Shakespeare in Swahililand
Page 8
In light of Steere’s evident belief that ‘the Old Testament and Shakespeare were interchangeable authorities’ – that translating Shakespeare and converting souls were two sides of the same coin – this light-hearted comment about Quatermain’s approach to book-learning seems less like a joke.
For all Quatermain’s ‘limited’ reading, King Solomon’s Mines is littered with Shakespeare quotations; but Rider Haggard’s debt to the explorers’ tales of Shakespeare in the bush do not end there. In a climactic scene, the heroes are saved from the machinations of Gagool the witch when they astonish the inhabitants of the lost kingdom by pretending to bring on an eclipse while reading from the only book that they have with them.16* This celebrated scene is, in fact, a blend of two real-life travellers’ tales which Haggard was echoing. One of these is the prediction of an eclipse by Christopher Columbus on 1 March 1504, which won him the obedience of the awestruck native Indians of Jamaica; the other, of course, is Stanley’s story about taming the tribesmen he encountered with his magic volume of Shakespeare. Rider Haggard, who added to his public reputation as a gruff man’s man by confessing himself ‘no great reader’, increases the humour of the scene by replacing the conventional explorer’s volume of Shakespeare with a penny-dreadful collection of ghost stories, The Ingoldsby Legends. Once again, there is a creeping sense that Shakespeare was thought of as having too much real power by the Victorians to serve effectively as a comically mistaken magic book.*
These fantasies seem to have taken on an unstoppable life of their own, and the boundary between Rider Haggard’s fantasy and reality soon became hopelessly confused. Some readers, caught up in the excitement, were determined to head for Africa to locate King Solomon’s mines themselves. Every traveller who had met Haggard in Africa – and many who hadn’t – claimed to be one of the models for his characters. Further muddling matters, the explorer Joseph Thomson both accused Rider Haggard of plagiarizing from his expeditionary account Through Maasai Land and also took to writing Haggard-esque fantasy novels himself. Archaeologists working on the ruined city of Great Zimbabwe, which had been visited by various expeditions since 1871, declared in 1891 that it was the seat of Solomon’s companion the Queen of Sheba, and that the civilization that built it must (like Rider Haggard’s Kakuana tribe) have been Phoenician; a number of landmarks surrounding the site were named after characters from King Solomon’s Mines. Rider Haggard claims not to have known of the Great Zimbabwe excavations when writing his novel, though the ruins were widely discussed when he lived just south of them in Natal, and the similarities make his claim hard to believe.17 It is just possible, though, that the influence ran the other way – that the team who claimed Great Zimbabwe for the Queen of Sheba (J. Theodor Bent and his patron, Cecil Rhodes) were attempting to hitch their wagon to Haggard’s in an attempt to borrow some of his celebrity.
Rhodes, like Haggard, was a younger son in a large gentry family and (also like Haggard) had been thought too dull to follow his brothers to Eton or Winchester. Both men were sent to Africa in hopes that they could make something of themselves there – or at least fail to do so in a place where they were not in the public eye, and would be less of a drain on the family resources. Haggard and Rhodes each succeeded in triumphing over low expectations, becoming the most celebrated men of the age (unlike their brothers). But whereas Haggard’s kingdoms were the figments of a fertile imagination, Rhodes succeeded in building a vast dominion which existed in the world outside the boys’ adventure story. Through a mixture of canny entrepreneurial manoeuvring and willingness to use prison camp setups to control his workers at the Kimberly diamond mines, Rhodes succeeded in turning his De Beers enterprise into the largest company in British history. From this position of strength, he was able to found the British South Africa Company, a joint stock venture which soon held vast mining concessions in central Africa, concessions covering much of modern-day Zimbabwe, Zambia and Malawi, and serving as the basis for the eventual formation of his fiefdom of Rhodesia.
When the fabulous gold concessions Rhodes and his partners had promised their shareholders were slow to materialize, it must have been a useful distraction to be able to claim that the Great Zimbabwe ruins were the celebrated lands of Sheba (and must, therefore, contain their storied wealth). The Sheba story undoubtedly held an attraction for Rhodes, who – like Haggard and many of their compatriots – lived a life which curiously blended hard-nosed entrepreneurship with occult dabblings.* Many of the uses to which Rhodes directed his vast fortune have become famous, such as Rhodes House in Oxford, where the papers of Steere and many other famous early African settlers are kept, and the Rhodes Scholarships, which have fostered luminaries from Robert Penn Warren to Bill Clinton (and, since opening its ranks to women in 1977, Naomi Woolf and Rachel Maddow). Less famous is the secret society for the expansion of the British Empire that Rhodes intended to found with the bulk of his untold wealth – though Rhodes’s legacy retains an occultist flavour in the Masonic architecture of the Rhodes House building.
Rider Haggard was followed by a great many other novelists who used eastern and central Africa as a blank space in which to erect imaginary new societies. Ignatius Donnelly’s 1890 dystopian novel Caesar’s Column ends with the proletarian heroes fleeing a burning New York by airship to start afresh in Uganda, and of course Joseph Conrad’s ‘Mistah Kurtz’ was to use the Congo as the location for his own theocracy. The popularity of these tales meant that the most widely read and captivating descriptions of eastern and central Africa available to English readers – and soon more widely through translations – were inventions with only the slightest basis in fact. It seems very likely that these fantasies played a key part in the series of darkly comic colonial episodes which took place in East Africa in the 1890s. Perhaps the most striking of these was the project by the ‘Freeland Association’ to set up a socialist paradise in East Africa, one of the many nineteenth-century political fantasies that could trace its roots to Thomas More’s Utopia of 1516, the very same text that had partly inspired Shakespeare’s story of an experiment in island rule in The Tempest.18 Inspired by the science fiction novels of Austrian economist Theodor Hertzka – Freeland (1890) and its sequel A Visit to Freeland (1893) – a group of European idealists landed in Lamu in 1894 with visions of pastoral communities, free from private property, dancing in their heads. Rather uncannily like Allan Quatermain and his companions, their plan was to sail up the River Tana in search of a place to found their Utopia somewhere near the base of Mount Kenya.* Descriptions of the Association’s members, led by an Englishman, Captain Dugmore (who joined the expedition for ‘sport’), give a taste of their quality:19
GUSTAV RABINEK
Cashiered from Austrian Army for embezzlement – utterly dishonest – habitual swindler
AXEL STOCKERBYE (Lieutenant, Danish Navy)
Drunkard, but perfect gentleman even when drunk
PETER SCAVENIUS
Son of Danish Cabinet Minister – an intriguing agitator, bitterly hostile to British Influence
REINHARD GLEISERING
Drunkard and thief, lunatic with homicidal tendencies
FELIX THOMAS
Irreclaimably dishonest (expelled)
HANS SALNER
Nickname – ‘Sassy’, drunkard, fanatic anarchist and supporter of the bomb-worker, clever chemist, wife a second Louise Michel.*
In the event, however, the Freelanders never got further than Lamu, in large part because their provisions for transport up the River Tana proved wholly inadequate – the river is only navigable for a short distance and even then only after the rains. As novels from Conrad’s Heart of Darkness to Naipaul’s A Bend in the River suggest, rivers were central to the imaginative experience of colonialism, in part because they held out the promise of travel far into the interior while keeping a safe distance from land in the comparative comfort of a boat. East Africa, however, offered no navigable rivers like the Congo, Amazon or Yangtze; in fact, water travel forms li
ttle or no part of the life of most inland East Africans, and many tribes even consider fish to be a debilitating foodstuff.
I am reminded of this hydrophobia by the fact that most of those with me on the ferry to the mainland are being sick, even though the seas are relatively calm. Even for many of the afflicted passengers, however, this seems to be a regular commute, and though regular sea travel seems to have done nothing to cure them of their nausea, it does at least seem to have made the sickness something like a routine. I might perhaps have been worried by the number of incapacitated, even convinced that there was an infection running through the boat, if it weren’t for the placidness with which passenger after passenger lifts a bag to their face, only afterwards to resume a conversation or settle back down to sleep. I remember a similar predicament when, reaching cruising altitude on a propeller-driven plane flying from Mexico to Cuba, I was alarmed by the mist that filled the cabin making it impossible to see anything more than a few feet away; my anxieties were dispelled, however, by the fact that the rest of the passengers didn’t pause for a moment to notice the swiftly filling cabin, and blithely continued chattering on their mobile phones.
The Freeland Association, stranded in Lamu, used up their resources in three months doing little more than gaining a reputation for drunkenness, infighting and lascivious approaches towards the local Muslim women. Most of them returned to Europe and disappeared back into obscurity; a few remained as settlers, having been granted land by the Imperial British East Africa Company (IBEA). The IBEA (the Kumpani, as they were locally known) was bankrolled by the same Scottish shipping tycoon, William MacKinnon, who had paid for many of Henry Morton Stanley’s explorations. In order to function efficiently, outfits like the Kumpani (and Rhodes’s British South Africa Company) developed all the paraphernalia of modern European states: professional armies (occasionally with uniforms), contracts which defined the relationship between the Company and local tribal leaders and which formed a skeleton legal system, and even their own coinage.20 Corporate nations such as the Kumpani exercised political influence by placing their economic and military power at the disposal of whichever local leader stood to further their cause most directly; and when it came to pass, as it did without exception, that these chieftains faced threats to which the Company’s irregular troops proved unequal, the Company would appeal to its home nation to be given ‘Protectorate’ status, which allowed for the possibility of an occupying force from the regular army. The transition from Protectorate to Colony happened at some point afterwards (1920, in the case of Kenya), but was largely by that point a legal formality. Like Stanley’s treaties with the chieftains of the Congo, the agreements with local leaders used the fantasy of a universal culture – this time a legal and political culture which could be assumed to be just as valid in Africa as it was in Europe – to assert dominion over a native population who were dressed up in the trappings of European civilizations, making them more like Haggard’s lost tribes.
Given that Shakespeare’s works were prominent in the attempts to demonstrate that there was such a thing as universal culture, it is ironic that many of these same plays show a fear that accepting foreign cultures might simply be a prelude to political domination. John of Gaunt’s ‘sceptered isle’ death-speech from Richard II is one of the most famous expressions of English patriotism, but it is rarely remembered that the speech is prompted by a fear that the English love of Italian fashions is weakening them as a people:
GAUNT:
Though Richard my life’s counsel would not hear,
My death’s sad tale may yet undeaf his ear.
YORK:
No, it is stopped with other, flatt’ring sounds,
As praises of his state. Then there are found
Lascivious meters to whose venom sound
The open ear of youth doth always listen,
Report of fashions in proud Italy,
Whose manners still our tardy apish nation
Limps after in base imitation.
[…]
GAUNT:
This royal throne of kings, this sceptered isle,
This earth of majesty, this seat of Mars,
This other Eden, demi-paradise,
This fortress built by nature for herself
Against infection and the hand of war.
[…]
This land of such dear souls, this dear, dear land,
Dear for her reputation through the world,
Is now leased out – I die pronouncing it –
Like to a tenement or pelting farm.
Richard II (II.i.15–23, 40–44, 57–60)
England has ‘made a shameful conquest of itself’, allowing itself to be distracted by foreign fashions and poetry from the fact that it is undergoing a conquest by contract, a conquest it would have avoided had it been properly aware of its own cultural riches and uniqueness.
I will end this brief excursion into the prehistory of colonization with the story of my favourite fortune hunter drawn to Africa in the tide created by these fantasies: John Boyes, the Yorkshire urchin whose impossibly picaresque life climaxed in his rising to become ‘king’ of the Gikuyu.21 This tribe, whom the colonizers found settled in Kenya’s rich uplands, would eventually become the dominant economic and political force in the independent Kenyan nation, in part driven by the fact that the first president (Jomo Kenyatta) was Gikuyu. Boyes’s autobiography relates his vagabond existence, from Midlands runaway to North Sea trawlerman, up the River Amazon and down the west coast of Africa, through the Transvaal as an engine stoker, and finally to Kenya to try his fortune as a trader. The charmingly bumbling manner in which Boyes stumbles from one predicament to another puts me in mind of the response of E. J. Wayland, an early Ugandan geologist, when a publisher once asked him to write of his adventures: ‘I had none,’ he said, ‘only incompetent people have adventures.’22 Though written in a poor approximation of Rider Haggard’s gruff and spare style, Boyes’s memoir can be rather touching when his tales of high adventure falter and more intimate memories get an airing, such as the night he spent as a lad marooned in a sandspit bathing-hut in Rotterdam harbour, clutching the tobacco he had been sent ashore to purchase for his superiors. Boyes’s story also involves encounters with some of the more prominent figures of the day, such as the following during his time serving in the Africander Corps in Matabeleland (modern Zimbabwe) when he encounters the founder of the Boy Scout movement:
It was about this time that I first met B.-P. – now General Sir R. S. S. Baden-Powell, but then only Colonel – who had been sent up to take charge of the operations […]. I was on water guard that day, to see that the natives did not poison the stream, when a man whom I took for a trooper came up and entered into conversation with me […] and it was only when I got back to camp, after going off duty, that I found I had been talking to the officer in command of the expedition.23
Though it is of course possible that this is an entirely honest recollection of one of Boyes’s treasured experiences, alarm bells may sound when the Shakespeare reader recognizes the similarity to a scene repeatedly used in the plays – that of having the disguised leader mingle with those under him. Perhaps most famously Henry V does this on the evening before Agincourt (Henry V, IV.i), though there is also a version of this device in Measure for Measure. Boyes does not, however, strike one as the type for Shakespeare worship, and it would be tempting to put the echo down to coincidence, were it not for the fact that the next episode of his autobiography involves him falling in with a troupe of Shakespearean actors:
Finding that funds were running out, I took to the sea again, and, getting a ship, worked my way around to Durban. Here I had to look around for something to do, and finding that a Shakespearian company was playing in the town at the time, I presented myself at the stage manager’s office, and applied for an engagement. They happened to have a vacancy, and I was taken on for small parts. The company was at rehearsal when I was engaged, and I was told to take my place among
the others on the stage. As far as I could judge, I was no worse than the other members of the company, and for a month I appeared nightly for the edification of the aristocracy of Durban.24
What we know of the Theatre Royal in Durban, where Boyes spent a season in 1898, confirms that it was very much the home of transient vagabonds like the future Gikuyu king. One of Boyes’s fellow actors, a Mrs Render, was in that same year cited in a divorce action by Mrs Madore against her husband, and another ‘handsome actress’, Maybell Rogers (known professionally as May Bell), was arrested in Johannesburg, charged with stealing three diamonds which she claimed had been given to her by a male admirer.25 The theatre booked a succession of touring theatre companies and orchestras, though Durban also saw smaller outfits; the impersonator Mr Henry Lee stayed on for six months in 1898 doing impressions of Joseph Chamberlain, the Pope, Rudyard Kipling, Charles Dickens and Henrik Ibsen. Impersonation, one suspects, must have been a somewhat less demanding craft before the age of movie reels or even radio.26
Following a hunch that Boyes’s story about Baden-Powell and as a player of Shakespeare could not have been merely coincidentally similar, I later traced the Durban theatre season of 1898 through the pages of the Natal Mercury. The chronology of Boyes’s stay in Durban is a little hazy, so it is hard to determine which of the two theatre companies that visited Durban that year he would have acted with. One of these, the Haviland–Coleridge Shakespearian and Old English Comedy Company, was resident at the Theatre Royal in Durban from May to June, and then again from October to November, and played The Merchant of Venice, Hamlet, Othello and Romeo and Juliet among their repertoire.27 The chronology, however, makes it more likely that Boyes would have taken up with the rather more modest Holloway company, who visited between August and September and played As You Like It and Richard III.28 While Richard III does gesture towards the trope of the ‘disguised king’, it is only in a single line about Richard’s intention to ‘play the eavesdropper’ (V.iii.19), something he does offstage, and I am tempted to abandon the idea of Boyes’s Shakespearean memory. But we crucially learn from the Mercury review that the Holloway company were playing an adapted text of Richard III. Although Richard III is a favourite play with today’s audiences, Shakespeare’s original had long been considered (as the reviewer reminds us) ‘one of the least satisfactory of Shakespeare’s tragedies’. As a consequence, it had for two centuries been performed largely through Colly Cibber’s 1699 bowdlerization, a hotchpotch of Shakespearean history plays that shortens the original and significantly increases the gore by (among other things) staging the murder of the Princes in the Tower. Cibber also added a number of monologues to enhance Richard’s part – including, in the night before Bosworth, a thinly disguised lift from Henry V of Richard secretly visiting his troops.29 It seems likely, then, that Boyes did experience a visit from a disguised general during his time in Africa, with the slight caveat that it was a Shakespearean character and not General Baden-Powell. Once again, the anecdotes of African life being reported back in England were simply a false memory of the stories they were taking to Africa with them.