Читать книгу Shakespeare in Swahililand: Adventures with the Ever-Living Poet - Edward Wilson-Lee - Страница 8

Shakespeare and the Slaveboy Printworks

Sir, he hath never fed of the dainties that are bred in a book.

He hath not eat paper, as it were; he hath not drunk ink.

His intellect is not replenished; he is only an animal – only sensible in the duller parts.

Love’s Labor’s Lost (IV.ii.21–3)

Carrying Shakespeare into Africa felt momentous for Burton and Stanley in part because they were escorting a treasure into the unknown, where it did not seem to belong. Their feelings were not, one suspects, altogether different from those of the missionaries who dedicated themselves to bringing the Gospel into strange lands, though of course the explorers showed little wish to share Shakespeare’s powerful language with the natives they met. Burton carried Shakespeare with Euclid because both were felt to contain unalterable, universal truths – in beauty as in geometry – and the unshakeable nature of the works was demonstrated by carrying them into unsettling places.* Yet though it is possible that the first white travellers met peoples who had not seen paper books before (if not likely, given that Arabic slaving caravans had long been visiting these areas), the sense that the works were wholly alien to Africa was largely an adventurer’s fantasy during the time of the later safaris. By the time Roosevelt visited in 1909–10, a generation of young Africans were not only familiar with Shakespearean narrative, but had even been learning to read and write Swahili using the stories of Shylock and Lear.

It was to understand the setting in which this schoolbook – the Hadithi za Kiingereza, or ‘Tales from the English’ – was printed that I first returned to East Africa. Though Africa would long since have swallowed up any traces of Burton and Stanley’s encampments, the Hadithi was printed in a town which might retain traces of its genesis. Frustratingly, not a single copy survives of the book’s first edition, printed by Edward Steere on the island of Zanzibar in 1867, and we are reliant on later editions for details of its contents.1 Though a tragedy, this is no great surprise: such a slender volume, with pages sewed together by Steere’s own hand, was designed for immediate use by the boys liberated from slaving vessels; copies of it would have quickly disintegrated in the dust and heat and sweat of excited, fearful, frustrated hands, and it was likely that no one thought it worth preserving a copy of such an ephemeral thing for the record.2 Karen Blixen’s Beethoven-loving houseboy, Kamante, was shrewd in casting doubt upon the merits of his mistress’s typed manuscript pages:

‘Look, Msabu,’ he said, ‘this [a leatherbound hardback Odyssey] is a good book. It hangs together from the one end to the other. Even if you hold it up and shake it strongly, it does not come to pieces. The man who has written it is very clever. But what you write,’ he went on, both with scorn and with a sort of friendly compassion, ‘is some here and some there. When the people forget to close the door it blows about, even down on the floor and you are angry. It will not be a good book.’3

Although the episode is intended to demonstrate Kamante’s charmingly naïve assessment of a book by its cover, he is of course right: literary longevity has everything to do with a good solid binding. Though reasonably good records were kept of the missionary printing activities during the later years of Steere’s stay in Zanzibar, the early print experiments like the Hadithi were not seen for what they would become: among the earliest physical relics of Swahili, a language spoken today by over a hundred million people in eastern Africa. It is one of the ironies of history that the true character of each age is lost in those things thought not worth preserving, and this was the fate of the first Swahili Shakespeare.

Steere’s thin Zanzibari pamphlet consisted of four stories, taken from the pages of the popular children’s book Tales from Shakespeare by Charles and Mary Lamb: The Taming of the Shrew (Mwanamke Aliyefunzwa), The Merchant of Venice (Kuwia na Kuwiwa), The Tragedy of King Lear (Baba na Binti), and The Life of Timon of Athens (Kula Maji). Steere’s choice of these four stories seems baffling at first. They are not unified by genre, including as they do two comedies and two tragedies (though Timon is a slippery fish and doesn’t sit easily in any category). Yet the idea that Steere might have chosen these four widely differing plays to give a sample of Shakespeare’s range is also unconvincing: while the Merchant and Lear are undisputed high points of Shakespeare’s writing, it seems certain that no one choosing four Shakespeare plays to take to a desert island would settle for The Taming of the Shrew and Timon of Athens. The answer, it seems, must lie elsewhere, and my first guess is that these four plays suggested themselves to Steere as Shakespeare’s clearest parables for everyday life: each of them is, in this highly simplified form, a morality tale about the proper relations between individuals, their families and the societies in which they live, and each offers a message that Steere might have expected to be acceptable to readers in an Islamic society. Taming warns of the dangers of unsubmissive women, and offers a path to bring them back to the desired obedience, while Lear shows the disastrous consequences of allowing children to wield power over their parents. The Merchant of Venice corrects the evils that arise in society from usury – a practice forbidden by Islamic law – and Timon demonstrates the fickleness of earthly possessions while portraying the sin of ingratitude. If this was Steere’s motive in choosing these four tales, he would have been following a time-honoured missionary practice of focusing first on elements likely to be familiar to the culture to be evangelized, just as the early Apostles had portrayed Christ as a warrior when it helped to get more bellicose peoples on board. Whatever Steere’s motives, they seemed to have struck a chord, as the collection was later taken up by the Society for the Promotion of Christian Knowledge and printed in regular editions (including at least eight between 1940 and 1972), forming part of their schoolbook distribution in eastern Africa, which would exceed 100,000 books a year in the middle of the twentieth century.4

Hadithi za Kiingereza. (Reproduced by kind permission of the Syndics of Cambridge University Library)

The language of the Hadithi is simple in the extreme, easily legible even to me with the impoverished Swahili that I have retained from my childhood. Each tale begins with a storybook formula: ‘Palikuwa na mtu, akikaa Venezia, mji wa Uitalia, jina lake Shailoki, kabila yake Myahudi; kazi yake kukopesha fedha na mali’ – ‘In the beginning there was a man, living in Venice, a town in Italy, named Shylock, of the Jewish people; his business was to lend money and property.’5 The use of this opening formula is striking, because Steere used the same words a few years after his Swahili Shakespeare to translate the haunting first words of the Gospel of John – ‘Mwanzo palikuwa na Neno, Neno akawa kwa Muungu, Neno akawa Muungu’ (‘In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God’).6 To the young boys and girls who were his first readership, the boundaries between Steere’s evangelizing mission and his role as a cultural ambassador must have seemed very hazy indeed, introduced as they were by the same man with identical formulas. There were no simple, physical signs by which to distinguish storybook Shakespeare from the Word of God: each of these early Swahili books is a flimsy, pocket-sized pamphlet, and while the title of Hadithi (‘stories’) might seem to signal that these are lighter fare, things may not have been so simple to children who had heard of the hadith that are the foundations of Islamic law. Hoping to find out more about Steere and the world into which he brought this oddity, I started my travels where the Hadithi did – in Zanzibar.

Shakespeare set two of his finest plays, The Comedy of Errors and The Tempest, on magical islands where all expectations are confounded, and he could have done worse than take his inspiration from Zanzibar, which was in his lifetime receiving its first visits from merchants of the newly founded East India Company.* The main city, called Stone Town to differentiate the whitewashed coral stone palaces on the seafront from the earthwork dwellings that once lay inland, is a labyrinth of narrow alleys winding between high smooth walls, topped by arabesque parapets. These walls are punctuated only by brass-studded heavy wooden doors and windows opening onto fretwork balconies, which for all their artistry give the stranger few distinguishing marks by which to find his bearings. Shakespeare’s own disorienting island of Ephesus provokes his traveller Antipholus to describe the feeling of getting lost in just such a warren of streets in some of the finest lines from this underrated gem of early Shakespeare:

I to the world am like a drop of water

That in the ocean seeks another drop,

Who, falling there to find his fellow forth,

Unseen, inquisitive, confounds himself.

The Comedy of Errors (I.ii.35–8)

Getting lost today in Stone Town can be a befuddling affair: one is as likely to happen upon a palace as a slum tenement, a mosque blaring anti-Western rhetoric from the loudspeaker as a European church in the neo-gothic style. To add to the effect, this puzzle of streets smells strongly – as indeed the whole island does – of cloves, which with other spices (cinnamon and nutmeg) are the main local crop.

I came once to Zanzibar as a child, and my sense of it as a place of wonder was doubtless set by those early memories. We arrived for our visit on a hydrofoil, a ship-sized hovercraft which a local entrepreneur had recently acquired on credit to ferry passengers from the mainland to Stone Town. The hydrofoil disappeared soon after with its insolvent owner, to the confusion of the local police, who had little means of following an ocean-going hovercraft. It turned up years later, I believe, off in the Gulf, as an air-conditioned pirate ship for the modern day. Of Zanzibar itself I remember taxicabs carpeted inside with Persian rugs, and the catamaran fishing dhows spilling their resplendent cargo on the shore.

The Zanzibar archipelago is made up of two main islands – Unguja and Pemba – lying off the coast of modern-day Tanzania, and the location of these islands made them a prized seat for a succession of colonizing powers. Not only are the islands marvellously lush, but they are also far enough offshore to be safe from all but advanced maritime nations, as well as being directly in the path of the seasonal tradewinds that circulate between Africa, the Middle East and India. Indeed, so attractive were the islands that the Busaidi dynasty, who had controlled Zanzibar since 1698, moved their seat from Oman to the southern island of Unguja early in the nineteenth century. Arabic merchants built an empire there through the trade in spices, ivory and (above all) slaves, and expended their wealth on the palaces which line the seafront of Stone Town. The immensely powerful Busaidi dynasty soon caught the interest of the Western powers, and by the middle of the nineteenth century American and European consuls were resident in Stone Town. When Edward Steere arrived in 1864, then, Stone Town was anything but the barbaric wilderness that he feared when he left England. Indeed, it was considerably more cosmopolitan than his former parish in the remote Lincolnshire town of Skegness. He remarked on arrival that ‘the whole aspect of the place from the sea is more Italian than African’, and was surprised to see riding in the harbour the Sultan’s latest acquisition, the battleship Shenandoah, which had recently been retired from Confederate service in the American Civil War.7

The European quarter of Zanzibar. (Reproduced by kind permission of the Syndics of Cambridge University Library)

The organization that sent Steere to Africa, the Universities’ Mission to Central Africa (UMCA), had been founded by four universities (Oxford, Cambridge, Durham and Trinity College Dublin) in response to an appeal made by David Livingstone in a speech to the Oxford Union in 1857. Livingstone, who had spent nearly two decades evangelizing in Africa by that time, was considered a saint in his own lifetime, a veneration that does not seem to have been reduced by the fact that he reputedly managed to convert only a single person to Christianity during all his mission work (and that convert lapsed soon afterwards).8 It was not only, however, Livingstone’s Christian zeal which captured the enthusiasm of the earnest Victorian university men; rather, it was his principled stand against the Indian Ocean slave trade, against which he railed in speaking tours while on periodic return to Britain, making him a philanthropic celebrity. The UMCA had quickly gathered steam, and had sent their first Missionary Bishop out in 1861, though the incumbent died shortly after arriving on the mainland, living only long enough to send home reports of pestilence, famine and war. Steere travelled out in the entourage of the second appointee, Bishop Tozer, and before retreating to the safety of Stone Town the pair had made a concerted attempt to set up in the interior, where Livingstone felt the main work of conversion and education was to be done. Among the many bleak descriptions of this voyage up the Zambezi in Steere’s letters, now kept in Rhodes House (Oxford), is a delightful description of Steere holding one of the new patent steel-ribbed oilcloth umbrellas over the bishop’s head.9

It must have been just such first encounters with Europeans that made the factory-produced umbrella a universal symbol of status through much of Africa. For people relentlessly assaulted from above by sun or driving rain, this was an infinitely more impressive invention than others of which European civilization was so proud. I cannot help thinking, after reading Steere’s description, of a senescent askari (guard) who worked at our house outside of Nairobi. Vuli would arrive promptly at sundown and fall fast asleep in a chair outside the house, and on the few occasions he did wake (usually roused by his own snoring) he summoned the entire household, having convinced himself that one of the Labradors was a leopard. On his days off Vuli would walk to market, wearing a shower cap and armed with an umbrella and a squash racquet, the inalienable markers of his civility.

For all the amusement afforded by the image of Steere and Tozer under their umbrellas on the Zambezi, Steere’s letters paint a sobering picture of torturous illness within the mission party and vicious warfare on the riverbanks (though, following the tradition instituted by the explorers, they responded to these hardships with evening readings of Shakespeare).10 Having tried but failed to establish a foothold at various locations closer and closer to the coast, he and Tozer eventually left for Zanzibar at the end of August 1864, having decided that their ends would be best served by setting up a seminary on Zanzibar to train local priests for redeployment in the interior. Though Steere’s nineteenth-century biographer defends the move as a ‘tactical retreat’, it was seen as a shameful capitulation by many, including Livingstone himself, who dismissed the Zanzibar mission as nothing more than a chaplaincy to the consulate.11

Even if Steere setting up in Stone Town was in many ways an admission of defeat, he nevertheless applied himself fiercely to the tasks at hand, the most urgent of which was to get the Sultan (and the local British Navy vessels) to take seriously the anti-slavery ‘Moresby’ treaty the two had signed decades earlier. The disregard for the ban on trading human cargo was underlined by the fact that upon their arrival the Sultan gave the UMCA party, along with a palace in which to set up operations, five slave boys as a welcoming gift. These and all the UMCA’s first subjects for evangelization – including those whom Steere taught to work his printing press when it arrived – were literally a captive audience, boys from mainland tribes who had been lured away from their families in southern Tanganyika by tende halwa (‘sweet givers’).12 A small number of these, including most of those at the UMCA mission, were then confiscated from the slavers by the Royal Navy. Steere later recorded his first impression of his encounter with the boys presented by the Sultan:

Now if you can imagine yourself standing opposite to five little black boys, with no clothing save the narrowest strip of calico [merikani] round their middles, with their hands clasped round their necks, looking up into your face with an expression of utter apprehension that something more dreadful than ever they had experienced would surely come upon them, now that they had fallen into the hands of the dreaded white men, you will feel our work somewhat as we felt it. And then, how are you to speak, or they to answer? You have not one word in common. Yet these are the missionaries of the future.13

Steere’s confidence that these damaged boys would find a vocation in the church might seem delusional, and yet the future was to see some of his hopes come to fruition. Among these boys was John Swedi, who became the first East African to take holy orders, and Francis Mabruki, who spent a year at Rickinghall in Suffolk, where he inspired the destitute farmhand Samuel Speare to follow him back to Zanzibar as a missionary. Another of the young recruits, Owen Makanyassa, was put to work in the printing office, where he was soon in charge and running a brisk business for local clients as well as setting the pamphlets composed by Steere.14 Ironically, the boy christened ‘William Shakespeare’ was considered among those ‘who shew no sign of teaching power’, and was put out to apprentice as a mason.15

It is hard to decide quite what to think of the evangelizing activities of Steere and his kind. The intentions with which Steere embarked upon his life in Africa were undoubtedly noble ones, just as his life before Zanzibar had been a catalogue of selfless aspiration. Though he had followed his father and studied law at University College London, he was distracted (as I was when an undergraduate there) by the variety of the metropolis and spent most of his time in the Reading Room of the British Museum studying ancient tongues, as well as learning to print (and learning botany, conchology and brass rubbing). (Admittedly, my own distractions were not always as salubrious.) He was called to the bar in 1850, but soon left in hopes of helping the needy. He sold all of his books and other possessions to support his work in various Brotherhoods dedicated to helping the London poor, though he left this life in disgust at the internal politics and what he viewed as the lack of zeal in many of the participants.

Joining the church seemed the next logical step, and Steere volunteered for one of the least desirable postings in the British Isles, where his Skegness parishioners remembered him as a ‘downright shirt sleeve man, and a real Bible parson’.16 When even this proved insufficiently testing, he signed on to accompany Bishop-elect Tozer into what could only have seemed to him the last place on earth. So if Steere’s actions in offering safety and a livelihood to utterly helpless orphans in exchange for their adherence to his own Christian beliefs strikes me as hard to sympathize with, it is nevertheless clear to me that Steere was benevolent and believed unquestioningly that what he was giving these boys was salvation. He was, I suppose, not asking of them anything more than what he was asking of himself, and this sets him apart from the explorers. As his translation of the Tales from Shakespeare suggests, Steere’s belief in the equality of our souls meant he also believed in the possibility of shared thought, language, culture, of a common humanity which reversed the fragmentation of human society after the Tower of Babel.

This is not to say that Steere could not be rather self-righteous, perhaps even too much for the woman he married in 1858, Mary Bridget. It seems clear that there was a separation between Steere and the woman who persuaded him to accept the African posting, for all that the biography written soon after Steere’s death gives an (amusingly melodramatic) explanation for why they never lived together again:

Mrs. Steere had bravely consented to his former sacrifice [his solitary move to Skegness], and now she bade him God speed on his second venture [to Africa], and quite intended following herself, accompanied by a sister. We may add that the idea was not definitely abandoned until some years afterwards, when delicacy of health, ending, alas! in disease of the brain, rendered it impossible.17

Although Steere and his wife never lived together again, their letters and papers do show rather touchingly that she spent much of her remaining life visiting English churches to sketch the masonry and woodwork that Steere would copy for the vast neo-gothic cathedral he erected in Stone Town, on the site of the Zanzibar slave market he had helped to put out of commission.

Christ Church, Zanzibar, the cathedral that Steere built during his time as Missionary Bishop to Central Africa. (Reproduced by kind permission of the Syndics of Cambridge University Library)

My progress in reconstructing the Stone Town of Steere’s day is immeasurably slowed during my first days in Zanzibar by the fact that Ramadan is being observed. For this I have calculated: things would be open erratically (if at all), and any officials whom I do manage to locate will be hungry and uncooperative from observing their daytime fast. This is fine – I have a pile of nineteenth-century accounts of Zanzibar to work my way through, and a list of infidel contacts whose availability should be less affected by the religious calendar. What I had not realized, however, is that Zanzibar is practically alone in the Islamic world in not observing a set date for the end of Ramadan: instead, Eid al-Fitr will only be declared when the new moon is actually seen by the famished and expectant faithful. Each cloudy evening, then, will mean another day’s wait, and a day less of my limited time in the archives. I spend my days, then, walking the alleys that have remained unchanged since Steere’s time, trying to pinpoint the location of the UMCA mission and of Steere’s printing venture. Here is what was once the American Consul’s house, where Henry Morton Stanley spent nights on the roof in his tent to prepare himself for the hardships of his expedition to find Livingstone. This palace became the club for colonials in the twentieth century, where Evelyn Waugh spent a week trying to weather the unbearable heat by sitting under a fan with eau de quinine on his head; it is now a public hotel selling smart cocktails at souvenir prices to visiting cruise passengers. Here is Steere’s cathedral, and nearby the chains that serve as reminders of the slave auctions once held on the site. Here would have stood the building where a princess, Seyyida Salme, was kept under house arrest during Steere’s time after assisting her brother in a failed coup. Seyyida Salme, who will play a part in Steere’s life in Stone Town, is a figure whose daily life is recorded in unparalleled detail in the intimate memoirs she left of life in the harem.

The brother whose rising she supported, Barghash, did eventually become Sultan, and his palace, the Beit al-Ajaib (or ‘House of Wonders’), is now a sparsely filled museum, with exhibits in the corners of its vast reception rooms. As an Arab palace, the Beit al-Ajaib is of an open design to allow the sea breeze to draw the hot air out of the upper floors, and many of the lighter exhibits seem on the point of fluttering away. The rickety vitrines, dwarfed by the echoing and palatial rooms, contain the few surviving pieces of Limoges porcelain and Venetian glass with which Barghash tricked out his palace, pieces which in their exotic fragility seem faintly like butterflies pinned to their velvet boards. Among these moulting remnants of Barghash’s splendour and their curling typewritten labels, I come across an intriguing early photograph of a group of men, both black and white, working in a large room filled with what are unmistakably typesetting cases: inclined desks, like architects’ drawing-tables, with dozens of cubby holes for the pieces of moveable type that will be put together to make a printed page. The photograph is labelled ‘Universities Mission to Central Africa, Mambo Msiige’, and by the look of their dress the photograph was taken at the end of the nineteenth century. There is no one to ask for further information other than the small crowd of women lazing on the verandah at the front of the palace, of whom all and none seem to be employed by the museum. I shall have to see The Director; The Director is unlikely to be in until after Ramadan; my existing ticket will certainly not allow me to enter the museum again to see if he has returned.

After several unsuccessful return visits I manage to secure an interview with The Director. No further mention is made of new tickets, and indeed after my first reappearance I have the run of the museum, as the women have evidently become bored by the whole matter and make no protest at my comings and goings. I find my way to The Director’s office, which turns out to be another cavernous reception room in which he occupies a small desk at the far end, by one of the two walls of windows, which remain firmly shuttered in an attempt to keep the stacks of paper on his desk. The Director is a small, round man in a navy blue suit, squared off by shoulder pads of a remarkable breadth. He invites me to take a seat, an offer which occasions some confusion on my part as the only two chairs in the near-empty office are next to one another behind his desk. I take a seat behind the desk, though it becomes clear that this is not the commencement of the interview, as The Director is engaged in Solving a Problem. On his desk is a computer; on another table, a good thirty feet away across the palace room, is a printer. These two are evidently plugged into the two power sockets in the room. The Director returns to the printer, which he seems to have been examining for some time, and walks the printer cable to its full extent, leaving him a good twenty-five feet short of the computer. He places it calmly on the ground and walks to the computer, where he stops and looks back at the printer, before once again pacing the ground in between. I am unsure whether it would be wise to offer some observations at this point, so I remain quiet. The Director spends some time over at the printer, contemplating (it seems) whether he had best move the printer table towards the desk, or give the matter up entirely. Employing a tactic once suggested to me as a response to official delays, I remove my volume of Shakespeare from my satchel and begin to read. Emitting a sigh of resignation, the Director comes and sits down at my side.

Leaning towards me on his elbow with chin in hand, but still looking out into the body of the room rather than in my direction, he asks me the nature of my inquiry. Assuming what seems to be the only logical posture at this point, I also speak out into the room, telling him who I am and asking whether he might be able to provide any information on the photograph in the gallery below. There are the inevitable questions about letters of introduction, of which I am thoughtlessly unprovided. (Later in my trip I take to writing these on my own behalf from inventively named referees; my university identity card, which would have been infinitely more difficult to forge, is of no interest to such authorities as I meet.) After several repetitions of my question have produced no impression whatsoever on the mind of The Director, it appears that the only thing to do is to descend together into the gallery to inspect said photograph. This involves a great process of informing secretaries and locking offices – one or other of which one might reasonably have expected to suffice. The Director has evidently never set eyes on the photograph before, and indeed seems rather taken by the display as a whole. It is, he agrees, very interesting, but he can tell me nothing further about it.

Luckily I have another appointment, this time with a local watercolourist of Goan descent, John Baptist da Silva, who seems unnervingly to have been present at all significant events in the last seventy years of Zanzibar’s history. (It is, I suppose, a small island.) We sit on an open gallery overlooking the courtyard of his house; as with many townhouses in the old quarter, this one has inherited the Arab disdain for outward magnificence, and the heavy door which gives entrance to the elegant quarters opens off an alley which might easily be mistaken for an untended gap between buildings. His granddaughter brings us mugs of achingly sweet tea flavoured with husks of cardamom, and we look over portfolios of his exquisite paintings, which expertly capture the blend of rubbish and Moorish glamour that characterizes Stone Town. We discuss the irritability of the island during Ramadan, and I comment on the increased number of women wearing the full niqab covering since I was last here. Unfurling his glinting eyes from among their wrinkles, John Baptist smiles and tells me that they are, however, experts at flirting with their eyes, and often provocatively dressed underneath. My ‘flat’ in Stone Town confirms this sense of female freedom when off the streets. The ‘flat’ is, in fact, merely a room perched above a first-floor courtyard, reached by something more ladder than stairs; the entrance from the street is through the back of one of the many lean-to stores selling kikoi wraps, up stairs to a landing that has been converted into a hair salon by means of odd mirrors and chairs, and then into the courtyard which serves the dozen or so other residents of the tenement for all of life’s necessities. The ladies in the hair salon seem to have an arrangement by which each of them is dresser and each customer, without too much bothersome distinction between. One voluminous lady quickly senses my unsureness about local gender relations, and asks increasingly daring questions about my romantic interests, to gales of laughter from the other ladies.

When I tell John Baptist why I’ve come to Zanzibar, he is charmingly unfazed by the idea that I might try to understand Shakespeare (or anything else, for that matter) by coming to Zanzibar. He immediately recalls his own childhood experience of being made to learn Julius Caesar by rote for the Sisters of his Catholic convent school. His early memory is reminiscent of the semi-autobiographical passages in the novel By the Sea by the excellent Zanzibari novelist Abdulrazak Gurnah, which features a ‘teacher of English … who was a pious Muslim and an ardent Anglophile without contradiction or anxiety’, and whose efforts culminate in a bravura performance of Brutus’ speech in praise of Caesar, given by a young Zanzibari boy in an alley like that outside John Baptist’s house.18 It is rather poignant to think that Steere’s island would one day be populated by boys fluent in iambic pentameter.

John Baptist can confirm that the UMCA mission house was at Mambo Msiige, and that it later became (among other things) an embassy and part of the government telegraph office. Though it is still standing, he doubts that I am likely to find anything there; it is currently an empty shell, marooned in a legal battle over whether its proprietors should be allowed to convert another Zanzibari heirloom into a luxury hotel. He tells me not to expect too much in the archives or museum records: at independence in 1963 the new officials carted the records out of offices all over town in wheelbarrows and set fire to them on the front lawns, intent that the New Zanzibar should not be burdened by the clutter of the past. Much of Stone Town was appropriated under the subsequent socialist programmes of President (and Shakespeare translator) Julius Nyerere, given over to tenants who had no funds to maintain the merchant palaces in which they squatted.

I am shown the dozens of photograph albums John Baptist was given by a member of a Goan photographic dynasty, days before he was murdered in the looting that followed independence. John Baptist has since acquired more photographs and postcards of Zanzibar from visits to specialist fairs near Paddington railway station, which seems to be the only reason for which he leaves the island. The albums contain page after page of bug-eyed Victorian official portraits, as well as pictures of the town during the latter part of Steere’s life and a surprising number of louche pictures of all-male theatricals and costume parties on board navy vessels anchored off the island. Among the pictures is an old picture postcard depicting the UMCA mission House on Mambo Msiige, where Shakespeare first became Swahili in the thin pamphlet of stories. John makes a gift to me of the postcard, and, slugging the cardamom sugar at the bottom of my mug, I leave him to his afternoon nap.

A few days later, as I am carefully porting a paper plate full of barbecued seafood back to my rooms from the open-air market, the cry of Eid Mubarak! announces that Ramadan is at an end. A man from the crowd streaming down to the Forodhani gardens on the waterfront stops to tell me with no apparent irony that it is ‘not permitted’ to eat the street food in my flat, and (while dubious of the legal logic this entails) I take this as an invitation to join the revels down in town. The sense of relief is general. Even the dreadlocked Somali zealot I had watched a few days previously lambasting a tourist for wearing shorts during Ramadan seems to be letting his hair down.

When the archives finally open, and I have waited long enough for several ranks of officials to scrutinize my very august letter of introduction, I start on the boxes of UMCA papers. The going is slow, in part because I am only allowed one box at a time – the box being the natural unit with which the scholar can be trusted – and there are long intervals while a new one is fetched. The papers when they do arrive are terrifyingly brittle, and have to be handled like dried flowers. More than once it seems clear that I will be the last to read a letter or a diary page, and only reluctantly do I return the crumbling papers to their boxes and send them away into the hot-dry limbo in which they wait hopelessly to be read. Still, my time is short and I want to find out something about Steere’s printing works and his day-to-day life. So I pass over the touching details of the young slave boys’ daily routines, and the arrival of the first liberated slave girls, and the growth of outposts of the UMCA mission elsewhere on the Zanzibar islands and (slowly) on the mainland.

Here and there I come across a rich detail, such as the mission logbook entry which tells me that on 24 January 1867 – the very year in which Steere would set his printing press to the task of producing the Hadithi za Kiingereza – the mission staff (and perhaps some of the boys?) attended a ‘Theatrical Performance on board HMS Highflyer’; they also on that occasion received from the ship two further boys taken from slaving vessels.19 Even if this is no more than a tantalizing lead, I already know something about the contexts of this ship visit, which makes me thrill at the discovery. After all, the last time the Highflyer had been at Stone Town it had weighed anchor in the middle of the night, slipping away in secret to take with it Princess Seyyida Salme, the sister of the pretender Barghash, who had during her house arrest fallen in love with a German banker, Heinrich Reute. The ship’s party must have spent part of the evening before settling down to watch their play congratulating Captain Thomas Malcolm Sabine Pasley on his successful part in this storybook romance, by getting the princess safely to Aden, from where she could pass on to Hamburg, to live out the rest of her life as Emily Reute, a prosperous burgeress and celebrated author of harem exposés. The logs and letters are silent about what the play was – though it strikes me that Shakespeare’s own Winter’s Tale of rescued princesses would have served the mythic balance – but it is still fascinating that these people, far removed from England and every day facing danger and confronted by disease and deprivation, retained a loyalty to the cultural rituals of their homeland.*

Days of sifting – sometimes literally – through the disintegrating documents in the archives shows me that I will learn little more of the Hadithi za Kiingereza (at least here). This is, of course, a disappointment, but it is one that those interested in the past become accustomed to. There is a tightness in the gut which comes from the sense that something wondrous is slipping ever further from us, like the vertigo in one’s bones when handling something delicate. Though this tightness never disappears completely, it is sometimes relieved when a fragment brings us closer to the disappearing past, like a ghostly hand clasped for a moment. The feeling is succinctly captured in Shakespeare’s famous Sonnet 30:

When to the sessions of sweet silent thought

I summon up remembrance of things past,

I sigh the lack of many a thing I sought

And with old woes new wail my dear time’s waste.

Then can I drown an eye, unused to flow,

For precious friends hid in death’s dateless night,

And weep afresh love’s long-since canceled woe,

And moan th’expense of many a vanished sight.

Though convention required that Shakespeare turn in the end to a rather anodyne comment on the power of love (‘But if the while I think on thee, dear friend / All losses are restored, and sorrows end’), the force of the sonnet lies in Shakespeare’s unmatched evocation of loss. The phrases are riddling – how does one ‘sigh a lack’ or ‘moan an expense’? – but they summon precisely the defeat of language in the face of ‘time’s waste’, ‘death’s dateless night’, a defeat that can be brought on by the loss of ‘precious friends’, yes, but also by the loss of ‘things’ or even those ‘sights’ which are by nature ephemeral. The ‘sessions of sweet silent thought’ that characterize scholarship are often driven by much the same yearning.

Later, however, I do come across one enticing story which deserves to be told here even if it happened many decades afterwards. Though Steere and his printers were long dead, the episode takes place on the island of Zanzibar and is reported by a member of the Universities’ Mission to Central Africa – it is, in fact, a throwaway anecdote in one of their newsletters from 1934.20 In it he reports a large gathering of Africans, Arabs, Indians and Europeans at the village of Mbweni, where a troupe of local men were putting on an impromptu performance. The text on which the drama is based, it transpires, is none other than Kuwia na Kuwiwa, the rendering of The Merchant of Venice from the Hadithi za Kiingereza.21 The production, it is reported, was very basic: a petrol lamp, a table, a chair and five actors – Antonio, Bassanio, Shylock, a Judge and the ‘ugliest man in the village’ as Portia. The setting was only indicated by signs (Nyumba ya Portia, ‘Portia’s House’, etc.); and the tale of the Jewish moneylender had been turned, as it would often be afterwards in East Africa, against the wealthy Indians who were closer to their own lives. The punchline of the anecdote – and what particularly intrigues me about it – is that the cast of the play have no idea of its connection to Shakespeare, or even that it was once a dramatic text. For the correspondent in the newsletter this is evidently amusing – like Arthur Neumann putting Shakespeare into the hands of his unwitting elephant hunter; but I think we might take it rather differently. This, after all, is Shakespeare in the hands of those who have no reason to think of it as ‘Shakespeare’; ‘all ignorant of Shakespeare’s efforts’, we are told, they ‘decided it had great possibilities of dramatization’. While the appeal of Shakespeare’s play to a group of provincial Zanzibaris who had no reason to revere the text as canonical is not unassailable proof of Shakespeare’s universal appeal, it certainly has the flavour of a beginning.

Before leaving Zanzibar to follow the spread of Shakespeare on the mainland, I go to visit the Universities’ Mission house at Mambo Msiige, approaching it by walking along the beach among joggers and fishermen. I also pass groups of Maasai elmorani (warriors), long and thin and draped in their traditional plaid, like tartan Giacomettis; these nomadic herders from the inland plateau, disconcertingly out of place, have been imported by luxury hotels to give the place an authentically African air which the Arab coastal Africans apparently lack. The building is, as John Baptist had said, more or less abandoned – almost, that is, save for the dozen or so security guards, who in grand African tradition are armed to the teeth in blithe disregard for the fact they are sentries to a hollow shell. My original romantic notion of breaking into the empty building is replaced by an equally romantic notion that I will bribe my way in. It is very rare for Shakespeare scholars to have the opportunity to cover up criminal proceedings in the course of their research, so this was clearly an opportunity not to be missed. In the event, the guard I approach seems delighted that anyone had been tempted to breach the cordon, and offers to guide my tour personally.

We traipse around for a considerable time up narrow staircases comically unsuited to luxury, and through stripped-bare low-ceilinged spaces furnished only with curling posterboards with mockups of the high-ceilinged ballrooms the hotel will contain. Eventually, we find the nondescript room captured in the museum photo, where the Universities’ Mission had set up its printing operation. This was where my first Swahili Shakespeare had been typeset by fingers that had come from inland villages down to the coast in cages, out to sea in bondage, back to shore on ironclad Royal Navy ships. I have worked with old-fashioned hand-presses myself, and even to someone who knows what to expect they are a frightening confusion of pistons and levers and traps; I imagine the boys must have felt, like Conrad’s native boiler feeder in The Heart of Darkness, as if they were in ‘thrall to some strange witchcraft’. They did, however, seem to accommodate themselves to their new surroundings with reasonable speed, aided in part by the clearing up of certain misunderstandings. As Steere says,

It was not long before even the natives perceived that our boys had an air and a bearing such as their old companions never had. It was their Christianity beginning even so soon to show itself, as sound religion must, even in their speech and bearing. We taught our children that white men might be trusted. They have told us since that their impression was, that first night they slept in the house, that they were meant to be eaten.22

Steere is unfailingly confident that it was his religious teachings which made the boys feel superior to those around them, though being inducted into the mysteries of print may in and of itself have had a powerful effect on them. It is difficult for us, who spend our lives trying to keep above a sea of printed matter that threatens to drown us, to remember the strangeness and power of a process that produces uncannily identical objects, objects which constrain those holding them to speak the same words.23 Indeed, it is often far from clear in his writings that Steere felt he had come to the Dark Continent to bring the Christian message, rather than the tools of language which were only supposed to be servants in the Lord’s work. In a series of letters in 1872, prompted by Bishop Tozer’s resignation and the likelihood that he would succeed as Bishop, he wrote repeatedly to the UMCA asking to be left to his translation and printing: he was, he said, more ‘useful to the Mission as an interpreter of European thoughts to negroes and of negro thoughts to Europeans’.24 For Steere, it seems, establishing a shared culture had overtaken the task of religious conversion. A belief that we owe our existence to a single god might suggest that there are other things that link us – a shared morality, a culture which is similar at its heart for all the superficial differences. But this logic could also be reversed: evidence that there are shared, universal aspects to our culture might serve as proof that we derive from a single point of origin, an Edenic and united past.

We should not forget, however, the power that even this cultural authority was to confer on Steere and his kind. Looking out from the UMCA house on Mambo Msiige at the same seascape Steere would have seen, I am reminded of two Shakespeare quotations which evidently meant much to him. They are quoted prominently in his commonplace book, where Steere (like many readers before the twentieth century) gathered his most treasured bits of text. The first of these is from The Tempest, that perennial lens through which Englishmen saw Africa:

My Library

Was Dukedom large enough …25

This sentiment is voiced by Prospero (The Tempest, I.ii.109–10), magician and exiled Duke of Milan, whose death we saw being plotted by Caliban in the last chapter. As suggested by the need to burn his books before murdering him, Prospero’s library is the immediate source of his strength, like Samson’s hair, and destroying it will leave him vulnerable. But Prospero’s library has a more complicated relationship with power in the play than simply providing him with magic tricks. It is, in the first place, the reason that he has lost his Dukedom: Prospero’s bookish belief that his ‘library / Was Dukedom large enough’ distracted him from the dangers of his court and the conspiracy which unseated him. As so often in Shakespeare, however, a lack of interest in political power is the best evidence that someone deserves it. Two of Shakespeare’s great actor-politicians, Julius Caesar and Richard III, demonstrate their awareness of this when they make a great show of refusing a tyrant’s crown when it is first offered to them, only to condescend at the appropriate moment to accepting the burden. In a similar way, Prospero’s books are both a symbol of his lack of interest in power and the ultimate proof that he deserves it – as shown when he is reinstated to his Dukedom at the end of the play.

The suspicion that these lines are the key to Steere’s personality is confirmed by the fact that the second treasured quotation encapsulates the same paradox of power and books, even if it comes from a different play. The lines are from the opening of the second Act of As You Like It, where the ousted Duke Senior is praising his woodland exile over the cares of court. The lines (mis)quoted by Steere are given here in italics:

Now, my co-mates and brothers in exile,

Hath not old custom made this life more sweet

Than that of painted pomp? Are not these woods

More free from peril than the envious court? […]

Sweet are the uses of adversity,

Which like the toad, ugly and venomous,

Wears yet a precious jewel in his head.

And this our life exempt from public haunt

Finds tongues in trees, books in the running stream,

Sermons in stones, and good in everything.

As You Like It (II.i.1–4, 12–17)

Duke Senior argues that simply being away from the corridors of power has such a salutary effect that the very woodland becomes like a library in the reflections it affords. Again, like Prospero, it is the very fact that Duke Senior is content to give up his ducal rule for a bookish wilderness which advertises his fitness for authority, and he is duly returned to his Dukedom at the end of the play. So when Steere wrote these lines in his commonplace book, was he stirred by their humility, their idyll of a life contented with books, or with the righteous claim to power entailed by that humility?

Steere’s awareness of the role that printing and language-teaching would play in the struggle to dominate Africa meant that the relationship between power and books may not have been a subconscious one. As he wrote about one tribe shortly after an expedition into the interior, ‘It seems to me morally certain that the Yaos will be Christians or Mahommedans before very long, and I think the question will turn a good deal upon which is the first to write and read their language.’26 So the boys who learned to print in this room looking out to sea from Stone Town were, unbeknownst to them, building an arsenal which would conquer the inland communities from which they had been kidnapped. I thank the security guard, who is wavering between boredom with and suspicion of my glassy-eyed pensiveness in an empty room, and leave.

* Even in Shakespeare’s time, Euclid was carried into exotic places as a totem of the Christian West’s access to universal truth – as when the Jesuit missionary Matteo Ricci presented Euclid’s Elements to the Chinese Emperor, in hopes that the awestruck audience would accept the truths of Christian doctrine as equally indisputable.

* Shakespeare would also have had access to information about Zanzibar from John Pory’s translation and edition of the Geographical Historie of Leo Africanus, first published in 1600, where the inhabitants are described as ‘much addicted to sorcery and witchcraft’. The Geographical Historie is largely confined to northern and north-western Africa, and Pory’s supplement on sub-Saharan Africa was drawn from the reports of other travellers.

* Indeed, some indication of the success of Steere’s project to plant bardolatry on the East African coast is given by the action of Seyyida Salme’s brother, Sultan Barghash, during his state visit to London in 1875. Not only did Barghash insist on pausing to pay respect to the bust of Shakespeare in Westminster Abbey, but Shakespeare also helped to avert a diplomatic crisis: after the Sultan objected, during a ceremonial dinner given by the Worshipful Company of Fishmongers, to the use of the epithet ‘Worshipful’ for anyone other than God, he was apparently placated by the information that the company was sufficiently venerable to have merited a mention in the works of Shakespeare (The Times, 26 June 1875, p. 12). Although some commentators at the time suggested that Barghash was being coached by his British escorts into locally appropriate behaviours, they seem not to have considered that Barghash may have been evangelized for Shakespeare before setting foot in Britain.