Shakespeare in Swahililand

by Edward Wilson-Lee

  6. Zanzibar National Archive, MS CB 1/5, p. 5.

  7. Evelyn Waugh, Remote People (1931; Penguin Classics, 2002), p. 115.

  8. The details of Rider Haggard’s life here are drawn largely from D. S. Higgins’s Rider Haggard: The Great Storyteller (Cassell, 1981), though with additional details from Peter Beresford Ellis’s H. Rider Haggard: A Voice from the Infinite (Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1978) and Tom Pocock’s Rider Haggard and the Lost Empire (Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1993).

  9. Higgins, Rider Haggard, p. 83.

  10. H. Rider Haggard, Allan Quatermain (Longmans, 1887), p. 94.

  11. See John Ruskin, Lectures on Art, Delivered before the University of Oxford in Hilary Term of 1870 (Clarendon Press, 1870), esp. pp. 27–31, where he calls upon England to ‘found colonies as fast and as far as she is able, formed of her most energetic men:– seizing every piece of fruitful waste ground she can set her foot on, and there teaching these her colonists that their chief virtue is to be fidelity to their country, and that their first aim is to be to advance the power of England by land and sea’ (p. 29).

  12. Rider Haggard, Allan Quatermain, pp. 120, 149, 174. Rider Haggard’s description of Milosis is actually reminiscent of England as it should be, as laid out in Ruskin’s The Two Paths (1859), where thirteenth-century Pisa, with its ‘dome and bell-tower, burning with white alabaster and gold’, is held up as an example of what England has lost.

  13. The story of this phenomenon in ‘high’ literature is outlined by Edward W. Said in Orientalism (Vintage, 1979), esp. pt II. ch. IV, ‘Pilgrims and Pilgrimages, British and French’.

  14. Charles Miller, The Lunatic Express: An Entertainment in Imperialism (Macdonald and Co., 1972), pp. 79–82.

  15. This footnote first appears in the cheap edition of King Solomon’s Mines (Cassell, 1898), p. 35, and appears to be a tongue-in-cheek admission that Rider Haggard himself had misremembered the source of this quote and allowed it to stand misattributed in many editions of the novel over thirteen years.

  16. Higgins, Rider Haggard, p. 74.

  17. Ibid., pp. 75–6; Ellis, Rider Haggard, pp. 204–5.

  18. The fullest account of this venture is given in an article by R. W. Beachey, ‘“Freeland”: A Socialist Experiment in East Africa – 1894’, in the Makerere Journal, vol. 2 (1959), pp. 56–68. Beachey’s account, which is based on Foreign Office correspondence, makes clear that A. S. Rogers, thought by Miller in The Lunatic Express to be the leader of the Freeland Expedition, was actually the Sub-Commissioner of the newly formed province of Tanaland. See also Miller, Lunatic Express, ch. 11.

  19. Information for the table is taken from Beachey, ‘“Freeland”’, pp. 60–61.

  20. For details of the IBEA Company, see John S. Galbraith, Mackinnon and East Africa, 1878–1895: A Study in the New Imperialism (Cambridge University Press, 1972), ch. 6.

  21. Rejection of the European spelling of the tribal name (‘Kikuyu’) in favour of a spelling that more accurately reflected correct pronunciation (‘Gikuyu’) took on a political edge at an early stage (see Jomo Kenyatta, Facing Mount Kenya: The Tribal Life of the Gikuyu, Preface). I use ‘Gikuyu’ here except when directly quoting from a source that uses the European spelling, but (to keep things simple) use ‘Gikuyu’ in place of all the various premodified versions required by that tongue (‘Mu-Gikuyu’ – a Gikuyu person; ‘A-Gikuyu’ – Gikuyu people, etc.).

  22. Sonia Cole, Leakey’s Luck: The Life of Louis Seymour Bazett Leakey (Collins, 1975), p. 55.

  23. John Boyes, John Boyes: King of the Wa-Kikuyu (Methuen, 1911), p. 29.

  24. Ibid., p. 32.

  25. The Journal, Grahamstown, South Africa, 23 December 1898, p. 3; Bulawayo Chronicle, Bulawayo, Rhodesia, 28 January 1898, p. 6.

  26. Natal Mercury Weekly Edition, 10 September 1897, p. 11.

  27. See Denis Schauffer, ‘Shakespeare Performance in Pietermaritzburg before 1914’, Shakespeare in Southern Africa, vol. 19 (2007), pp. 17–18, and the notices page of the Grahamstown Journal between 24 and 31 December 1898, for the repertoire of the Haviland–Lawrence company; they also had The Taming of the Shrew in their repertoire, but don’t appear to have played it in Durban in 1898; the Natal Mercury Weekly Edition for 27 May 1898 (p. 11) adds Hamlet to this list. The Haviland–Coleridge company is alternately referred to as the ‘Haviland–Lawrence’ company.

  28. See the Natal Mercury Weekly Edition, 2 September 1898, pp. 26–7. Schauffer appears to have mistakenly attributed the same repertoire to the Wheeler company in May–June, but the Wheeler company, primarily a comic ensemble, do not seem to have visited Durban that year. See Schauffer, ‘Shakespeare Performance’, p. 17.

  29. William Shakespeare [and Colley Cibber], The Tragical History of King Richard III as it is Acted at the Theatre Royal (London: For B. Lintott … and A. Bettesworth, 1700), p. 50.

  30. Ruskin, Lectures on Art, p. 29.

  4. Mombasa: Shakespeare, Bard of the Railroad

  1. Charles Miller, The Lunatic Express: An Entertainment in Imperialism (Macdonald and Co., 1972), p. 15.

  2. Luís de Camões, Os Lusiadas (The Lusiads), trans. Richard Francis Burton, ed. Isabel Burton (Bernhard Quaritch, 1880), pp. 37–9.

  3. A translation of the poem is given in Lieut.-Col. John Henry Patterson, The Man Eaters of Tsavo and Other East African Adventures (Macmillan, 1907), Appendix II, pp. 332–8; see also Miller’s account in Lunatic Express, pp. 318–47. I have continued to employ the term ‘Hindustani’ here as it is used in contemporary sources, as it is unclear there when Urdu and when Hindi variants are being used. Agha Hashr Kashmiri translated Shakespeare into Urdu, but in other instances the standards used are not clear.

  4. Sisir Kumar Das, ‘Shakespeare in Indian Languages’, in India’s Shakespeare, eds Poonam Trivedi and Dennis Bartholomeusz (Delaware University Press, 2005), p. 55.

  5. See, for instance, Karen Blixen’s chapter on ‘Pooran Singh’ in Out of Africa (1937; Penguin Classics, 2001), Evelyn Waugh in Remote People (1931; Penguin Classics, 2002), William Boyd’s An Ice-Cream War (Hamish Hamilton, 1982), etc.

  6. Appendix I gives a list of the plays licensed in 1915–16, with a note of the author or translator (where known) and location of performance.

  7. Once again it is the colonial administration’s impulse to control that provides us with evidence of much of the theatrical activity; the Societies Ordinance of 1952 required that all associations be registered with the authorities – in order to prevent undesirable political associations – a requirement from which the Mombasa Shakespeare Group is exempted in the Kenya Gazette of 21 March 1961. I am grateful to Allaudin Qureshi and Neera Kapur for information on the other theatrical troupes; see Neera Kapur Dromson’s From Jhelum to Tana (Penguin Books, 2007), pp. 242–3, 329.

  8. Kathryn Hansen, Stages of Life: Indian Theatre Autobiographies (Anthem Press, 2011), p. 172.

  9. For summaries of Indian versions of Shakespeare, see P. K. Yajnik, The Indian Theatre (George Allen & Unwin, 1933), pp. 125–82, and Poonam Trivedi and Dennis Bartholomeusz, India’s Shakespeare: Translation, Interpretation and Performance (University of Delaware Press), esp. Sisir Kumar Das’s chapter, ‘Shakespeare in Indian Languages’.

  10. Yajnik, Indian Theatre, pp. 156–8.

  11. ‘Shakespeare in Mombasa’, East African Standard, 22 August 1908, p. 12. Yajnik, Indian Theatre, p. 134.

  12. ‘Hindu Theatricals at Mombasa’, East African Standard, 6 June 1914, p. 4.

  13. The identification of the play as Khubsurat Bala is made by Gaurav Desai in his article ‘Asian African Literatures: Genealogies in the Making’, Research in African Literatures, vol. 42, no. 3 (2011), pp. vi–xxx (ix–x).

  14. The likely reference to Shakespeare as an ‘upstart Crow, beautified with our feathers’ occurs in Robert Greene’s Greenes groats-worth of witte (London: for William Wright, 1592), sig. F1v; see discussion of this in, among others, Arthur Schoenbaum, Shakespeare: A Documentary Life, ch. 10, and Katherine Duncan
-Jones, Shakespeare: An Ungentle Life (Methuen, 2010), ch. 2. The reference to Shakespeare’s ‘small Latine, and lesse Greeke’ comes from Ben Jonson’s prefatory poem in the First Folio, ‘To the memory of my beloved, The Author’, and is of course affectionate, if still characteristically barbed affection from the dedicated classicist Jonson.

  15. See the British Universities’ Film and Video Council Record: Shakespeare, ‘Khoon Ka Khoon’, http://bufvc.ac.uk/shakespeare/index.php/title/av37438 (accessed 20 April 2015). See also Neera Kapur-Dromson, ‘Asian Drama Productions Light Up Nairobi’, Old Africa Magazine, February–March 2012, pp. 15–19.

  16. F. W. Gaisberg, Music on Record (Robert Hale, 1948), p. 54.

  17. The recordings are listed in Michael Kinnear’s The Gramophone Company’s First Indian Recordings, 1899–1908 (Bombay: Popular Prakashan). For Bhul Bhuliya, see p. 263. The British Library copy of the recording is held under 1CU0002108 S1 HIS MASTER’S VOICE, which may suggest that this recording is from a trip made subsequent to the Gramophone Company’s adoption of the HMV title in 1909.

  18. I am grateful to Rohit De and Suren Sista for help with translation from Indian languages.

  19. Bhul Bhoolaian, or Twelfth Night or What you Will. With some changes as performed by Parsee Original Theatrical Company [synopsis] (Parsee Orphanage Captain Printing Works, 1905).

  5. Nairobi: Expats, Emigrés and Exile

  1. Evelyn Waugh, Remote People (1931; Penguin Classics, 2002), pp. 135–6.

  2. This particular rendering of Longinus’ word comes from Longinus. On the Sublime, trans. A. O. Prickard (Clarendon Press, 1906), p. 13.

  3. Elspeth Huxley, White Man’s Country: Lord Delamere and the Making of Kenya (Chatto and Windus, 1968); Charles Miller, The Lunatic Express: An Entertainment in Imperialism (Macdonald and Co., 1972), pp. 415–26.

  4. Details of this festival can be found in the East African Annual for 1954–5, pp. 137–45.

  5. All details of Blixen’s Shakespeare volumes are from Pia Bondesson, Karen Blixens bogsamling på Rungstedlund (Karen Blixens selskabet, 1982), §396–407. I am grateful to Anne-Marie Teideman Dal for sending me the relevant pages, and to Sanne Rishoj-Christensen for help with Danish translation.

  6. Isak Dinesen (ed. Frans Lasson), Letters from Africa (Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1981), p. 410.

  7. Edward Grigg, The Faith of an Englishman (Macmillan, 1936), p. viii.

  8. Karen Blixen, Out of Africa (1937; Penguin Classics, 2001), p. 321.

  9. Ibid., pp. 221–3.

  10. Laura Bohannan, ‘Shakespeare in the Bush’, Natural History, August–September 1966.

  11. For further stories of Shakespearean narrative being misunderstood, see David Schalkwyk, Hamlet’s Dreams: The Robben Island Shakespeare (Bloomsbury, 2013), pp. 34–5.

  12. For an interesting reversal of this, which insists on universal mental structures in a language derived from Freud’s reading of Shakespeare, see Andreas Bertoldi’s essay on ‘Shakespeare, Psychoanalysis, and the Colonial Encounter: The Case of Wulf Sach’s Black Hamlet’, in A. Loomba and M. Orkin (eds), Post-Colonial Shakespeares (Routledge, 2003), pp. 235–58.

  13. The Indian Voice of British East Africa, 29 January 1913, p. 6.

  14. Harry Thuku with Kenneth King, Harry Thuku: An Autobiography (Oxford University Press, 1970), p. 11. Thuku describes the forgery incident on p. 13; the file on the court case had already disappeared by the time of his 1922 trial (see Kenya National Archives, S/288/45/122 – AP 1/3/7), so we are unable to add further details to this incident; but it was clearly not so serious as to have prevented him being employed by the Treasury shortly afterwards.

  15. Bruce J. Berman and John M. Lonsdale, ‘The Labors of Muigwithania: Jomo Kenyatta as Author, 1928–45’, Research in African Literatures, vol. 29, no. 1 (Spring 1998), p. 22.

  16. J. Bailey and G. Bundeh, Kenya: The National Epic. From the Pages of Drum Magazine (Kenway, 1993), p. 35.

  17. Jean de Brunhoff, The Story of Babar, trans. Merle S. Haas (Random House, 1933), p. 38.

  18. Quoted in the Daily Telegraph, ‘Mystery of Kenyatta Marriage’, 1 March 2005.

  6. Kampala: Shakespeare at School, at War and in Prison

  1. For reviews of these productions, see Makerere: A Literary Magazine, Published in East Africa at Makerere College: ‘Julius Ceasar’, by ‘R.A.S.’, September 1948 (vol. 2, no. 6), pp. 114–15; ‘Richard II’, by Alastair Macpherson, Sept.–Nov. 1949 (vol. 3, no. 3), pp. 6–8; and ‘Shakespeare at Makerere’, Jan.–March 1953 (vol. 4, no. 1), pp. 10–12 (for the 1950 A Midsummer Night’s Dream, the 1951 Coriolanus, and the 1952 Henry IV, Part 1).

  2. Margaret MacPherson, ‘Makerere: Place of the Early Sunrise’, in Eckhard Breitinger, Uganda: The Cultural Landscape (E. Breitinger, 1999), pp. 27–8.

  3. Yasmin Alibhai-Brown, The Settler’s Cookbook: A Memoir of Love, Migration and Food (Portobello Books, 2008), pp. 205–10.

  4. See also Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Decolonising the Mind (Heinemann, 1986), p. 38.

  5. Makerere, September 1948, pp. 114–15.

  6. MacPherson, ‘Makerere’, pp. 27–8.

  7. Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Dreams in a Time of War: A Childhood Memoir (Harvill Secker, 2010), p. 166.

  8. For another case study of this kind, see David William Cohen and E. S. Atieno Odhiambo’s Burying S.M.: The Politics of Knowledge and the Sociology of Power (Heinemann, 1992).

  9. Colony and Protectorate of Kenya, Legislative Council Debates. Official Report (1955), 5 October 1955, vol. LXVI, col. 21–22.

  10. There is an extensive literature on the Mau Mau and the Emergency of the 1950s, which is developing as newly declassified documents are being released, and which can only be gestured to here. I am reliant for my account here largely on the two volumes of John Lonsdale and Bruce Berman’s Unhappy Valley: Conflict in Kenya and Africa (Heinemann Kenya, 1991), E. S. Atieno and John Lonsdale’s Mau Mau and Nationhood: Arms, Authority and Narration (James Currey, 2003) and Caroline Elkins’s Britain’s Gulag: The Brutal End of Empire in Kenya (Jonathan Cape, 2005).

  11. My account here is heavily indebted to David Schalkwyk’s excellent recent book on the Robben Island Bible and Apartheid Shakespeare, Hamlet’s Dreams: The Robben Island Shakespeare (Bloomsbury, 2013).

  12. See Sonia Cole, Leakey’s Luck: The Life of Louis Seymour Bazett Leakey (Collins, 1975), p. 196, but also Peterson, Creative Writing, Translation, Bookkeeping, and the Work of Imagination in Colonial Kenya (Heinemann, 2004), which provides an interesting revisionist account of the relationships between the languages of Protestantism and Kenyan nationalism.

  13. Gakaara wa Wanjaū, Mau Mau Author in Detention, trans. Paul Ngigī Njoroge (Heinemann Kenya, 1988), p. 190.

  14. This episode is recounted in ibid., pp. 190–92.

  15. A useful short account of the forgery is provided in Stephen Jay Gould’s essay ‘Piltdown Revisited’ in The Panda’s Thumb: More Reflections in Natural History (Norton, 1980).

  16. Cole, Leakey’s Luck, p. 297.

  7. Dar es Salaam: Shakespeare in Power

  1. My account of Nyerere’s early life is largely based on Thomas Molony’s groundbreaking biography Nyerere: The Early Years (James Currey, 2014). As Molony points out, no adequate biography exists of Nyerere’s life as a whole, given the extreme hagiographical flavour of most existing accounts; Molony’s account, which takes us up to the time of his entry into politics in 1954, begins to repair this gap. Nyerere mentions himself that the day of his birth was a rainy day in David Ganzuki and Ad’ Obe Obe’s Rencontres avec Julius K. Nyerere (Descartes, 1995), p. 19.

  2. Cited in Molony, Nyerere, p. 54.

  3. As Molony points out (p. 85), joining the Catholic St Mary’s instead of Tabora Boys’ meant that Nyerere was not a civil servant and therefore would have expected less government oversight of his views.

  4. Molony, Nyerere, p. 85.

  5. Julius K. Nyerere, Freedom and Unity/Uhuru na Umoja: A Selection from Writings and Speeches, 1952–1
965 (Oxford University Press, 1966), pp. 40–41.

  6. Nyerere on Education/Nyerere kuhusu elimu: Selected essays and speeches, 1954–1998, eds Elieshi Lema, Marjorie Mbilinyi and Rakesh Rajani (HakiElimu, 2004). On Barriers to Democracy, where Nyerere also quotes Julius Caesar, IV.iii.218ff. (‘There is a tide in the affairs of men’), see Alamin A. Mazrui, ‘Shakespeare in African Political Thought’, in The Anglo-African Commonwealth: Political Fiction and Cultural Fusion (Pergamon Press, 1967), p. 113.

  7. Charles Meek, Brief Authority: A Memoir of Colonial Administration in Tanganyika (Radcliffe Press, 2011), p. 166.

  8. Ibid.

  9. Ibid., pp. 170–71.

  10. For a discussion of Nyerere’s ambitions for Swahili, as well as the objections to this project, see Alamin A. Mazrui, ‘Shakespeare in Africa: Between English and Swahili Literature’, Research in African Literatures, vol. 27, no. 1 (1996), as well as Judith Listowel, The Making of Tanganyika (Chatto and Windus, 1965), pp. 417–18, which also contains the mention of the Shakespeare anniversary of 1964.

  11. See Lyndon Harries, ‘Translating Classical Literature into Swahili’, Swahili: Journal of the Institute of Swahili Research, vol. 40, no. 1 (1970), pp. 28–31; Sunday News (Dar es Salaam), 8 September 1963; John Allen, ‘A Note on Dr. Nyerere’s Translation of Julius Caesar: Preliminary Thoughts on the Value and Importance of the Translation’, Makerere Journal (March 1964), pp. 53–41; and Ali Mazrui, ‘The African Symbolism of Julius Caesar’, in The Anglo-African Commonwealth, pp. 121–33.