For all that these performances attracted audiences of 400 or more every evening, amounting to tens of thousands over these years, the fact that they were performed in lean-to theatres of ribbed galvanized iron – mbati, as it is known locally – gives some idea of the difficulty involved in reconstructing their feel (or even the whereabouts of the theatres) a century later. I am lucky enough to have the Indian equivalent of the ‘bush telegraph’ activated on my behalf, awakening conversations over cappuccinos and pakoras which stir the buried memories of a theatrical culture now all but lost. The few trails I am able to follow are provided by the descendants of these actors, some of whom are able to pull photographs of these productions from attics and cupboards. A historian of the Indian diaspora, Neera Kapur, digs out for me photos of her grandfather’s 1930 production of Mehadi Hasan’s version of Hamlet, Khoon ka Khoon. The images capture the frenetic glory of this theatrical culture: overloaded motor cars and shoulder-borne floats, advertising the coming production, push slowly through crowds of onlookers; they are all eager for the splendour that the stage will bring, as in the image of Hiralal Kapur, majestic in sword and sash and turban. This same play was, five years later, filmed as the first ‘talkie’ version of Hamlet in any language.15 Heartbreakingly, no copy of this film can be found. The many days I spend in tuktuks – motorized rickshaws – following leads in Mombasa teach me little more than to cherrypick rickshawmen without sunglasses. It is not so much the glazed eyes of the khat chewer that should be of concern – consumption of the narcotic is near-universal, and besides gives the drivers’ insouciant disdain for risk to their passengers something very much like charm. The more worrisome thing that I found the sunglasses to hide, on more than one occasion, was dual cataracts so unctuous as to prevent the driver’s actions from bearing any relation to the world in front of him.
Given the difficulty of following these leads in the present day, it is our great good fortune that we do not have to rely entirely on the East African Standard reviewer’s opinion of the musical performances that he heard that day, because versions of these same songs are among the very first Indian sounds to have been recorded for posterity. In a canny attempt to break into the potentially enormous Indian market for gramophone machines and records, Gramophone Typewriter Limited sent agents, beginning with their principal sound engineer, F. W. Gaisberg, in 1899, on missions to return with recordings of local music that might create a generation of Indian consumers. They began with the dancing and singing girls of Calcutta’s theatres, outcasts in the most literal sense, having lost caste through their disreputable profession. Gaisberg’s account of the trip makes clear his amazement, not only at the alien aesthetic of Indian music and its easy familiarity with Shakespeare, but also with the studied indifference of the Anglo-Indians to the culture that surrounded them.16 Among those songs recorded during these first visits, from 1899 to 1909, were ones from Agha Hashr Kashmiri’s immensely popular Shakespearean plays, including Dil Farosh (The Merchant of Venice), which drew the ire of the Standard reviewer in 1908, as well as Bhul Bhuliya, a version of Twelfth Night by Mehadi Hasan.17 Only a few of these exquisite amber-caught moments of turn-of-the-century Indian music survive, though even these survivals are astounding when one realizes that these recordings were not made on the wax or metal discs common at the time – which have endured relatively well – but on discs made from shellac, crushed beetle-shell.
Indian nautch girl. (Images of Asia)
When I later went to listen to the two surviving recordings from these songs at the British Library sound archive, I was giddy with the thought that I was hearing the same sounds that would have rung out of the ramshackle theatres onto the Mombasa streets, the love songs of Hindustani Shakespeare, preserved in the carcasses of beetles which had once footled around the forests of Bengal. The song from Bhul Bhuliya is a duet, ‘Bar Tar Saroor Mein Tujhpaar Nissar’ (‘All that is beautiful in this world is devoted to you’), sung by ‘Miss’ Acheria and ‘Miss’ Subashi (so titled following Western stage traditions).18 The music is, it must be admitted, initially monotonous – even enervating – to my untrained ear, but as I listen over and over again in my booth the song, which jumps into life after an initial section damaged beyond repair, reveals a web of erotic longing it weaves through its lines of clipped, repeated words, each one only changing the last but a little, until it blurs into a strange mixture of flirtation and chant. It is, in fact, a perfect evocation of those famous opening lines of the play, in which the spurned lover Duke Orsino imagines gorging on love-music until such time as his body revolts:
If music be the food of love, play on.
Give me excess of it that, surfeiting,
The appetite may sicken and so die.
That strain again, it had a dying fall.
Oh, it came o’er my ear like the sweet sound
That breathes upon a bank of violets,
Stealing and giving odor. Enough, no more!
’Tis not so sweet now as it was before.
Twelfth Night (I.i.1–8)
Perhaps the most touching thing about Hasan’s Bhul Bhuliyan being performed in Mombasa in 1915 comes from the changes he made to the original plot. Shakespeare’s second wondrous ‘twin play’ – the first being The Comedy of Errors – opens with a shipwreck on the Illyrian coast which sees Viola separated from her twin, Sebastian, forced to dress as a boy, and thrown into a love triangle which only the reappearance of Sebastian can square to end the play happily. Hasan’s play transposes these events to Tartary, where the Princess of Baghdad (Dilara) and her brother, Jafar, are driven from their country by the armed and unwanted suit of the King of Bokhara. The most striking change, however, is the replacement of the shipwreck in Shakespeare’s version. In the original play, this merely sets up the events of the play and is the subject of only a few dozen lines; in Bhul Bhuliyan, however, it is a disaster which takes up much of the first act of the play, as we can see from a 1905 English summary of the play printed in the Parsee Orphanage Captain Printing Works in the Parel suburb of Bombay:
ACT I
[…]
SCENE III
Being defeated in the battle Prince Jafar and his sister run away from their home, by a railway train.
SCENE IV
A railway train is seen passing, in which Dilara and Jafar have taken their seats.
SCENE V
A railway Bridge is seen. Heavy rains with thunder and lightning burst forth. Lightning destroys the bridge. The train (in which Jafar and Dilara have taken their seats) coming up, falls dashing in the waters below.
ACT II
[…]
SCENE II
A passenger of the lost train has saved Dilara and landed her on the shores of Tarter.19
Few members of the Mombasa audience would not have known or been related to at least one of the 2498 men who died during the construction of the line which ran from the coast to Lake Victoria. Little trace has been left of these men, and other than those with the dubious fortune to fall prey to the man-eating lions of Tsavo, even their manners of death only merit occasional mention among the drifts of paper mouldering in a shed in the Railway Museum in Nairobi. We do know, however, that many of them died in the collapse of railway bridges during times of heavy rain and flood, when the pioneering work of construction in the sandy soil of the savannah took its toll. This Shakespearean fantasy, then, of a survival which is turned to victory, must have resonated very deeply with the audiences packing the flimsy and overheated Mombasa theatres. And it is these very liberties taken with Shakespeare’s texts, the liberties which so dismayed the reviewers from the Standard, that meant Shakespeare was a living voice to these audiences, and not being watched simply to venerate some lifeless idol.
It also makes perfect sense that Shakespeare’s plays appealed to that audience. Shakespeare, the glover’s son who moved to London in his mid-twenties to join a theatre scene for which he had no obvious qualifications, is (after all) the poet of new beginnin
gs. Unlike the French and Spanish dramatists of the day, Shakespeare and the Elizabethan theatre he helped to create did not produce plays in which, following classical models, a long history comes home to roost on a character at the end of their story. Instead, Shakespeare’s most popular plays involve characters entering a new world or a new phase of life, and these plays are about facing what lies in wait there. The pasts these characters do have are quickly suppressed, surviving only in garbled fragments. We learn that Romeo had a first love, Rosaline, but she plays no part in his life; Lady Macbeth speaks as a mother of children who are nowhere to be seen. What happened to the mothers of Imogen, Cordelia, and Miranda? No one knows. The most awkward moment in Hamlet is the appearance of the prince’s schoolfriends, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, remnants of a past that he has no desire to recall; Hamlet famously sends them on to England and death without him, protesting that they ‘are not near my conscience’. Shakespeare’s plays are often about people with no apparent past, a feat which often requires sweeping what has happened under the carpet. In being so, they perfectly suited themselves to the world that inherited Shakespeare. Unlike the Elizabethan world in which Shakespeare himself grew up, the world in which his works grew famous constantly thought of itself as at the beginning of a new age and not at the end of time. This was certainly the case in the Mombasa theatres, where a community clung to the side of a continent in which everything remained to be done.
Like any well-structured drama, my time in Mombasa is drawn to a close by a looming deadline. A few weeks before my arrival a grenade attack had killed several people at a popular bar where people had gathered to watch the Euro 2012 England–Italy match, and during the tension that followed a radical Islamist preacher had been killed. Although embassies had issued travel warnings to their citizens advising them to steer clear of Mombasa, I had been told at a cocktail party at the US embassy in Nairobi not to worry. The reassurance seemed believable in large part because the physique and grooming of the man who gave it were greatly at odds with his humdrum official title (Liaison for Agricultural Standards, or some such thing). But now I had been told that there were riots expected after Friday prayers had finished at the mosques, and that the police would most likely be barricading routes on and off the island. Finally, then, after some weeks of coasting, I was headed inland, paralleling the route taken by the Indian-built railroad, though off in bush which would have been more like the unspoilt grassland which they were expected to pioneer.
* The currency of this myth in Shakespeare’s time is demonstrated by the inclusion of the priest-king in the extended pilgrimage planned by Benedick to avoid having to speak to Beatrice: ‘I will go on the slightest errand now to the Antipodes that you can devise to send me on. I will fetch you a tooth-picker now from the furthest inch of Asia, bring you the length of Prester John’s foot, fetch you a hair off the Great Cham’s beard, do you any embassage to the pigmies, rather than hold three words’ conference with this harpy’ (Much Ado about Nothing, II.i.230–35).
* When in his 1906 novel Benita Rider Haggard returned once more to his favourite storyline of wealth hidden in the African continent, he is forced south to the Zambezi for an uncharted territory in which to set his story. This novel, in which the treasure hunter mesmerizes an African boy in order to dredge from his memory the whereabouts of buried gold from early Portuguese travellers, gives some taste of the complex way in which European legends of Africa blended with occultist fashions in the fin de siècle imagination.
* Patterson would go on, in the course of an extraordinary life, to lead the first Jewish fighting force since biblical times into the Battle of Gallipoli, and to serve as godfather to a future Israeli Prime Minister, Binyamin Netanyahu.
5
NAIROBI
Expats, Emigrés and Exile
SHYLOCK:
What judgment shall I dread, doing no wrong?
You have among you many a purchased slave,
Which like your asses and your dogs and mules
You use in abject and in slavish parts
Because you bought them. Shall I say to you,
‘Let them be free; marry them to your heirs!
Why sweat they under burdens? Let their beds
Be as soft as yours, and let their palates
Be seasoned with such viands’? You will answer,
‘The slaves are ours.’ So I do answer you:
The pound of flesh which I demand of him
Is dearly bought. ’tis mine, and I will have it.
If you deny me, fie upon your law:
There is no force in the decrees of Venice.
I stand for judgement. Answer! Shall I have it?
The Merchant of Venice (IV.i.89–103)
The railways provided for the mass transportation of people and goods into the East African interior, a change whose most striking effect would be the transformation of the Kenyan highlands into industrial farms of a quasi-mythical richness, which would be jealously guarded by the European settlers who staked their claims in the early years of the twentieth century. As anyone knows who has spent time in the Kenyan uplands, the soil is more forcefully present there than is believable on first acquaintance. The red murram dust coats everything in the dry season, silts into shoes and under windows and powders dogs; and in the wet season, when rains are announced by the rising scent of wet earth long before any drops are heard or felt, the same clay makes everywhere ochre-coloured sculptures out of the doughy mud, with tyre ruts and shoeprints baked hard by the soon returning sun. The soil is also dauntingly fertile, sprouting with deep green at every pore, and making a pitiful mess of any tarmac laid over it.
The brute forces of soil and steam transportation may have transformed East Africa, but it was the way in which the railway allowed decadence to blossom in the wilderness which most caught the imagination of the world outside. Evelyn Waugh wonderfully captures this fantastical realm in his account of his short stay in 1930. After leaving Mombasa on the night train, he writes:
It was a novel sensation, after so many weeks, not to be sweating. Next morning I changed from white drill to grey flannel. We arrived at Nairobi a little before lunch time, I took a taxi out to the Muthaiga Club. There was no room for me there, but the secretary had been told of my coming and I found I was already a temporary member. In the bar were several people I had met in the [ship] Explorateur Grandidier, and some I knew in London. They were drinking pink gin in impressive quantities. Someone said, ‘You mustn’t think Kenya is always like this.’ I found myself involved in a luncheon party. We went on together to the races. […]
Someone took me to a marquee where we drank champagne. When I wanted to pay for my round the barman gave me a little piece of paper to sign and a cigar.
We went back to Muthaiga and drank champagne out of a silver cup which someone had just won.
Someone said, ‘You mustn’t think Kenya is always like this.’
There was a young man in a sombrero hat, trimmed with snake skin. He stopped playing dice, at which he had just dropped twenty-five pounds, and asked me to come to a dinner party at Torr’s. Raymond and I went back there to change.
On the way up we stopped in the bar to have a cocktail. A man in an orange shirt asked if we either of us wanted to fight. We both said we did. He said, ‘Have a drink instead.’
That evening it was a very large dinner-party, taking up all one side of the ballroom at Torr’s. The young lady next to me said, ‘You mustn’t think that Kenya is always like this.’
After some time we went on to Muthaiga.
There was a lovely American called Kiki, whom I had met before. She said, ‘You’ll like Kenya. It’s always like this.’1
Even Waugh, the portraitist par excellence of London’s Roaring Twenties, was impressed by the bohemian grandeur of the so-called Happy Valley set, of whom Raymond de Trafford (mentioned here) was a key member.
The most famous accounts of this world, however, come from the pen of Karen Blixe
n, who arrived in 1913 from Denmark to join her soon-to-be-ex-husband, Baron Blixen, and to set up a coffee farm, within the grounds of which I grew up. Blixen’s coffee farm was plagued by problems (starting with being planted in the wrong area) and she left in 1931 after it fell into bankruptcy. There was tender irony, then, in the fact that some of her coffee bushes could still be found in our garden, resilient against the regrown forest in the way that they had not been for Blixen. Though not quite as remote from Nairobi town as when Blixen was in residence, the area named ‘Karen’ after her was still relatively wild when I grew up there: our house was a fair drive down a steep dirt track from the potholed Mbagathi Ridge road on which Blixen’s farmhouse sits, and was regularly only accessible on foot during the rains. The breeze-block bungalow, which was a palace for me from the moment that we arrived to find it overrun with lizards, clung to one side of a valley densely wooded on either side, still the habitat of Sykes monkeys, miniature suni and duiker antelope, the occasional leopard, and the tree hyraxes that scream at night like a strangled child. At the bottom of the valley the Mbagathi River seeped through a sedge of papyrus swamp and eucalyptus groves, though at times it broke free of the swamp and made rills where we caught crayfish and built childish dams. The eucalyptus leaves, tough and green like scales of oxydized copper, clattered together and mingled with the river sound to make a noise only describable by one of Homer’s greatest descriptive turns, when he calls Mount Pelion ‘εινοσιϕυλλον’, ‘ashiver with leaves’.2 Herodotus had a tale about the tribes who lived near the cataract of the Nile and who were so inured to the deafening roar of the river that they could not hear it any more. He didn’t, perhaps, consider that the same people would hear its absence anywhere else.
Shakespeare in Swahililand Page 11
