Shakespeare in Swahililand

by Edward Wilson-Lee

  3

  INTERLUDE: THE SWAHILI COAST

  Player-Kings of Eastern Africa

  STEPHANO (to Caliban):

  Monster, I will kill this man. His daughter and I will be king and queen – save our graces – and Trinculo and thyself shall be viceroys. Dost thou like the plot, Trinculo?

  The Tempest (III.ii.101–3)

  If The Tempest ensured that the Victorian explorers arrived in Africa with readymade ideas about the book-burning savages they expected to meet, it also provided predictions of how the colonizing powers would behave towards them. The prescience of its narrative – the occupation of land through various legal and technological tricks, initial belief in the aptness of the native for education, followed by horror when the same natives begin to demand to be treated as their education merits (as Caliban does in casting a desiring eye upon Miranda) – was not lost on East African observers, who after gaining independence repeatedly reflected on the way in which Shakespeare’s works both predicted and served as patterns for colonial actions.1 The breakthrough novel (A Grain of Wheat, 1967) of Kenya’s most celebrated writer, Ngugi wa Thiong’o, includes the story of a local official in the Kenyan colonial administration whose grand plan to Anglicize the local Africans is laid out in a tract entitled PROSPERO IN AFRICA. That Prospero’s colonization project ended in the enslavement and torture of Caliban is, of course, entirely lost on Ngugi’s deluded visionary.

  Interestingly, however, Shakespeare’s Tempest provides not one but two prophecies of colonization, and if Prospero’s overlordship takes the form of tragedy, the second version is unmistakably in the key of farce. This subplot features the clowns Stefano and Trinculo, who are shipwrecked in the storm that opens the play and who imagine themselves the sole survivors to have been washed up on the island. In a series of burlesque episodes that run parallel to the main action of the play, Stefano (fuelled by the vat of wine on which he drifted ashore) conceives a plan to murder Prospero and rule over the island with the aid of Caliban, who (in his inebriation) believes Stefano to be a god. In the first great colonial narrative in English, at that time largely a matter of speculative fiction, Shakespeare had not only predicted with uncanny accuracy the course of Britain’s future colonial empire, but also the many comically botched and bungled amateur attempts at colonization which preceded it.

  A few days after Eid I pick my way down to the dock, back past the Beit al-Ajaib and the shorefront restaurant celebrating Queen’s frontman and local boy, Freddie Mercury, in search of a passage to the mainland. Ferry travel here, as in so many parts of the Third World, creates a class system with stark boundaries: a relatively comfortable passage for me and other travellers who can afford it, and dangerously overcrowded hulks for those who can’t. The number of sunken vessels is astonishing, though for one reason and another they hardly register a blip on the Western media radar. The week after I make the short hop over warm waters to the mainland a cheap-passage ferry, with an official capacity of 645, capsizes with 3586 people on board; 2976 of them – roughly the number of excess passengers – are drowned.2

  Though it is not the hovercraft on which I came to the island as a child, my ferry is sufficiently commodious for me to continue to read during the crossing, and to think about the first performances of Shakespeare in East Africa. Striking as John Baptist’s photographs of shipboard actors are, they cannot claim to record the first English stage plays acted on (or off) the coast of Swahililand. In fact, one of the most incredible stories in all of Shakespeareana recounts how Shakespeare’s own work was acted off the East African coast during the poet’s own lifetime. The performances in question are said to have taken place on the Dragon, which led the Hector and the Constant on the third voyage of the East India Company between 1607 and 1610, years during which Shakespeare’s Sonnets were published and when he was himself writing about sea travel in Pericles and The Winter’s Tale. While the Constant made a swift passage around the Cape of Good Hope to its destination of the Molucca Islands (the fountainhead of the early modern spice trade, now in modern Indonesia), the Dragon and the Hector were beset by a litany of disasters and spent much of the next year and a half coasting slowly around Africa. In extracts supposedly taken from the diary of Captain William Keeling of the Dragon, first published as a postscript to an article on Hamlet in The European Magazine of 1825–6, we hear that the ship’s crew were distracted from more dangerous temptations by being allowed to stage two of Shakespeare’s plays on board:

  Sept. 5, 1607. I sent the Portuguese interpreter, according to his desire, aboard the Hector, where he broke fast, and after came aboord me, where we had the TRAGEDY OF HAMLET; and in the afternoone we went altogether ashore, to see if we could shoot an elephant.

  Sept. 29, 1607. Captain Hawkins [of the Hector] dined with me, when my company acted KINGE RICHARDE THE SECOND.

  March 31, 1608. I invited Captain Hawkins to a fyshe dinner, and had HAMLET acted aboord me, which I permit, to keepe my people from idleness and unlawful games, or sleep.3

  The first two performances, in September 1607, would have taken place while the Dragon was riding at anchor off Sierra Leone (and trying to lay in fresh fruit to counteract a bout of scurvy), and may in fact represent the very first recorded performance of Hamlet.* Even more remarkably, this would mean that the earliest recorded production of Hamlet was a command performance for a Portuguese-speaking native of the West African coast. By the time of the third performance, in March 1608, the Dragon had made it around the Cape, and was meandering between the various islands north-west of Madagascar. According to Keeling’s diary, then, Shakespeare was being acted off the Swahili coast even as Shakespeare was still alive and writing plays for the King’s Men in London.

  Fuller extracts from Keeling’s account of this period on the East African coast, published in the great compendium of Renaissance English travel accounts Purchas his pilgrimes in 1625, make for fascinating reading. The swing from the now-familiar (such as monsoon patterns and elephants) to the utterly fantastical can be somewhat disorienting for the modern reader, though it must be remembered that they were faced with constantly sorting between the astounding things they witnessed and fictional reports (many of which probably had more in common with their European traditions and experiences). A selection of Keeling’s observations from around the time that his men were supposedly performing Hamlet to help the digestion of Captain Hawkins’s Zanzibari ‘fyshe dinner’ gives a flavour of his writing:

  [20 March 1608] George Euans, one of the Hectors Company, was shrewdly bitten with an Alegarta. […]*

  The people are circumcised, as some affirmed to have seene.

  Here we found the beautifull beast. […]

  THE Moores of this place affirme, that in some yeeres, pieces of Amber-greece [sperm-whale gland] are found, Poiz twentie kintals, of such bulke, that many men may shelter themselves under the sides thereof, without beeing seene. This is upon the coasts of Mombasa, Magadoxo, Pata Braua, &c. being indeed all one long Coast.4

  While Burton and Stanley used Shakespeare as a talisman of Englishness during their expeditions, to set themselves apart from their exotic surroundings and perhaps keep themselves from ‘going native’, Shakespeare had nothing of this iconic status as transcendent genius and national poet in 1607–8. The performances on the Dragon would, then, be an even more intriguing episode of happenstance, whereby Shakespeare found his way to Africa as merely one of a jumble of shipboard occupations, nestled within a bewildering array of scarcely imaginable new experiences for the Englishmen coasting along East Africa.

  As suggested by the tentative manner in which this superb story has been told, however, a range of question marks lingers over its basis in truth.5 To begin with, the journal of Keeling’s from which the clearly pseudonymous ‘Ambrose Gunthio’ transcribed these passages in 1825–6 no longer survives, and the (admittedly chaotic) records of the East India Company suggest that it may already have been lost by the inventory of 1822. A number of
experts have seen in this delightful episode the hand of the Shakespeare scholar and notorious forger John Payne Collier. Collier, who lived at the centre of Romantic intellectual and literary circles, and could name Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Charles and Mary Lamb among his friends, was later exposed as having fabricated a wide range of documents (purporting to be Tudor and Stuart originals) in support of his editorial scholarship and biographical writings. Other modern scholars have reinforced suspicions about the Keeling entries by questioning the likelihood that a group of shiphands would have been capable of performing not one but two long and complex Shakespeare plays on a crowded deck, or that they would even have wanted to during stifling days off the African coast.*

  While all of these doubts are reasonable, it is hard to understand why the supposed forger would allow his trick to remain unremarked upon by Shakespeare scholars for nearly half a century, when the story gained a wider currency. To this the sceptics can only respond that the delight of the forger is in having performed his chicanery in public, and not necessarily in it obtaining widespread approbation. If these stories were a forgery, however, the form they took began to make perfect sense in light of the exotic Shakespeare stories I was collecting during my travels: whether this episode only came to light in the nineteenth century, or was actually cooked up to suit nineteenth-century tastes, it fits comfortably into the compulsive desire of the English at that time to see Shakespeare rear his head in the Dark Continent, to sing (as the text of Bishop Tozer’s first Zanzibar sermon would have it) ‘the Lord’s song in a strange land’ (Psalm 137).6

  As I read through the memoirs of the early travellers and settlers, a pattern becomes increasingly clear. This was, in effect, a strange feedback loop in which fortune hunters, drawn to East Africa by literary fantasies cobbled together from accounts by Stanley and others like him, returned with yet more travellers’ tales which confirmed to the hungry audiences at home that the reality matched their fevered expectations. Evelyn Waugh joked, on his return from a tour of the region, about that time when travellers

  have been home from abroad for a week or two, and time after time, in response to our friends’ polite inquiries, we have retold our experiences, letting phrase engender phrase, until we have made quite a good story of it all; when the unusual people we have encountered have, in retrospect, become fabulous and fantastic, and all the checks and uncertainties of travel have become very serious dangers; when the minor annoyances assume heroic proportions and become, at the luncheon table, barely endurable privations …[.]7

  What Waugh fails to mention, however, is how these tales can set the course of history for the regions about which they are told. These stories were to crop up again and again in the early history of East Africa, blurring the boundaries between historical record and fictional narrative, and though at first their profusion of characters seemed like a distraction from the Shakespearean story I was following, it slowly became clear that this was the missing link between colonialism and the literary texts that I was studying.

  The great fountainhead of the African adventure story was H. Rider Haggard, whose phenomenally popular boys’ adventure novels drew on his three years’ experience in the Transvaal in southern Africa (1878–81), but took much of their material from explorers’ accounts such as those by Burton and Stanley, and from letters written by his brother, Jack, who was British Vice-Consul at the ancient Arabic city of Lamu on the Kenyan coast from 1881 to 1885.8 The novel that made Rider Haggard famous (and very wealthy) was King Solomon’s Mines (1885), an extraordinary yarn about a voyage into central Africa to discover the legendary source of the biblical king’s wealth, which the heroes find in a Lost Kingdom resembling ancient Phoenicia beyond snowcapped mountains. Their access to Solomon’s mines, however, is forestalled by a battle in the kingdom between two rival claimants to the throne, one of whom is supported by the ghastly witch Gagool.

  Rider Haggard’s novel was astonishingly popular. In part this was down to his publishers’ use of the first guerrilla advertising campaign to promote it, clandestinely covering the London streets on the night before publication with posters that read: ‘KING SOLOMON’S MINES – THE MOST AMAZING BOOK EVER WRITTEN’ – a claim that the still-innocent consumers of 1885 could not resist testing.9 But King Solomon’s Mines also gave the British public a purer version of what they had already been reading in the explorer’s accounts, a wish-fulfilment fantasy in which Men of Courage could find Untold Wealth in the heart of the Dark Continent. The stories also conveniently served the purposes of a British government desperate for recruits to staff its rapidly expanding colonial service, a need greatly increased after the 1885 Berlin Conference defined the ‘spheres of influence’ allotted to each of the European powers and set in motion the ‘Scramble for Africa’. Haggard’s hero, Allan Quatermain, sums it up in an entirely unembarrassed passage:

  But then that is what Englishmen are, adventurers to the backbone; and all our magnificent muster-roll of colonies, each of which will in time become a great nation, testify to the extraordinary value of the spirit of adventure which at first sight looks like a mild form of lunacy.10

  While this theme of ‘Imperial Duty’ was nothing new – the great Victorian art critic John Ruskin had used it as a call to arms in his inaugural lecture as Slade Professor of Fine Art at Oxford in 1870 – it was now the stuff of bestsellers, captivating an entire nation with a heady cocktail of national pride, moral righteousness, and the enticements of wealth and power.11

  Rider Haggard quickly followed up his bestseller with a sequel (Allan Quatermain) and a newly cast adventure story (She), both published in 1887. Each of these stories copies the formula of King Solomon’s Mines very closely, and both again rely heavily on African explorers’ tales and the letters of his East African brother, Jack Haggard. This is especially the case in Allan Quatermain, in which the same band of characters – the eponymous hero, accompanied by his old team of Captain John Good (reportedly based on Jack Haggard) and Sir Henry Curtis (an idealized, almost proto-Aryan English nobleman) – depart from Lamu up the River Tana in search of a mythical kingdom of white men somewhere in the interior of modern Kenya. Along the way they ward off an attack by Maasai warriors, and their canoe is sucked into an underground cavern, where they are forced to survive by eating giant black crabs. The underwater cavern – like the jagged peaks of ‘Sheba’s Breasts’ in King Solomon’s Mines and the vast catacomb tunnels leading to the kingdom of She-who-must-be-obeyed in She – marks the transition from heightened reality to pure fantasy. On the far side of this cavern they reach the land of the Zu-Vendi, whose capital, Milosis, is strangely reminiscent of England:

  In another minute we perceived a great golden dome, not unlike that of St Paul’s piercing the morning mists …

  … the climate is, comparatively speaking, a cold one, being very similar to that of southern England … Sometimes, again, we went hawking, a pastime in great favour among the Zu-Vendi, who generally fly their birds at a species of partridge which is remarkable for the swiftness and strength of its flight.12

  After taking the side of Nyleptha against her sister-queen, Sorais, in a civil war, Sir Henry Curtis marries her and remains behind in the Lost Kingdom as King of the Zu-Vendi.

  ‘For there … were Sheba’s breasts’: an illustration from the 1888 edition of King Solomon’s Mines. (Reproduced by kind permission of the Syndics of Cambridge University Library)

  Rider Haggard had, in effect, hit upon the archetype of African adventure stories, a model from which to reproduce endless tales in which every Englishman worth his salt had a kingdom waiting for him in the heart of Africa, ripe for the taking.13 Even better, these kingdoms did not have the inconvenience of exotic natives – their inhabitants were usually varieties of European lost tribe – nor had they suffered the ravages of industrialization.* They were, in fact, little versions of Old England, hidden just through the looking-glass landscape of the African wild. The reading public were evidently happy to all
ow for the possibility of such kingdoms, even while they had struggled to believe the announcement in 1849 that snow had been sighted on Mounts Kenya and Kilimanjaro, a claim that flew in the face of long-held notions about the tropics and was laughed to scorn in the learned societies of Europe.14* In a way, these fantasy stories found a middle way between the explorers’ and the missionaries’ approach to the Dark Continent: the traveller could expect to wield power (like Stanley) over the people that he found in Africa, but he needn’t worry about ‘going native’ because these hidden kingdoms had a shared culture – they were, in fact, just little Englands.

  Rider Haggard, posing as the ‘editor’ of a true story told by the hero Allan Quatermain, makes it clear early on that Quatermain is cut from the same cloth as other Shakespeare-toting adventurers, though with a sly twist. He glosses a Shakespeare quotation misattributed to the Old Testament with the following note:

  Readers must beware of accepting Mr Quatermain’s references as accurate, as it has been found, some are prone to do. Although his reading evidently was limited, the impression produced by it on his mind was mixed. Thus to him the Old Testament and Shakespeare were interchangeable authorities. – Editor.15