Shakespeare in Swahililand

by Edward Wilson-Lee

  The following libraries and archives have provided indispensable materials, as well as guidance and information during the course of my research: the Commonwealth and Rare Books Rooms at Cambridge University Library; the Rhodes House Library in Oxford; the Zanzibar National Archives; the Tanzania National Archives; the Kenya National Archives; the Uganda National Archives; the Makerere University Archives; the Nova Scotia Archives; the Archive of the National Maritime Museum; the Archive of the Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland; the Karen Blixen Museet; the Huntington Library; the British Library, including the technicians at the Sound Archive; the SOAS library; the Library of Congress; the library of the University of Michigan.

  Finally, there are two debts which should be acknowledged last. The first of these is to Ambrogio Caiani, who encouraged me to write this up as a book in the first place, and who has been a great supporter since. The last is to my wife, Kelcey, whose idea this really was, and who, as well as reading innumerable drafts, saved me from my constant instincts to ruin it.

  References

  Prelude: Beauty out of Place

  1. They did, it should be said, count Castilian, Mexican and Argentinian Spanish as three different languages, as well as making ‘Hip Hop’ its own tongue, in order to make the advertising slogan work.

  2. W. H. Auden, The Complete Works, vol. 3: Prose, 1949–55, ed. Edward Mendelson (Faber and Faber, 2008), p. 159.

  3. The term is used by Alamin M. Mazrui in ‘Shakespeare in Africa: Between English and Swahili Literature’, Research in African Literatures, vol. 27, no. 1 (1996), p. 68, and has seemed a convenient shorthand for the geographical area covered by this book; the term is not, of course, without its problems, defining as it does a broad region in the terms of a local culture which owes its significance within wider eastern Africa to colonial history – though the cultural, political and social coherence of this region are themselves to a large extent a product of the same history.

  1. The Lake Regions: Shakespeare and the Explorers

  1. Pliny the Elder, Natural History: A Selection, trans. John F. Healey (Penguin Classics, 1991), p. 35.

  2. Adam Phillips, ‘Freud’s Idols’, London Review of Books, vol. 12, no. 18 (27 September 1990), pp. 24–6; Albert Hourani, A History of the Arab Peoples (Faber and Faber, 1992), ch. 16, pp. 265–8. See Tim Jeal, Explorers of the Nile: The Triumph and Tragedy of a Great Victorian Adventure (Faber and Faber, 2010), pp. 13–19, for Livingstone’s response to the resistance of the Nile to discovery. For Murchison’s presidential address, see Ian Cameron, To the Farthest Ends of the Earth: The History of the Royal Geographical Society, 1830–1980 (Macdonald, 1980), pp. 76–9.

  3. For the British ambivalence on the benefits of the colonies, see Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (1776), bk IV, ch. vii, ‘Of Colonies’; Gladstone’s ‘Midlothian Speeches’ (for instance, the opening speech of the Midlothian Campaign in Gladstone’s Speeches, ed. Arthur Tilney Bassett (Methuen and Co., 1916), pp. 570–72; Mira Matikkala, Empire and Imperial Ambition: Liberty, Englishness, and Anti-Imperialism in Late Victorian Britain (I. B. Tauris, 2011), pt I, ch. 1. On the age of tycoon-philanthropists who sponsored these expeditions, see (for instance) John S. Galbraith, Mackinnon and East Africa, 1878–1895: A Study in the New Imperialism (Cambridge University Press, 1972), and Charles Miller, The Lunatic Express: An Entertainment in Imperialism (Macdonald and Co., 1972), pp. 172–6.

  4. Richard Francis Burton, Personal Narrative of a Pilgrimage to Al-Madinah and Mecca (Longman, 1857), pp. 7–8. See also Burton’s defence of travelling in disguise in the Preface to the third edition (1879), reproduced in the Memorial Edition (Tylson and Edwards, 1893), vol. I, pp. xix–xxvi.

  5. Richard Burton, Zanzibar: City, Island, and Coast (1872), 2 vols, vol. II, pp. 388–9. For further examples of Burton’s Shakespeare quotations in his accounts of his East African expeditions, see, for example, The Lake Regions of Central Africa: A Picture of Exploration (Longman, Green, Longman, Roberts, 1860), vol. I, pp. 65, 163, 338; vol. II, pp. 89, 204, etc. Burton does not include Shakespeare among the list of ‘miscellaneous works’ in the Lake Regions of Central Africa (vol. I, p. 155) – these are all linguistic, navigational and ethnographic treatises – but he makes it clear in his later accounts that Shakespeare was one of the few non-functional texts that accompanied them on the trip.

  6. See Alan H. Jutzi, ‘Burton and His Library’, in In Search of Richard Burton: Papers from a Huntington Library Symposium, ed. Alan H. Jutzi (Huntington Library, 1993), pp. 85–106. Burton’s copy of the Sonnets is now held as part of the Burton Library Collection at the Huntington Library in San Marino, California. I am very grateful to Alan Jutzi of the Rare Books Department for his guidance on the Collection and for sending me copies of relevant pages of Burton’s Sonnets.

  7. Lake Regions of Central Africa, vol. I, p. 338.

  8. Ibid., vol. II, p. 204.

  9. Theodore Roosevelt, African Game Trails: An Account of the African Wanderings of an American Hunter-Naturalist (John Murray, 1910), pp. 24–5.

  10. Karen Blixen, Out of Africa (1937; Penguin Classics, 2001), p. 195.

  11. ‘The Pigskin Library’, Outlook, 30 April 1910, pp. 967–70. C. W. Eliot’s opposing selection of the greatest books, originally known as ‘Dr Eliot’s Five Foot Shelf of Books’, soon afterwards became the Harvard Classics series; see his ‘Editor’s Introduction’ to The Harvard Classics (P. F. Collier and Son, 1909). The Harvard Classics are now available to download for free online.

  12. Roosevelt, African Game Trails, Appendix F, pp. 569–75, at p. 570.

  13. Walter Montague Kerr, The Far Interior: A Narrative of Travel and Adventure from the Cape of Good Hope across the Zambesi to the Lake Regions of Central Africa (2 vols, 1886), vol. I, p. 121. For other examples of travellers who took Shakespeare with them on East African travels, see (for instance) George Francis Scott Elliot, A Naturalist in mid-Africa: Being an Account of a Journey to the Mountains of the Moon and Tanganyika (A. D. Innes, 1896), pp. 65 and 369; The Life and Letters of Arthur Fraser Sim, Priest in the Universities’ Mission to Central Africa (1896), p. 109.

  14. Thomas Heazle Parke, My Personal Experiences in Equatorial Africa, as Medical Officer of the Emin Pasha Relief Expedition (Sampson, Low, Marston & Co., 1891), p. 384.

  15. Lawrence F. Abbott, ed., The Letters of Archie Butt, Personal Aide to President Roosevelt (William Heinemann, 1924), p. 86, quoted in Patricia O’Toole, When Trumpets Call: Theodore Roosevelt after the White House (Simon & Schuster, 2005), p. 58.

  16. Marjorie Hessell Tiltman, interviewing Gertrude Benham in Women in Modern Adventure (Harrap & Co., 1935), p. 90.

  17. Parke, My Personal Experiences, p. 8; I have added the italics.

  18. Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness (1899; Penguin Classics, 2007), p. 60.

  19. William G. Stairs, expedition diary, microfilm 11028, Nova Scotia Archives; also printed in African Exploits: The Diaries of William Stairs, 1887–92, ed. Roy McLaren (Liverpool University Press, 1998), p. 218. I am very grateful to the staff of the Nova Scotia Archives for sending me copies of the relevant pages of Captain Stairs’s diary.

  20. Arthur H. Neumann, Elephant Hunting in East Equatorial Africa (Rowland Ward, 1898), p. 115.

  21. Except where otherwise indicated, my account here is indebted to Tim Jeal’s authoritative biography, Stanley: The Impossible Life of Africa’s Greatest Explorer (Faber, 2007).

  22. See Jeal, Stanley, p. 254, and H. M. Stanley: Unpublished Letters, ed. Maurice Albert (W. & R. Chambers, 1957), pp. 87–8.

  23. See Jeal, Stanley, p. 198, and Norman R. Bennett (ed.), Stanley’s Despatches to the New York Herald, 1871–77, p. 387, as well as the account in Henry Morton Stanley, Through the Dark Continent (S. J. Low, 1880), vol. II, pp. 385–6.

  24. Stanley, Through the Dark Continent, vol. II, pp. 385–6. Both of these accounts strangely insist on the reader knowing that he took the Chandos edition with him, something
that I have not yet been able to explain. Answers on a postcard, please.

  25. Richard Stanley and Alan Neame (eds), The Exploration Diaries of H. M. Stanley: Now First Published from the Original Manuscripts (William Kimber, 1961), pp. 192–3.

  26. See the discussion of cannibalism in early modern New World reports in Montaigne’s essay ‘On the Cannibals’, and in David Abulafia, The Discovery of Mankind: Atlantic Encounters in the Age of Columbus (Yale University Press, 2009), pp. 3–9, 187–92, et passim; Anthony Pagden, European Encounters with the New World (Yale University Press, 1993), ‘Introduction’ and ch. 1; Stephen Greenblatt, Marvellous Possessions: The Wonder of the New World (Oxford University Press, 1991), ch. 3 et passim.

  27. Rabelais proposes laughter as a defining human quality in the prologue to Gargantua (Caliban is ‘merry’ and ‘jocund’ at III.ii.111–12), and the love of wine appears as a version of enlightenment throughout his books and related writings (indeed, the parallel between Caliban’s worship of the bottle and the cult of the Divine Bottle in Le Cinquiesme Livre is interesting and – to my knowledge – unnoted). On the appreciation of music as a sign of higher intelligence, see Elizabeth Eva Leach, Sung Birds: Music, Nature, and Poetry in the Later Middle Ages (Cornell University Press, 2007), pp. 1–11.

  2. Zanzibar: Shakespeare and the Slaveboy Printworks

  1. There is some ambiguity in the archival evidence about when the Hadithi was first printed and even who was given the main credit for the translation (as well as whether the original edition was entitled Hadithi Kiingereza or Hadithi za Kiingereza; I have chosen to standardize it here as the latter, following Marcel van Spaandonk’s Practical and Systematical Swahili Bibliography (E. J. Brill, 1965), §700, p. 47). While all of the printed historiographies of Swahili literature are consistent in attributing the translation to Steere (see, for instance, Rollins’s History of Swahili Prose, p. 62), and the fact of Steere’s translation has become common knowledge among those few who are interested in this area, a few documents in the Archive of the Universities’ Mission to Central Africa attribute the translation instead to A. C. Madan, who was resident at the Zanzibar mission from the late 1870s and who revised a number of Steere’s works for publication; see UMCA D(8)3/75 (confusingly, this box is also labelled ‘c’, and there is confusion in the catalogue, where it is listed as ‘3’ in the index, but the page appears to be missing from the detailed catalogue) and the List of Swahili Books Published by the Universities’ Mission with the Names of the Translators (Zanzibar: Universities’ Mission Printing Office, 1905), p. 8; it is unclear whether the mention here of ‘Hadithi Ingereza 4’ is a reference to the fact that there are four tales or to this being the fourth edition. It should be noted that it is only the 1900 edition of the Hadithi that is attributed to Madan, and that by the time that the attribution is made Steere was long deceased and Madan had been away from Zanzibar for nearly a decade. Both Steere and Madan are frustratingly vague when referring to their translations and publications in their letters (see, for instance, UMCA A(VI)A, f. 860v), each referring repeatedly to ‘my translations’ without specifying which one(s) they mean and, in the case of Madan, often referring to ‘his’ publications when these are actually revisions or expansions of works by Steere. In the absence of strong evidence for overturning the attribution of the works to Steere and assigning the initial publication date to 1867, I stick with the established chronology here.

  2. See R. M. Heanley, A Memoir of Edward Steere, D.D., LL.D.: Third Missionary Bishop in Central Africa (George Bell, 1888), p. 163.

  3. Karen Blixen, Out of Africa (1937; Penguin Classics, 2001), p. 50.

  4. Some details can be provided about these translations after it was transferred to the Sheldon Press imprint of the Society for Promotion of Christian Knowledge, though the archives of the SPCK are uncatalogued and so information is rather patchy. The records of the SPCK Foreign Translation Committee (Cambridge University Library) record the following editions: a new 1938 edition of The Merchant of Venice in Swahili (Biashara was Venisi), 5000 copies, p. 336; a 1940 edition (61 pp., illustrated, 6d) of Tales from Shakespeare (number of copies unspecified, though 5000 was the usual number for this kind of book), p. 378. SPCK MS A16/8. The same volume (for instance, p. 240) shows that Swahili was by far the biggest market for the SPCK, selling well over 100,000 volumes a year in the 1930s and ’40s. In addition to the 1940 edition, the SPCK archive in the Cambridge University Library holds (as yet uncatalogued) editions from 1951, 1961, 1963, 1964, 1966, 1967 and 1972. I am very grateful to Claire Welford-Elkin of the Rare Books Room for unearthing these for me.

  5. Hadithi za Kiingereza (Sheldon Press, 1940), p. 22.

  6. Anjili kwa Yohana (Cambridge University Press for the British and Foreign Bible Society, 1875), p. [3].

  7. Edward Steere, Some Account of the Town of Zanzibar (1869), p. 6.

  8. Tim Jeal, Livingstone (Heinemann, 1973), ch. 7.

  9. Heanley, Memoir of Edward Steere, p. 62.

  10. The Ware Collection and various newspaper cuttings, British Online Archives img. 781. www.britishonlinearchives.co.uk/browse.php?did=72542cE1 (accessed 18 February 2015).

  11. Timothy Holmes, Journey to Livingstone: Exploration of an Imperial Myth (Canongate, 1993), p. 273.

  12. Steere, Some Account of the Town of Zanzibar, p. 13.

  13. Heanley, Memoir of Edward Steere, pp. 79–80.

  14. An inventory of April 1863 suggests that Tozer and Steere brought the printing press with them on their voyage from England, and left it in Cape Town to be sent on to them at a later date (UMCA Archive, Rhodes House Library, A1(I)A 2, fol. 270); the press was certainly up and running by April 1865, when he requests a box of printing ink and says that the one he has is nearly finished (UMCA A1(I)A/2 fol. 275). Steere mentions Owen Makanyassa as the head of the print operation in a letter of October 1879 (Heanley, Memoir of Edward Steere, p. 248), but Samuel Speere suggests that he was in charge of the press as early as 1872 (Suffolk Boy in East Africa, 86). An account of the conditions of the printing house from slightly later can be found in G. W. Mallendar’s ‘Missionary Life in Central Africa’ (UMCA Archive), available at www.britishonlinearchives.co.uk/browse.php?did=72542cE3 (accessed 14 September 2015), pp. 28–9.

  15. Central Africa: A Monthly Record of the Work of the Universities’ Mission, 1 January 1886, p. 7.

  16. Heanley, Memoir of Edward Steere, p. 49.

  17. Ibid., p. 101.

  18. Abdulrazak Gurnah, By the Sea (Bloomsbury, 2002), pp. 77–8. A similar quasi-autobiographical memory is repeated and reflected upon in his novel Desertion (Bloomsbury, 2006), pp. 145–7 and 215.

  19. Zanzibar National Archives MS CB1/5, p. 32.

  20. Central Africa, 1934, p. 166.

  21. The other interesting conclusion that can be drawn from this is that the Hadithi was still in circulation in 1934, despite not yet having been taken up and printed in the large Sheldon Press editions (which began in 1940); either further, as yet undocumented editions were printed in Zanzibar (or elsewhere), or the people of Mbweni were still cherishing flimsy pamphlets that were now a half-century old.

  22. Heanley, Memoir of Edward Steere, p. 80.

  23. For a discussion of the experience of print, see Marshall McLuhan, The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man (University of Toronto Press, 1962), and Jonathan Sawday, Engines of the Imagination: Renaissance Culture and the Rise of the Machine (Routledge, 2007), ch. 3.

  24. Letter to John Festing, July 1872, UMCA Archive, Rhodes House; digital image www.britishonlinearchives.co.uk/browse.php?did=72542cB01 (Letters and Images Relating to Dr Steere Part 1, img. 145).

  25. UMCA D(8)/2/7, fol. 7. See also fol. 17v for ‘All the world’s a stage’.

  26. Heanley, Memoir of Edward Steere, p. 146.

  3. Interlude. The Swahili Coast: Player-Kings of Eastern Africa

  1. There is an extensive literature on African appropriations of The Tempest, including Rob Nixon’s ‘Caribbean a
nd African Appropriations of The Tempest’, Critical Inquiry, vol. 13, pp. 557–78, and Thomas Cartelli’s ‘Prospero in Africa: The Tempest as Colonial Text and Pretext’, in J. Howard and M. O’Connor (eds), Shakespeare Reproduced: The Text in History and Ideology (Methuen, 1987), pp. 99–115. See also, however, Jerry Brotton’s critique of the anachronistic mapping of colonialist discourses onto the early modern text in ‘“This Tunis, sir, was Carthage”: Contesting Colonialism in The Tempest’, in A. Loomba and M. Orkin (eds), Post-Colonial Shakespeares (Routledge, 2003), pp. 23–42.

  2. The figures about the MV Spice Islander disaster used here are from a report by the Tanzanian firm IPP Media (www.ippmedia.com/frontend/index.php?l=34437); figures from the Zanzibar prosecutors’ case put the figure slightly lower at 2740 in March 2013.

  3. ‘Ambrose Gunthio’, ‘A Running Commentary on the Hamlet of 1603’, in The European Magazine, and London Review, vol. I, no. 4 (December 1825), pp. 339–47, at p. 347.

  4. Samuel Purchas, Purchas his pilgrimes in five books (1625), vol. III, no. 6, §2–3, pp. 191–3.

  5. The fullest recent account of this controversy can be found in Bernice W. Kilman’s article ‘At Sea about Hamlet at Sea: A Detective Story’, printed in Shakespeare Quarterly vol. 62, no. 2 (2011), pp. 180–204. Kilman’s article, while compelling in many respects in its quest to prove the entries to be forged and to be forged by Collier, does not entirely convince that Collier would have undertaken such an audacious forgery only to then let it wallow in obscurity for forty or fifty years before gaining general traction among Shakespeare scholars. While Collier’s most recent and authoritative biographers, Arthur Freeman and Janet Ing Freeman, do note several instances of Collier forgery which do seem to have been undertaken with no view to having the evidence widely known and generally accepted, they nevertheless do not see Collier’s hand in the publication of the 1825–6 Gunthio article which gives the suspect Keeling entries for the first time. Further complexity is added to the story by the fact that the entries were published again, in a slightly variant form, in Thomas Rundall’s Narratives of Voyages towards the North-West, in Search of a Passage to Cathay and India, 1496 to 1631 (1849) for the Hakluyt Society, and it is not clear how Rundall came by the entries or why they exist in a variant form in his version.