Abuk sits with the riverbank behind him and I can see beyond to where the massive stern of a half-sunk ferry sticks out of the water. I cannot help but think of Shakespeare’s lines about his strange and isolated nation from Cymbeline
… I’th’ world’s volume
Our Britain seems as of it, but not in’t:
In a great pool a swan’s nest.
(III.iv.137–9)
While the sunken ferry often has a fishing boat moored to it, it becomes clear over the ensuing days that at least one fisherman has taken up residence in the wreck.
Appendix
A Partial List of Theatrical Performances Licensed in the Official Gazette of the East Africa Protectorate, 1915–1916*
An Act of 16 October 1912 required all stage plays and cinematograph exhibitions to be licensed by the colonial authorities. This is a list of licences published in the official organ of the East Africa Protectorate between February 1915 and June 1916; it is not intended to be exhaustive, but merely suggestive of the scope and range of Indian theatre being performed at this time. Although some of the Shakespeare plays are given their English titles, it is clear from their inclusion in long lists of Indian-language plays that almost all of these must have been Indian translations as well. I have tried as far as possible to identify those other plays which come from Shakespearean sources, though it is almost certain that I have missed a large number of these; the corpus of Indian Shakespeare translations is enormous and even if the poorly transliterated titles in the Gazette could be correctly identified, there is no authoritative guide.
* The relevant pages of the Official Gazette of the East Africa Protectorate are 14 April, 1915 (p. 281), 7 July, 1915 (p. 564), 13 October, 1915 (p. 831), 12 January, 1916 (p. 16), 12 April, 1916 (p. 277) and 26 July, 1916 (p. 651).
Picture Section
Captain Richard Francis Burton, who read Shakespeare extensively with his future nemesis John Hanning Speke during their expedition to find the source of the Nile. (Photo by Rischgitz/Getty Images)
Henry Morton Stanley in a carte de visite portrait staged at the London Stereoscopic and Photographic Company (1872) with his servant Ndugu M’hali, whom he re-named ‘Kalulu’. (Smithsonian Institution Archives, Image SIL28-277-01)
Teddy Roosevelt with members of his 1909–10 East African hunting safari, including his son Kermit (seated, right). President Roosevelt clutches a book from the 55-volume ‘pigskin library’ that accompanied him on his expedition (Smithsonian Institution Archives, Image SIA2009-1371)
Edward Steere, Third Missionary Bishop of Central Africa. Steere’s press on the island of Zanzibar produced many of the first volumes printed in Swahili, including the Hadithi za Kiingereza (a translation of Charles and Mary Lamb’s Tales from Shakespeare). (George Bell, 1888)
A procession announcing a performance of Khoon ka Khoon, a translation of Hamlet by Mehadi Hasan, winds through the streets of Nairobi around 1930. The photo is provided by his granddaughter Neera Kapur-Dromson. (Reproduced with kind permission of Neera Kapur-Dromson)
A procession announcing a performance of Khoon ka Khoon, a translation of Hamlet by Mehadi Hasan, winds through the streets of Nairobi around 1930. The photos are provided by his granddaughter Neera Kapur-Dromson. (Reproduced with kind permission of Neera Kapur-Dromson)
Hiralal Kapur (left) in his costume for this production. The photo is provided by his granddaughter Neera Kapur-Dromson. (Reproduced with kind permission of Neera Kapur-Dromson)
Karen Blixen in the first photo she sent back to Denmark of her household near Nairobi. Farah, with whom she recounts discussing The Merchant of Venice, is seated second from left. (The Royal Library, Copenhagen, The Rungstedlund Collection)
Apollo Milton Obote, the future first President of Uganda, in the title role of the 1948 production of Julius Caesar at Makerere University. Cassius, kneeling, is played by A. F. Mpanga, who would become legal adviser to Obote’s government. (Makerere University Library Archive)
A production of Coriolanus staged at Makerere University in 1951, with Assiah Jabir in the role of Volumnia. (Makerere University Library Archive)
A production of Coriolanus staged at Makerere University in 1951, with Assiah Jabir in the role of Volumnia. (Makerere University Library Archive)
Julius Kambarage Nyerere, the first President of Tanzania, photographed in 1960 during the struggle for independence from British colonial rule. Nyerere’s Swahili translations of Julius Caesar and The Merchant of Venice were undertaken during his first five years in office. (© Hulton-Deutsch Collection/CORBIS)
Che Guevara in disguise, crossing Lake Tanganyika to fight in the Congo. Che spent several months recovering from his Congolese expedition in a secret room at the top of the Cuban embassy in Dar es Salaam. (Photo by AFP/Stringer/Getty Images)
Emperor Haile Selassie I parades the streets of Addis with his entourage in 1971. (Author’s collection)
Image from the production of Tsegaye Gebre Medhin’s Otello (1963). Othello is played by Awelaččaw Däjäné. (National Theatre of Ethiopia)
Image from the production of Tsegaye Gebre Medhin’s Hamlét (1967). Täsfäye Gässäsä (standing, with prominent shoulder clasps) plays Hamlet. (National Theatre of Ethiopia)
Standing over the bodies of Imogen and Cloten in the Juba Arabic production of Cymbeline staged at Shakespeare’s Globe in 2012. (The Globe Theatre)
A Note on Sources and Further Reading
While the sources for specific facts and quotations can be found in the endnotes, where I have also pointed towards some of the major scholarship and criticism relevant to individual events and texts, it seemed useful here to provide a general overview of the sources used in writing this history, as well as some guidance for those who would like to read further about the subject of each particular chapter.
The only attempt prior to this to deal with Shakespeare in East Africa at any length was an important article by Alamin M. Mazrui entitled ‘Shakespeare in Africa: Between English and Swahili Literature’, in Research in African Literatures, vol. 27, no. 1 (1996), 64–79. Mazrui sketches out some of the basic lineaments of the stories of Steere, Nyerere and Moi, but without the context of the use of Shakespeare by the explorers, the Indian and European settlers, or within the independence and post-independence pan-Africanist movement. The history of Shakespeare in Ethiopia is treated authoritatively by Richard Pankhurst in an article in the same journal (‘Shakespeare in Ethiopia’, Research in African Literatures, vol. 17, no. 2 (1986), 169–86), though no connection is made there with the uses of Shakespeare in the rest of Africa. Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s Decolonising the Mind (Heinemann, 1986) provides an important overview of the use of literature (and more particularly drama) in colonial education.
Over the past three decades a considerable literature has grown up treating Shakespeare and his relation to colonization – both the prehistories of English colonization which can be found in his works and the parts played by his work in colonial and post-colonial history. While this book is a highly personal account of Shakespeare’s impact on one specific location (and a location that has, I believe, certain historical peculiarities), it is of course related to wider debates on the role played by culture (and Shakespeare more specifically) in the geopolitics of the colonial and post-colonial periods; for obvious reasons, a book for the general reader could not be expressed in the highly recondite theoretical terminology developed in this scholarship, though it is perhaps appropriate here to say briefly what the relation of this book is to that scholarship. Many of the stories told here fall into that category of cultural ‘hybridity’ which is seen by some to be characteristic of the colonial and post-colonial condition, and indeed some of these episodes (as well as the narrative arc as a whole) suggest the capacity of this hybridity to supplement and interrupt discourses of power. The best place to start for those interested in reading more about this is Ania Loomba and Martin Orkin’s volume Post-Colonial Shakespeares (Routledge, 2003), which also provides
a useful introduction to other literature on the subject; Peter Hulme and William H. Sherman’s ‘The Tempest’ and Its Travels (Reaktion, 2000) is also useful in demonstrating the immense complexities that can be drawn out of both the contexts and afterlives of a single play. Those wishing to read further into theories of cultural exchange and hybridity should start with Homi K. Bhabha’s The Location of Culture: Critical Theory and the Postcolonial Perspective (Routledge, 1991) and Kwame Anthony Appiah’s In My Father’s House (Oxford University Press, 1992).
There are several good and accessible general histories of East Africa in this period which helped to give a backdrop to this history and which will serve anyone wishing to know the history more generally: Thomas Pakenham’s The Scramble for Africa (Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1991) covers the nineteenth-century exploration and exploitation, Charles Miller’s The Lunatic Express: An Entertainment in Imperialism (Macdonald and Co., 1972) provides a good introduction to the early social history of eastern Africa in service of telling the story of the Uganda railroad, and Martin Meredith’s The State of Africa: Fifty Years of a Continent in Crisis (Free Press, 2005) gives a pithy distillation of African political and economic history since independence. For those interested in the literary history of East Africa, Simon Gikandi’s Columbia Guide to East African Literature in English since 1945 (Columbia University Press, 2007) is a good place to start.
Tim Jeal’s excellent biographies Livingstone (Heinemann, 1973) and Stanley: The Impossible Life of Africa’s Greatest Explorer (Faber, 2007), as well as his group biography Explorers of the Nile: The Triumph and Tragedy of a Great Victorian Adventure (Faber and Faber, 2010), give an excellent introduction both to these complex characters and to the literature of exploration more generally; the latter is more thorough than Alan Moorehead’s The White Nile (Hamish Hamilton, 1960; rev. edn 1972), though Moorehead’s book remains a classic of the genre. Edward Rice’s biography of Captain Sir Richard Francis Burton: The Secret Agent Who Made the Pilgrimage to Mecca, Discovered the Kama Sutra, and Brought the Arabian Nights to the West (Scribner’s, 1990) is also highly readable.
There is no modern biography of Edward Steere beyond the short life in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography; the nineteenth-century A Memoir of Edward Steere, D.D., LL.D.: Third Missionary Bishop in Central Africa (George Bell, 1888) by R. M. Heanley is rather dated, but is nevertheless readable and available for free online. For those interested in in-depth research on the Universities’ Mission to Central Africa, the papers lodged in Rhodes House became available in digital facsimile during the final stages of this project, and can be accessed through the British Online Archives. Derek Peterson’s Creative Writing: Translation, Bookkeeping, and the Work of the Imagination in Colonial Kenya (Heinemann, 2004) provides a much more detailed and scholarly consideration of the relationship between literacy and colonialism in an East African context than was possible here. D. S. Higgins’s Rider Haggard: The Great Storyteller (Cassell, 1980) is the best biography available, and Wendy Katz’s Rider Haggard and the Fiction of Empire (Cambridge University Press, 1987) is also useful. There are no modern accounts of the other adventurers treated in Chapter 3, beyond the brief vignettes provided in Miller’s The Lunatic Express.
The history of Indian settlement in eastern Africa is woefully undertreated, though there are good foundations laid in several works by the late Cynthia Salvadori (We Came in Dhows (3 vols; Paperchase Kenya Ltd, 1996) and Through Open Doors: A View of Asian Cultures in Kenya (Kenway, 1989)); Neera Kapur-Dromson’s From Jhelum to Tana (Penguin Books, 2007) provides an enjoyable personal account of one family’s immigration to East Africa, as well as a sense of general atmosphere. There is welcome new work on the Indian theatre in the period dealt with in this chapter, among which Kathryn Hansen’s Stages of Life: Indian Theatre Autobiographies (Anthem Press, 2011) stands out.
While Blixen is her own best biographer, the key work on the political and historical contexts of this period is Bruce Berman and John Lonsdale’s two-volume Unhappy Valley: Conflict in Kenya and Africa (Heinemann Kenya, 1991). There are also interesting studies looking at life on Blixen’s farm from the perspective of her servants, including Peter Beard’s Longing for Darkness (Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1975) and Tove Hussein’s Africa’s Song of Karen Blixen (T. Hussein, 1998).
There are no good widely available sources on the history of Makerere University and on East African education more generally, though a general sense of the atmosphere is easily gained from the novels of Ngugi wa Thiong’o, M. J. Vassanji (especially The In-Between Life of Vikram Lall (Doubleday, 2003)), and the writings of Paul Theroux. David Johnson’s Shakespeare and South Africa (Clarendon Press, 1996) is more limited in scope than the title suggests, but provides a broadly analogous account of the use of Shakespeare in the colonial education system. David Schalkwyk’s Hamlet’s Dreams: The Robben Island Shakespeare (Bloomsbury, 2013), on Mandela’s ‘Robben Island Shakespeare’, is an excellent introduction to the complexities of that particular episode and to South African prison literature more generally, and might be used as a way to approach East African prison writings by Ngugi, Jack Mpanje and others.
The excellent coverage of Nyerere’s pre-political life in Thomas Molony’s Nyerere: The Early Years (James Currey, 2014) is much harder to come by in accounts of his later life, and it is to be hoped that Molony will continue his account in a companion volume. Readers are otherwise reliant on picking through various European eyewitness accounts of this period in Tanzanian history (such as Judith Listowel’s The Making of Tanganyika (Chatto and Windus, 1965) and Charles Meek’s Brief Authority: A Memoir of Colonial Administration in Tanganyika (Radcliffe Press, 2011)) and hagiographical biographies, both of which have severe shortcomings.
Richard Pankhurst’s The Ethiopians: A History (Blackwell, 1998) and Ryszard Kapuściński’s The Emperor: Downfall of an Autocrat (Quartet, 1983) provide excellent and highly readable accounts of Haile Selassie’s last years and of Ethiopian history more generally. There is no good general account of the early Portuguese explorations in Abyssinia, but Francisco Álvares’ account is available in a mid-twentieth-century edition (1961) by the Hakluyt Society (The Prester John of the Indies) and is generally enjoyable.
David Eggers’ What is the What (Hamish Hamilton, 2007), a ghost-written account of the life of Valentino Achak Deng – one of the Sudanese ‘Lost Boys’ who made their way to America – provides an excellent (if often harrowing) introduction to recent Sudanese history.
Unless otherwise specified, all quotations from Shakespeare’s works are taken from Stephen Greenblatt et al. (eds), The Norton Shakespeare (3rd edn; W. W. Norton and Company, 2015).
Acknowledgements
This book has benefited from the expertise, advice, encouragement and couches of an almost interminable list of individuals, and I can only hope that those who have somehow slipped from this list will attribute my remissness, as the essayist Montaigne says, to an uncooperative memory rather than to the duties of friendship which I hold in such high regard.
My first debts of thanks go, of course, to my parents, who gave me my experiences of Africa (and much else) without much regard for the comfort of their old age; and the British Academy, who (with the help of the Sir Ernest Cassel Educational Trust) funded much of my research for this book. I am also grateful to the Master and Fellows of Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge, who have provided me with research funding and leave (not to mention gainful employment and a roof) during the writing of this book.
This book has been shepherded into its final order by an extraordinary group of people from the publishing world, from my wonderful agent Isobel Dixon and her colleagues Blake Friedmann, to Arabella Pike, Kate Tolley and the team at HarperCollins, to Mitzi Angel, Ileene Smith and John Knight at Farrar, Straus & Giroux. They have relentlessly supported this book and made invaluable suggestions for improving it.
I am grateful for the help and advice, during my African travels, of Jan Janmohammed
, Daniel Sambai and John Baptist da Silva (in Zanzibar); Neera Kapur-Dromson, Allaudin Qureshi, Tove Hussein, George Mungai, John Sibi-Okumu and Mary Epsom (in Nairobi); Derek Pomeroy, Austin Bukenya, Timothy Wangusa and Abasi Kiyimba (in Kampala), where Susan Kiguli was not only a gracious host but also provided aid in photo researching; Tony Calderbank, Philip Winter, Joseph Abuk and the South Sudan Theatre Company (in Juba); Tom Miscioscia, Meron Solomon, and Richard and Rita Pankhurst (in Addis). Shaila Mauladad-Fisher and Jaswant Vohora proved a formidable team in organizing my life in Kenya, and I am also grateful to the Vohoras for stays in Nairobi and Arusha. I am further grateful for the advice of Shernaz Cama and others linked to the Parzor Foundation for information about Parsi theatre and culture.
Back in Cambridge, I have been endlessly supported and encouraged by my colleagues in Sidney English (Chris Page, Claire Preston and Clive Wilmer). I also benefited from readings of early chapters by fellow young scholars (Jo Craigwood, Ruth Ahnert, Sarah Howe and Joe Moshenska) and by my good friend René Weis; Joe Moshenska and Clive Wilmer also later read a complete draft and provided invaluable feedback. I also benefited from help and advice, at key stages, from Emma Hunter, John Lonsdale and Paline Essah at the Centre for African Studies. Sanne Rishoj-Christensen helped me with Karen Blixen’s Danish. I am also grateful for having had the opportunity to read early versions of these chapters to audiences at the British Academy, at the Shakespeare Institute in Stratford (at the invitation of Michael Dobson), and at the Aga Khan University in London (at the invitation of Philip Wood), and for the feedback given by audiences on those occasions.
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