The European quarter of Zanzibar. (Reproduced by kind permission of the Syndics of Cambridge University Library)
The organization that sent Steere to Africa, the Universities’ Mission to Central Africa (UMCA), had been founded by four universities (Oxford, Cambridge, Durham and Trinity College Dublin) in response to an appeal made by David Livingstone in a speech to the Oxford Union in 1857. Livingstone, who had spent nearly two decades evangelizing in Africa by that time, was considered a saint in his own lifetime, a veneration that does not seem to have been reduced by the fact that he reputedly managed to convert only a single person to Christianity during all his mission work (and that convert lapsed soon afterwards).8 It was not only, however, Livingstone’s Christian zeal which captured the enthusiasm of the earnest Victorian university men; rather, it was his principled stand against the Indian Ocean slave trade, against which he railed in speaking tours while on periodic return to Britain, making him a philanthropic celebrity. The UMCA had quickly gathered steam, and had sent their first Missionary Bishop out in 1861, though the incumbent died shortly after arriving on the mainland, living only long enough to send home reports of pestilence, famine and war. Steere travelled out in the entourage of the second appointee, Bishop Tozer, and before retreating to the safety of Stone Town the pair had made a concerted attempt to set up in the interior, where Livingstone felt the main work of conversion and education was to be done. Among the many bleak descriptions of this voyage up the Zambezi in Steere’s letters, now kept in Rhodes House (Oxford), is a delightful description of Steere holding one of the new patent steel-ribbed oilcloth umbrellas over the bishop’s head.9
It must have been just such first encounters with Europeans that made the factory-produced umbrella a universal symbol of status through much of Africa. For people relentlessly assaulted from above by sun or driving rain, this was an infinitely more impressive invention than others of which European civilization was so proud. I cannot help thinking, after reading Steere’s description, of a senescent askari (guard) who worked at our house outside of Nairobi. Vuli would arrive promptly at sundown and fall fast asleep in a chair outside the house, and on the few occasions he did wake (usually roused by his own snoring) he summoned the entire household, having convinced himself that one of the Labradors was a leopard. On his days off Vuli would walk to market, wearing a shower cap and armed with an umbrella and a squash racquet, the inalienable markers of his civility.
For all the amusement afforded by the image of Steere and Tozer under their umbrellas on the Zambezi, Steere’s letters paint a sobering picture of torturous illness within the mission party and vicious warfare on the riverbanks (though, following the tradition instituted by the explorers, they responded to these hardships with evening readings of Shakespeare).10 Having tried but failed to establish a foothold at various locations closer and closer to the coast, he and Tozer eventually left for Zanzibar at the end of August 1864, having decided that their ends would be best served by setting up a seminary on Zanzibar to train local priests for redeployment in the interior. Though Steere’s nineteenth-century biographer defends the move as a ‘tactical retreat’, it was seen as a shameful capitulation by many, including Livingstone himself, who dismissed the Zanzibar mission as nothing more than a chaplaincy to the consulate.11
Even if Steere setting up in Stone Town was in many ways an admission of defeat, he nevertheless applied himself fiercely to the tasks at hand, the most urgent of which was to get the Sultan (and the local British Navy vessels) to take seriously the anti-slavery ‘Moresby’ treaty the two had signed decades earlier. The disregard for the ban on trading human cargo was underlined by the fact that upon their arrival the Sultan gave the UMCA party, along with a palace in which to set up operations, five slave boys as a welcoming gift. These and all the UMCA’s first subjects for evangelization – including those whom Steere taught to work his printing press when it arrived – were literally a captive audience, boys from mainland tribes who had been lured away from their families in southern Tanganyika by tende halwa (‘sweet givers’).12 A small number of these, including most of those at the UMCA mission, were then confiscated from the slavers by the Royal Navy. Steere later recorded his first impression of his encounter with the boys presented by the Sultan:
Now if you can imagine yourself standing opposite to five little black boys, with no clothing save the narrowest strip of calico [merikani] round their middles, with their hands clasped round their necks, looking up into your face with an expression of utter apprehension that something more dreadful than ever they had experienced would surely come upon them, now that they had fallen into the hands of the dreaded white men, you will feel our work somewhat as we felt it. And then, how are you to speak, or they to answer? You have not one word in common. Yet these are the missionaries of the future.13
Steere’s confidence that these damaged boys would find a vocation in the church might seem delusional, and yet the future was to see some of his hopes come to fruition. Among these boys was John Swedi, who became the first East African to take holy orders, and Francis Mabruki, who spent a year at Rickinghall in Suffolk, where he inspired the destitute farmhand Samuel Speare to follow him back to Zanzibar as a missionary. Another of the young recruits, Owen Makanyassa, was put to work in the printing office, where he was soon in charge and running a brisk business for local clients as well as setting the pamphlets composed by Steere.14 Ironically, the boy christened ‘William Shakespeare’ was considered among those ‘who shew no sign of teaching power’, and was put out to apprentice as a mason.15
It is hard to decide quite what to think of the evangelizing activities of Steere and his kind. The intentions with which Steere embarked upon his life in Africa were undoubtedly noble ones, just as his life before Zanzibar had been a catalogue of selfless aspiration. Though he had followed his father and studied law at University College London, he was distracted (as I was when an undergraduate there) by the variety of the metropolis and spent most of his time in the Reading Room of the British Museum studying ancient tongues, as well as learning to print (and learning botany, conchology and brass rubbing). (Admittedly, my own distractions were not always as salubrious.) He was called to the bar in 1850, but soon left in hopes of helping the needy. He sold all of his books and other possessions to support his work in various Brotherhoods dedicated to helping the London poor, though he left this life in disgust at the internal politics and what he viewed as the lack of zeal in many of the participants.
Joining the church seemed the next logical step, and Steere volunteered for one of the least desirable postings in the British Isles, where his Skegness parishioners remembered him as a ‘downright shirt sleeve man, and a real Bible parson’.16 When even this proved insufficiently testing, he signed on to accompany Bishop-elect Tozer into what could only have seemed to him the last place on earth. So if Steere’s actions in offering safety and a livelihood to utterly helpless orphans in exchange for their adherence to his own Christian beliefs strikes me as hard to sympathize with, it is nevertheless clear to me that Steere was benevolent and believed unquestioningly that what he was giving these boys was salvation. He was, I suppose, not asking of them anything more than what he was asking of himself, and this sets him apart from the explorers. As his translation of the Tales from Shakespeare suggests, Steere’s belief in the equality of our souls meant he also believed in the possibility of shared thought, language, culture, of a common humanity which reversed the fragmentation of human society after the Tower of Babel.
This is not to say that Steere could not be rather self-righteous, perhaps even too much for the woman he married in 1858, Mary Bridget. It seems clear that there was separation between Steere and the woman who persuaded him to accept the African posting, for all that the biography written soon after Steere’s death gives an (amusingly melodramatic) explanation for why they never lived together again:
Mrs. Steere had bravely consented to his former sacrifice [his solitary move to Skeg
ness], and now she bade him God speed on his second venture [to Africa], and quite intended following herself, accompanied by a sister. We may add that the idea was not definitely abandoned until some years afterwards, when delicacy of health, ending, alas! in disease of the brain, rendered it impossible.17
Although Steere and his wife never lived together again, their letters and papers do show rather touchingly that she spent much of her remaining life visiting English churches to sketch the masonry and woodwork that Steere would copy for the vast neo-gothic cathedral he erected in Stone Town, on the site of the Zanzibar slave market he had helped to put out of commission.
Christ Church, Zanzibar, the cathedral that Steere built during his time as Missionary Bishop to Central Africa. (Reproduced by kind permission of the Syndics of Cambridge University Library)
My progress in reconstructing the Stone Town of Steere’s day is immeasurably slowed during my first days in Zanzibar by the fact that Ramadan is being observed. For this I have calculated: things would be open erratically (if at all), and any officials whom I do manage to locate will be hungry and uncooperative from observing their daytime fast. This is fine – I have a pile of nineteenth-century accounts of Zanzibar to work my way through, and a list of infidel contacts whose availability should be less affected by the religious calendar. What I had not realized, however, is that Zanzibar is practically alone in the Islamic world in not observing a set date for the end of Ramadan: instead, Eid al-Fitr will only be declared when the new moon is actually seen by the famished and expectant faithful. Each cloudy evening, then, will mean another day’s wait, and a day less of my limited time in the archives. I spend my days, then, walking the alleys that have remained unchanged since Steere’s time, trying to pinpoint the location of the UMCA mission and of Steere’s printing venture. Here is what was once the American Consul’s house, where Henry Morton Stanley spent nights on the roof in his tent to prepare himself for the hardships of his expedition to find Livingstone. This palace became the club for colonials in the twentieth century, where Evelyn Waugh spent a week trying to weather the unbearable heat by sitting under a fan with eau de quinine on his head; it is now a public hotel selling smart cocktails at souvenir prices to visiting cruise passengers. Here is Steere’s cathedral, and nearby the chains that serve as reminders of the slave auctions once held on the site. Here would have stood the building where a princess, Seyyida Salme, was kept under house arrest during Steere’s time after assisting her brother in a failed coup. Seyyida Salme, who will play a part in Steere’s life in Stone Town, is a figure whose daily life is recorded in unparalleled detail in the intimate memoirs she left of life in the harem.
The brother whose rising she supported, Barghash, did eventually become Sultan, and his palace, the Beit al-Ajaib (or ‘House of Wonders’), is now a sparsely filled museum, with exhibits in the corners of its vast reception rooms. As an Arab palace, the Beit al-Ajaib is of an open design to allow the sea breeze to draw the hot air out of the upper floors, and many of the lighter exhibits seem on the point of fluttering away. The rickety vitrines, dwarfed by the echoing and palatial rooms, contain the few surviving pieces of Limoges porcelain and Venetian glass with which Barghash tricked out his palace, pieces which in their exotic fragility seem faintly like butterflies pinned to their velvet boards. Among these moulting remnants of Barghash’s splendour and their curling typewritten labels, I come across an intriguing early photograph of a group of men, both black and white, working in a large room filled with what are unmistakably typesetting cases: inclined desks, like architects’ drawing-tables, with dozens of cubby holes for the pieces of moveable type that will be put together to make a printed page. The photograph is labelled ‘Universities Mission to Central Africa, Mambo Msiige’, and by the look of their dress the photograph was taken at the end of the nineteenth century. There is no one to ask for further information other than the small crowd of women lazing on the verandah at the front of the palace, of whom all and none seem to be employed by the museum. I shall have to see The Director; The Director is unlikely to be in until after Ramadan; my existing ticket will certainly not allow me to enter the museum again to see if he has returned.
After several unsuccessful return visits I manage to secure an interview with The Director. No further mention is made of new tickets, and indeed after my first reappearance I have the run of the museum, as the women have evidently become bored by the whole matter and make no protest at my comings and goings. I find my way to The Director’s office, which turns out to be another cavernous reception room in which he occupies a small desk at the far end, by one of the two walls of windows, which remain firmly shuttered in an attempt to keep the stacks of paper on his desk. The Director is a small, round man in a navy blue suit, squared off by shoulder pads of a remarkable breadth. He invites me to take a seat, an offer which occasions some confusion on my part as the only two chairs in the near-empty office are next to one another behind his desk. I take a seat behind the desk, though it becomes clear that this is not the commencement of the interview, as The Director is engaged in Solving a Problem. On his desk is a computer; on another table, a good thirty feet away across the palace room, is a printer. These two are evidently plugged into the two power sockets in the room. The Director returns to the printer, which he seems to have been examining for some time, and walks the printer cable to its full extent, leaving him a good twenty-five feet short of the computer. He places it calmly on the ground and walks to the computer, where he stops and looks back at the printer, before once again pacing the ground in between. I am unsure whether it would be wise to offer some observations at this point, so I remain quiet. The Director spends some time over at the printer, contemplating (it seems) whether he had best move the printer table towards the desk, or give the matter up entirely. Employing a tactic once suggested to me as a response to official delays, I remove my volume of Shakespeare from my satchel and begin to read. Emitting a sigh of resignation, the Director comes and sits down at my side.
Leaning towards me on his elbow with chin in hand, but still looking out into the body of the room rather than in my direction, he asks me the nature of my inquiry. Assuming what seems to be the only logical posture at this point, I also speak out into the room, telling him who I am and asking whether he might be able to provide any information on the photograph in the gallery below. There are the inevitable questions about letters of introduction, of which I am thoughtlessly unprovided. (Later in my trip I take to writing these on my own behalf from inventively named referees; my university identity card, which would have been infinitely more difficult to forge, is of no interest to such authorities as I meet.) After several repetitions of my question have produced no impression whatsoever on the mind of The Director, it appears that the only thing to do is to descend together into the gallery to inspect said photograph. This involves a great process of informing secretaries and locking offices – one or other of which one might reasonably have expected to suffice. The Director has evidently never set eyes on the photograph before, and indeed seems rather taken by the display as a whole. It is, he agrees, very interesting, but he can tell me nothing further about it.
Luckily I have another appointment, this time with a local watercolourist of Goan descent, John Baptist da Silva, who seems unnervingly to have been present at all significant events in the last seventy years of Zanzibar’s history. (It is, I suppose, a small island.) We sit on an open gallery overlooking the courtyard of his house; as with many townhouses in the old quarter, this one has inherited the Arab disdain for outward magnificence, and the heavy door which gives entrance to the elegant quarters opens off an alley which might easily be mistaken for an untended gap between buildings. His granddaughter brings us mugs of achingly sweet tea flavoured with husks of cardamom, and we look over portfolios of his exquisite paintings, which expertly capture the blend of rubbish and Moorish glamour that characterizes Stone Town. We discuss the irritability of the island during Ramadan, and I comment o
n the increased number of women wearing the full niqab covering since I was last here. Unfurling his glinting eyes from among their wrinkles, John Baptist smiles and tells me that they are, however, experts at flirting with their eyes, and often provocatively dressed underneath. My ‘flat’ in Stone Town confirms this sense of female freedom when off the streets. The ‘flat’ is, in fact, merely a room perched above a first-floor courtyard, reached by something more ladder than stairs; the entrance from the street is through the back of one of the many lean-to stores selling kikoi wraps, up stairs to a landing that has been converted into a hair salon by means of odd mirrors and chairs, and then into the courtyard which serves the dozen or so other residents of the tenement for all of life’s necessities. The ladies in the hair salon seem to have an arrangement by which each of them is dresser and each customer, without too much bothersome distinction between. One voluminous lady quickly senses my unsureness about local gender relations, and asks increasingly daring questions about my romantic interests, to gales of laughter from the other ladies.
When I tell John Baptist why I’ve come to Zanzibar, he is charmingly unfazed by the idea that I might try to understand Shakespeare (or anything else, for that matter) by coming to Zanzibar. He immediately recalls his own childhood experience of being made to learn Julius Caesar by rote for the Sisters of his Catholic convent school. His early memory is reminiscent of the semi-autobiographical passages in the novel By the Sea by the excellent Zanzibari novelist Abdulrazak Gurnah, which features a ‘teacher of English … who was a pious Muslim and an ardent Anglophile without contradiction or anxiety’, and whose efforts culminate in a bravura performance of Brutus’ speech in praise of Caesar, given by a young Zanzibari boy in an alley like that outside John Baptist’s house.18 It is rather poignant to think that Steere’s island would one day be populated by boys fluent in iambic pentameter.
Shakespeare in Swahililand Page 5
