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

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СКАЧАТЬ 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 СКАЧАТЬ