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

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      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.