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

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СКАЧАТЬ 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. СКАЧАТЬ