The appearance here of the ‘disguised king’ episode is interesting, because just as Trinculo and Boyes provide the burlesque counter-history of colonization, so this motif is the counterpart and reverse of the ‘refused crown’ motif that seemed to motivate Steere’s simultaneous recoil from and attraction to the exercise of power. The refusal of a proffered crown – in Julius Caesar and Richard III, and in Steere’s protesting preference for libraries over power – is a ritual which demonstrates the fitness, even destiny, of the ruler for rule: it is both right and natural that they are above all men, as they alone have the self-control to resist the allure of power. Ruskin, in his 1870 lecture on ‘Imperial Duty’, used the same motif to place his audience of Oxford undergraduates in the position of the reluctant and righteous rulers of the Globe: ‘the refusal of the crown’ of imperial dominion would be, he laments, ‘of all yet recorded in history, the shamefullest and untimely’.30 The mingling of the disguised king among his people – an episode which Shakespeare had inherited from medieval romance – had originally served the same purpose, as in I Henry VI where Joan of Arc is able to pick the disguised French king out from a crowd by sensing his kingly aura (I.iii). But for the most part when this happens in Shakespeare, it has the opposite of the desired effect: the king learns how little support he has from among his people (Richard III) and it becomes apparent that he is a man like any other, virtually indistinguishable from those over whom he is set to rule. This episode, then, suggests that sovereignty is nothing more than a collective delusion, consisting only of our willingness to believe in its existence; it proves, in effect, a perfect prelude not only to Boyes’s own extraordinary feat of persuading the Gikuyu to elevate him to power, but also to the collective delusion which sustained belief in the justice of colonial rule for the half-century that followed.
It would be all too easy to write off these episodes pinched from Shakespeare as merely travellers’ tall tales. The consistency with which these stories are lifted specifically from Shakespeare, however, suggests that there is something else at play here. In a funny way, these mirrorings are rather like the theological idea of typology, the doctrine that sees episodes from the Old Testament as foreshadowing and predicting those of the New: Abraham’s near-sacrifice of Isaac, and the replacement of Isaac by a ram, is a premonition of God’s sacrifice of his own son Jesus, the Lamb of God. This doctrine was later extended by Christian thinkers to suggest that episodes from the Old Testament were also predictions of historical events that had not yet come to pass: so Christian thinkers saw the tribulations of the people of Israel, and their eventual triumph, as a version of their own sufferings and a guarantee of their own future vindication. But just as Shakespeare and the Bible were two sides of the same coin for Allan Quatermain (and Bishop Steere), so the English travellers seem to have found in Shakespeare a way of thinking about the things that happened to them in the Dark Continent. Stanley’s and Boyes’s use of Shakespeare narratives is not a simple duplicity, a substitution of facts for something more compelling; it is, rather, evidence of a belief – perhaps unconscious – that certain scenes in life have an eternal form, a universal structure, which is captured by Shakespeare better than anyone else. The savage must be a devotee of fire and an enemy of the written word, because civilization is the containment of primal forces in the hearth and the primacy of written record; the great general must walk unknown among his troops, because he is the earthly equivalent of the God who walks among us unknown, the General of the Church Militant.
These stories from Haggard and Boyes confirmed once again the extraordinary impression that literature – and, more specifically, Shakespeare – was an integral part of the repertoire of early explorer and settler life, something which appeared almost automatically in every experience of the Dark Continent. The very oddity, even unbelievability, of Shakespeare blossoming in alien landscapes seemed to make his presence indispensable to these stories. Before long, however, there was a thriving and unmistakably real Shakespearean presence on the East African mainland, though (once again) this bardolatry would come from an entirely unexpected quarter.
* Although no earlier records of productions survive, it is clear that Hamlet was performed before this, with two quarto editions (1603 and 1605) attesting to the popularity it had already gained on the stage. Indeed, one of these, the first so-called ‘bad quarto’ of 1603, has long been believed by many to be a ‘pirated’ text compiled for the printer from memory by the actor who played the minor character Marcellus.
* Shakespeare had been the first to use this word in a printed English text when in the 1597 quarto Romeo buys his suicide dram from an apothecary ‘Whose needie shop is stufft / With beggarly accounts of empty boxes: / And in the same an Aligarta hangs, / Olde ends of packthred, and cakes of roses’ (V.i.45–8). In the 1599 quarto the word has moved closer to its modern spelling and appears as ‘allegater’.
* There is, however, a range of interesting evidence to suggest that early modern travellers were driven to literary consolations when stranded in exotic climes: among notable examples are Camões’ composition of part of The Lusiads while shipwrecked on the Mekong delta in 1559 (another poem, now lost, was written when he was stuck on the island of Mozambique), and the story of François Leguat, a Huguenot exile who planned to set up a French Protestant colony in Mauritius, but ended up marooned with his fellow colonists on the uninhabited island of Rodrigues. During his time on the island he wrote a long poem recounting his experiences (including allusions to being raped by the other sailors), and hid the poem in the hollow of a tree.
* Rider Haggard’s fantasy of a lost Mediterranean culture in central Africa was later formalized in the ‘Hamitic Hypothesis’ championed by the English anthropologist C. G. Seligman, who argued for cultural links between ancient Egyptian and ‘primitive’ central African tribal societies. These largely unsubstantiated ideas had a long reach, not only through the use of Seligman’s writing in colonial service training, but also through the influence of his pupil Bronisław Malinowski, who set the tone for a generation’s work on African ethnography (including Jomo Kenyatta’s work on his own Gikuyu tribe). Julius Nyerere’s brother himself believed that their Zanaki tribe was descended from a race of ancient Egyptians; see Thomas Molony, Nyerere: The Early Years (James Currey, 2014), pp. 24–5.
* Incidentally, the German missionary Johannes Krapf, who made this sighting, spent many years dreaming of founding his own theocratic kingdom, ‘Ormania’, in eastern Africa.
* In the first editions of King Solomon’s Mines Rider Haggard had his travellers astonish the natives by predicting an eclipse of the sun by a full moon; this was changed in all post-1887 editions for an eclipse of the moon, it having been pointed out to Rider Haggard that his first eclipse was an impossibility.
* In a further twist to this curious tale, the supposed inspiration for Quatermain, the Great White Hunter Frederick Courtney Selous, was himself inspired to seek adventure in Africa by the romantic childhood atmosphere created by his uncle, the Shakespeare illustrator H. C. Selous.
* Another adventurer who attempted to find King Solomon’s mines in Africa – this time in Mozambique – was Carl Peters, the leader of the German Emin Pasha expedition. Peters’ writings were to inspire the Freeland Association (discussed below) to decide on East Africa as the site for their socialist Utopia.
* A rather better-resourced (though not less fantastical) project was anticipated in Joseph Chamberlain’s 1903–5 plan to found a Jewish homeland in the African interior, a plan which met with furious resistance from the growing community of European settlers. This plan was inspired by another utopian tract by the confusingly similar-named Theodor Hertzl. A full account of the East African project is given in Robert G. Weisbord’s African Zion.
* Louise Michel was an anarchist leader during the French Commune of 1871. Mrs Salner was evidently proud of Dugmore’s comparison, as when the expedition landed at Lamu she gave a speech in which she declared herself
the ‘African Louise Michel’ (Beachey, ‘“Freeland”, p. 61).
4
MOMBASA
Shakespeare, Bard of the Railroad
The lunatic, the lover, and the poet
Are of imagination all compact.
One sees more devils than vast hell can hold;
That is the madman. The lover, all as frantic,
Sees Helen’s beauty in a brow of Egypt.
The poet’s eye, in a fine frenzy rolling,
Doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven,
And as imagination bodies forth
The forms of things unknown, the poet’s pen
Turns them to shapes and gives to airy nothing
A local habitation and a name.
Such tricks hath strong imagination
That if it would but apprehend some joy,
It comprehends some bringer of that joy;
Or in the night, imagining some fear,
How easy is a bush supposed a bear!
A Midsummer Night’s Dream (V.i.2–22)
H. Rider Haggard was not, of course, the first stranger to make East Africa the local habitation for his ‘shaping fantasies’, and Mombasa, my next stop, served as the anchoring point for a good number of these stories. As early as the fifteenth century, the Arabic geographer Abu al-Mahasin reported of Mombasa that ‘the monkeys have become rulers … [who,] when they enter a house and find a woman, they hold congress with her’. ‘The people’, al-Mahasin laconically concludes, ‘have much to put up with.’1 The most persistent story that the earliest European travellers told of eastern Africa was that of Prester John, the mythical priest-king who ruled over a lost Christian tribe somewhere outside the bounds of the Christian world. Rumours of an actual Coptic Christian kingdom in Ethiopia may have led to the lands of Prester John being pinned down in Abyssinia during the late Middle Ages, and finding his kingdom was a central aim of the Portuguese mariners who pioneered the route around the southern tip of Africa in the late fifteenth century. The ‘Abyssinia’ over which Prester John ruled in the travellers’ minds was not, however, tied to any one geographical location, and their eagerness to find it made them see signs of his kingdom everywhere.* An episode in the Portuguese national epic, The Lusiads, recounts how Vasco da Gama’s search for a sea route to India nearly foundered at Mombasa, where a conniving Arab-Swahili guide draws them into an ambush using the long-sought Christian kingdom as a lure. As Captain Richard Burton’s own translation has it,
And eke he telleth, with that false intent
whereby fell Sinon baulked the Phrygian race
of a near-lying isle, that aye had lent
to Christian dwellers safest resting place. […]
Here too with every word the liar lied,
as by his regiment he in fine was bound,
for none who CHRIST adore could there abide,
only the hounds who worship false Mahound, […]
So near that islet lay along the land,
nought save a narrow channel lay atween;
and rose a city thronèd on the strand,
which from the margent of the seas was seen;
fair built with lordly buildings tall and grand,
as from its offing showed all with sheen:
Here ruled a monarch for long years high famed;
Islet and city are Mombasah namèd.2
For all Burton’s archly medieval spelling and Homeric register, the poem does draw directly on some of the earliest recorded European experiences of the East African coast. The poet Camões, who wrote much of this epic in a cave while shipwrecked near the Mekong delta in China, had himself sailed the southern route to India and so knew the locations of which he wrote intimately. At the close of this extraordinary scene, Camões has da Gama saved by the intervention of Venus and her ocean nymphs, a delightful fantasy in which the explorers are saved from the trap baited with an exotic myth by the protective force of a classical one.
The reasonable assumption that the legend of Prester John would evaporate as knowledge of the African interior became available proved false. H. Rider Haggard’s East African novels are themselves variations on the Prester John legend, and something of this tradition of blissful inland kingdoms remained even in my childhood in the prurient gossip about goings-on at secluded up-country ranches which were a law unto themselves. As late as 1910, the celebrated novelist John Buchan’s Prester John shows that the myth still had some power, though in a clever inversion of the usual narrative Buchan’s hero rises to power – like Boyes and my other player-kings – by making a false claim to be the legendary priest-king. Buchan, who had lived in and travelled through southern Africa at the turn of the century, evidently sensed how stories had a curious way of turning themselves into facts on the Dark Continent.
I have come to Mombasa to follow leads I unearthed back in Cambridge which gave a glimpse of a vibrant culture of East African Shakespeare performance in the early years of the twentieth century. The Shakespearean actors of whom I have come in search arrived just as the construction of the railways changed the shape of the continent, driving any ‘lost kingdoms’ further and further inland.* Before the building of the railways, the East African interior was sufficiently vast, unknown and unstructured to allow ample space for the European imagination to run wild; as already noted, the lack of navigable rivers made inland travel unthinkable to all but the best-supplied ventures by seasoned expeditionaries. Victorian industrial innovation had provided a solution for this impenetrability in the form of an iron rivulet which would run uphill from Mombasa through the Taru desert and Tsavo to the Mau escarpment, and beyond to the great inland seas on which the kingdom of the Buganda sat. This kingdom, if not magically white or Christian like those of the literary imagination, was at the very least rich, relatively developed and verdant. Importantly, it was also deemed strategically crucial for protecting the headwaters of the Nile, and hence Egypt and Suez and the passage to India, jewel in the crown of the British Empire. The railways created arteries where there were none before, and from these arteries were to bud depots which would grow into the first towns of the interior, just as port towns had grown up on the coast where the ships were accustomed to stopping. The railways also allowed for the transport inland of industrial hardware and troops, and of settlers who could arrive in coaches tricked out in dark cool wooden panelling, soft leather banquettes and lead-crystal glassware.
The East African Railway was still a major fixture during my childhood, though by then airports had once again reoriented the world, so that one arrived on the mid-continental plateau and took the train down to the coast, as we did for beach holidays over Christmas. The arrival of chartered flights and tarmacked roads had halted the refurbishment of the rolling stock in the middle of last century, and by the time of my childhood the once-luxurious railway carriages were lumpy and tarnished. They nevertheless at the time seemed to me the height of grandeur; indeed, the impression created by these decaying remnants was evidently so strong that I still have a hard time finding elegance in anything new. Yet for all that these trains were down at heel when I began to ride them, travelling in them still featured the little ritual absurdities and talismans which the early settlers had put in place to protect themselves. There were white-gloved stewards turning down starched sheets as the locomotive bottled its way through the pitch-black savannah, occasionally halting until a herd of buffalo moved off the track, and dinner was parcelled out in a sequence of courses served by swaying waiters in the dining car. There is still something unmistakably riverine about these night trains – in the gentle lilt of the coaches as they eddy back and forth, the feeling of coursing through rapids as the train goes down into the Rift Valley or towards the coast, and the mild resistance as the train climbs, as if pushing against the current.
The railways are important to the story of Shakespeare in East Africa because they created the first urban populations dense enough to make professional theatre possible. These
are, of course, the same conditions which led Shakespeare to write the plays in the first place. For a professional theatrical culture to develop there must be enough people in the same place to replenish the audience day after day (or, as lighting developed, night after night), and preferably enough for two or more theatres, so that competition can drive productions to new levels. This critical mass in East Africa was not produced, however, by native Africans clustering at the rail depots or by European settlers, who only began to arrive in any numbers years after the railways were built. It came, rather, from the tens of thousands of Indian labourers, clerks and sepoys brought over to build the railway, and the inevitable caravan of followers who trailed after to service their needs. The use of Indian labour to build the railways was to have a profound effect upon the character of East Africa, inserting between the white colonial masters and the native Africans a middle class of shopkeepers and administrators. The Indian immigrant population made its first home at Mombasa, and it was to Mombasa that they returned during periods of furlough.
Shakespeare in Swahililand Page 9
