Shakespeare in Swahililand: Adventures with the Ever-Living Poet. Edward Wilson-Lee

Чтение книги онлайн.

      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