Shakespeare in Swahililand

by Edward Wilson-Lee

  John Baptist can confirm that the UMCA mission house was at Mambo Msiige, and that it later became (among other things) an embassy and part of the government telegraph office. Though it is still standing, he doubts that I am likely to find anything there; it is currently an empty shell, marooned in a legal battle over whether its proprietors should be allowed to convert another Zanzibari heirloom into a luxury hotel. He tells me not to expect too much in the archives or museum records: at independence in 1963 the new officials carted the records out of offices all over town in wheelbarrows and set fire to them on the front lawns, intent that the New Zanzibar should not be burdened by the clutter of the past. Much of Stone Town was appropriated under the subsequent socialist programmes of President (and Shakespeare translator) Julius Nyerere, given over to tenants who had no funds to maintain the merchant palaces in which they squatted.

  I am shown the dozens of photograph albums John Baptist was given by a member of a Goan photographic dynasty, days before he was murdered in the looting that followed independence. John Baptist has since acquired more photographs and postcards of Zanzibar from visits to specialist fairs near Paddington railway station, which seems to be the only reason for which he leaves the island. The albums contain page after page of bug-eyed Victorian official portraits, as well as pictures of the town during the latter part of Steere’s life and a surprising number of louche pictures of all-male theatricals and costume parties on board navy vessels anchored off the island. Among the pictures is an old picture postcard depicting the UMCA mission House on Mambo Msiige, where Shakespeare first became Swahili in the thin pamphlet of stories. John makes a gift to me of the postcard, and, slugging the cardamom sugar at the bottom of my mug, I leave him to his afternoon nap.

  A few days later, as I am carefully porting a paper plate full of barbecued seafood back to my rooms from the open-air market, the cry of Eid Mubarak! announces that Ramadan is at an end. A man from the crowd streaming down to the Forodhani gardens on the waterfront stops to tell me with no apparent irony that it is ‘not permitted’ to eat the street food in my flat, and (while dubious of the legal logic this entails) I take this as an invitation to join the revels down in town. The sense of relief is general. Even the dreadlocked Somali zealot I had watched a few days previously lambasting a tourist for wearing shorts during Ramadan seems to be letting his hair down.

  When the archives finally open, and I have waited long enough for several ranks of officials to scrutinize my very august letter of introduction, I start on the boxes of UMCA papers. The going is slow, in part because I am only allowed one box at a time – the box being the natural unit with which the scholar can be trusted – and there are long intervals while a new one is fetched. The papers when they do arrive are terrifyingly brittle, and have to be handled like dried flowers. More than once it seems clear that I will be the last to read a letter or a diary page, and only reluctantly do I return the crumbling papers to their boxes and send them away into the hot-dry limbo in which they wait hopelessly to be read. Still, my time is short and I want to find out something about Steere’s printing works and his day-to-day life. So I pass over the touching details of the young slave boys’ daily routines, and the arrival of the first liberated slave girls, and the growth of outposts of the UMCA mission elsewhere on the Zanzibar islands and (slowly) on the mainland.

  Here and there I come across a rich detail, such as the mission logbook entry which tells me that on 24 January 1867 – the very year in which Steere would set his printing press to the task of producing the Hadithi za Kiingereza – the mission staff (and perhaps some of the boys?) attended a ‘Theatrical Performance on board HMS Highflyer’; they also on that occasion received from the ship two further boys taken from slaving vessels.19 Even if this is no more than a tantalizing lead, I already know something about the contexts of this ship visit, which makes me thrill at the discovery. After all, the last time the Highflyer had been at Stone Town it had weighed anchor in the middle of the night, slipping away in secret to take with it Princess Seyyida Salme, the sister of the pretender Barghash, who had during her house arrest fallen in love with a German banker, Heinrich Reute. The ship’s party must have spent part of the evening before settling down to watch their play congratulating Captain Thomas Malcolm Sabine Pasley on his successful part in this storybook romance, by getting the princess safely to Aden, from where she could pass on to Hamburg, to live out the rest of her life as Emily Reute, a prosperous burgeress and celebrated author of harem exposés. The logs and letters are silent about what the play was – though it strikes me that Shakespeare’s own Winter’s Tale of rescued princesses would have served the mythic balance – but it is still fascinating that these people, far removed from England and every day facing danger and confronted by disease and deprivation, retained a loyalty to the cultural rituals of their homeland.*

  Days of sifting – sometimes literally – through the disintegrating documents in the archives shows me that I will learn little more of the Hadithi za Kiingereza (at least here). This is, of course, a disappointment, but it is one that those interested in the past become accustomed to. There is a tightness in the gut which comes from the sense that something wondrous is slipping ever further from us, like the vertigo in one’s bones when handling something delicate. Though this tightness never disappears completely, it is sometimes relieved when a fragment brings us closer to the disappearing past, like a ghostly hand clasped for a moment. The feeling is succinctly captured in Shakespeare’s famous Sonnet 30:

  When to the sessions of sweet silent thought

  I summon up remembrance of things past,

  I sigh the lack of many a thing I sought

  And with old woes new wail my dear time’s waste.

  Then can I drown an eye, unused to flow,

  For precious friends hid in death’s dateless night,

  And weep afresh love’s long-since canceled woe,

  And moan th’expense of many a vanished sight.

  Though convention required that Shakespeare turn in the end to a rather anodyne comment on the power of love (‘But if the while I think on thee, dear friend / All losses are restored, and sorrows end’), the force of the sonnet lies in Shakespeare’s unmatched evocation of loss. The phrases are riddling – how does one ‘sigh a lack’ or ‘moan an expense’? – but they summon precisely the defeat of language in the face of ‘time’s waste’, ‘death’s dateless night’, a defeat that can be brought on by the loss of ‘precious friends’, yes, but also by the loss of ‘things’ or even those ‘sights’ which are by nature ephemeral. The ‘sessions of sweet silent thought’ that characterize scholarship are often driven by much the same yearning.

  Later, however, I do come across one enticing story which deserves to be told here even if it happened many decades afterwards. Though Steere and his printers were long dead, the episode takes place on the island of Zanzibar and is reported by a member of the Universities’ Mission to Central Africa – it is, in fact, a throwaway anecdote in one of their newsletters from 1934.20 In it he reports a large gathering of Africans, Arabs, Indians and Europeans at the village of Mbweni, where a troupe of local men were putting on an impromptu performance. The text on which the drama is based, it transpires, is none other than Kuwia na Kuwiwa, the rendering of The Merchant of Venice from the Hadithi za Kiingereza.21 The production, it is reported, was very basic: a petrol lamp, a table, a chair and five actors – Antonio, Bassanio, Shylock, a Judge and the ‘ugliest man in the village’ as Portia. The setting was only indicated by signs (Nyumba ya Portia, ‘Portia’s House’, etc.); and the tale of the Jewish moneylender had been turned, as it would often be afterwards in East Africa, against the wealthy Indians who were closer to their own lives. The punchline of the anecdote – and what particularly intrigues me about it – is that the cast of the play have no idea of its connection to Shakespeare, or even that it was once a dramatic text. For the correspondent in the newsletter this is evidently amusing – like Arthur Neum
ann putting Shakespeare into the hands of his unwitting elephant hunter; but I think we might take it rather differently. This, after all, is Shakespeare in the hands of those who have no reason to think of it as ‘Shakespeare’; ‘all ignorant of Shakespeare’s efforts’, we are told, they ‘decided it had great possibilities of dramatization’. While the appeal of Shakespeare’s play to a group of provincial Zanzibaris who had no reason to revere the text as canonical is not unassailable proof of Shakespeare’s universal appeal, it certainly has the flavour of a beginning.

  Before leaving Zanzibar to follow the spread of Shakespeare on the mainland, I go to visit the Universities’ Mission house at Mambo Msiige, approaching it by walking along the beach among joggers and fishermen. I also pass groups of Maasai elmorani (warriors), long and thin and draped in their traditional plaid, like tartan Giacomettis; these nomadic herders from the inland plateau, disconcertingly out of place, have been imported by luxury hotels to give the place an authentically African air which the Arab coastal Africans apparently lack. The building is, as John Baptist had said, more or less abandoned – almost, that is, save for the dozen or so security guards, who in grand African tradition are armed to the teeth in blithe disregard for the fact they are sentries to a hollow shell. My original romantic notion of breaking into the empty building is replaced by an equally romantic notion that I will bribe my way in. It is very rare for Shakespeare scholars to have the opportunity to cover up criminal proceedings in the course of their research, so this was clearly an opportunity not to be missed. In the event, the guard I approach seems delighted that anyone had been tempted to breach the cordon, and offers to guide my tour personally.

  We traipse around for a considerable time up narrow staircases comically unsuited to luxury, and through stripped-bare low-ceilinged spaces furnished only with curling posterboards with mockups of the high-ceilinged ballrooms the hotel will contain. Eventually, we find the nondescript room captured in the museum photo, where the Universities’ Mission had set up its printing operation. This was where my first Swahili Shakespeare had been typeset by fingers that had come from inland villages down to the coast in cages, out to sea in bondage, back to shore on ironclad Royal Navy ships. I have worked with old-fashioned hand-presses myself, and even to someone who knows what to expect they are a frightening confusion of pistons and levers and traps; I imagine the boys must have felt, like Conrad’s native boiler feeder in The Heart of Darkness, as if they were in ‘thrall to some strange witchcraft’. They did, however, seem to accommodate themselves to their new surroundings with reasonable speed, aided in part by the clearing up of certain misunderstandings. As Steere says,

  It was not long before even the natives perceived that our boys had an air and a bearing such as their old companions never had. It was their Christianity beginning even so soon to show itself, as sound religion must, even in their speech and bearing. We taught our children that white men might be trusted. They have told us since that their impression was, that first night they slept in the house, that they were meant to be eaten.22

  Steere is unfailingly confident that it was his religious teachings which made the boys feel superior to those around them, though being inducted into the mysteries of print may in and of itself have had a powerful effect on them. It is difficult for us, who spend our lives trying to keep above a sea of printed matter that threatens to drown us, to remember the strangeness and power of a process that produces uncannily identical objects, objects which constrain those holding them to speak the same words.23 Indeed, it is often far from clear in his writings that Steere felt he had come to the Dark Continent to bring the Christian message, rather than the tools of language which were only supposed to be servants in the Lord’s work. In a series of letters in 1872, prompted by Bishop Tozer’s resignation and the likelihood that he would succeed as Bishop, he wrote repeatedly to the UMCA asking to be left to his translation and printing: he was, he said, more ‘useful to the Mission as an interpreter of European thoughts to negroes and of negro thoughts to Europeans’.24 For Steere, it seems, establishing a shared culture had overtaken the task of religious conversion. A belief that we owe our existence to a single god might suggest that there are other things that link us – a shared morality, a culture which is similar at its heart for all the superficial differences. But this logic could also be reversed: evidence that there are shared, universal aspects to our culture might serve as proof that we derive from a single point of origin, an Edenic and united past.

  We should not forget, however, the power that even this cultural authority was to confer on Steere and his kind. Looking out from the UMCA house on Mambo Msiige at the same seascape Steere would have seen, I am reminded of two Shakespeare quotations which evidently meant much to him. They are quoted prominently in his commonplace book, where Steere (like many readers before the twentieth century) gathered his most treasured bits of text. The first of these is from The Tempest, that perennial lens through which Englishmen saw Africa:

  My Library

  Was Dukedom large enough …25

  This sentiment is voiced by Prospero (The Tempest, I.ii.109–10), magician and exiled Duke of Milan, whose death we saw being plotted by Caliban in the last chapter. As suggested by the need to burn his books before murdering him, Prospero’s library is the immediate source of his strength, like Samson’s hair, and destroying it will leave him vulnerable. But Prospero’s library has a more complicated relationship with power in the play than simply providing him with magic tricks. It is, in the first place, the reason that he has lost his Dukedom: Prospero’s bookish belief that his ‘library / Was Dukedom large enough’ distracted him from the dangers of his court and the conspiracy which unseated him. As so often in Shakespeare, however, a lack of interest in political power is the best evidence that someone deserves it. Two of Shakespeare’s great actor-politicians, Julius Caesar and Richard III, demonstrate their awareness of this when they make a great show of refusing a tyrant’s crown when it is first offered to them, only to condescend at the appropriate moment to accepting the burden. In a similar way, Prospero’s books are both a symbol of his lack of interest in power and the ultimate proof that he deserves it – as shown when he is reinstated to his Dukedom at the end of the play.

  The suspicion that these lines are the key to Steere’s personality is confirmed by the fact that the second treasured quotation encapsulates the same paradox of power and books, even if it comes from a different play. The lines are from the opening of the second Act of As You Like It, where the ousted Duke Senior is praising his woodland exile over the cares of court. The lines (mis)quoted by Steere are given here in italics:

  Now, my co-mates and brothers in exile,

  Hath not old custom made this life more sweet

  Than that of painted pomp? Are not these woods

  More free from peril than the envious court? […]

  Sweet are the uses of adversity,

  Which like the toad, ugly and venomous,

  Wears yet a precious jewel in his head.

  And this our life exempt from public haunt

  Finds tongues in trees, books in the running stream,

  Sermons in stones, and good in everything.

  As You Like It (II.i.1–4, 12–17)

  Duke Senior argues that simply being away from the corridors of power has such a salutary effect that the very woodland becomes like a library in the reflections it affords. Again, like Prospero, it is the very fact that Duke Senior is content to give up his ducal rule for a bookish wilderness which advertises his fitness for authority, and he is duly returned to his Dukedom at the end of the play. So when Steere wrote these lines in his commonplace book, was he stirred by their humility, their idyll of a life contented with books, or with the righteous claim to power entailed by that humility?

  Steere’s awareness of the role that printing and language-teaching would play in the struggle to dominate Africa meant that the relationship between power and books may not have been a subco
nscious one. As he wrote about one tribe shortly after an expedition into the interior, ‘It seems to me morally certain that the Yaos will be Christians or Mahommedans before very long, and I think the question will turn a good deal upon which is the first to write and read their language.’26 So the boys who learned to print in this room looking out to sea from Stone Town were, unbeknownst to them, building an arsenal which would conquer the inland communities from which they had been kidnapped. I thank the security guard, who is wavering between boredom with and suspicion of my glassy-eyed pensiveness in an empty room, and leave.

  * Even in Shakespeare’s time, Euclid was carried into exotic places as a totem of the Christian West’s access to universal truth – as when the Jesuit missionary Matteo Ricci presented Euclid’s Elements to the Chinese Emperor, in hopes that the awestruck audience would accept the truths of Christian doctrine as equally indisputable.

  * Shakespeare would also have had access to information about Zanzibar from John Pory’s translation and edition of the Geographical Historie of Leo Africanus, first published in 1600, where the inhabitants are described as ‘much addicted to sorcery and witchcraft’. The Geographical Historie is largely confined to northern and north-western Africa, and Pory’s supplement on sub-Saharan Africa was drawn from the reports of other travellers.

  * Indeed, some indication of the success of Steere’s project to plant bardolatry on the East African coast is given by the action of Seyyida Salme’s brother, Sultan Barghash, during his state visit to London in 1875. Not only did Barghash insist on pausing to pay respect to the bust of Shakespeare in Westminster Abbey, but Shakespeare also helped to avert a diplomatic crisis: after the Sultan objected, during a ceremonial dinner given by the Worshipful Company of Fishmongers, to the use of the epithet ‘Worshipful’ for anyone other than God, he was apparently placated by the information that the company was sufficiently venerable to have merited a mention in the works of Shakespeare (The Times, 26 June 1875, p. 12). Although some commentators at the time suggested that Barghash was being coached by his British escorts into locally appropriate behaviours, they seem not to have considered that Barghash may have been evangelized for Shakespeare before setting foot in Britain.