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

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СКАЧАТЬ 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 СКАЧАТЬ