands made them a prized seat for a succession of colonizing powers. Not only are the islands marvellously lush, but they are also far enough offshore to be safe from all but advanced maritime nations, as well as being directly in the path of the seasonal tradewinds that circulate between Africa, the Middle East and India. Indeed, so attractive were the islands that the Busaidi dynasty, who had controlled Zanzibar since 1698, moved their seat from Oman to the southern island of Unguja early in the nineteenth century. Arabic merchants built an empire there through the trade in spices, ivory and (above all) slaves, and expended their wealth on the palaces which line the seafront of Stone Town. The immensely powerful Busaidi dynasty soon caught the interest of the Western powers, and by the middle of the nineteenth century American and European consuls were resident in Stone Town. When Edward Steere arrived in 1864, then, Stone Town was anything but the barbaric wilderness that he feared when he left England. Indeed, it was considerably more cosmopolitan than his former parish in the remote Lincolnshire town of Skegness. He remarked on arrival that ‘the whole aspect of the place from the sea is more Italian than African’, and was surprised to see riding in the harbour the Sultan’s latest acquisition, the battleship Shenandoah, which had recently been retired from Confederate service in the American Civil War.7