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

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      STEPHANO (to Caliban):

      Monster, I will kill this man. His daughter and I will be king and queen – save our graces – and Trinculo and thyself shall be viceroys. Dost thou like the plot, Trinculo?

      The Tempest (III.ii.101–3)

      If The Tempest ensured that the Victorian explorers arrived in Africa with readymade ideas about the book-burning savages they expected to meet, it also provided predictions of how the colonizing powers would behave towards them. The prescience of its narrative – the occupation of land through various legal and technological tricks, initial belief in the aptness of the native for education, followed by horror when the same natives begin to demand to be treated as their education merits (as Caliban does in casting a desiring eye upon Miranda) – was not lost on East African observers, who after gaining independence repeatedly reflected on the way in which Shakespeare’s works both predicted and served as patterns for colonial actions.1 The breakthrough novel (A Grain of Wheat, 1967) of Kenya’s most celebrated writer, Ngugi wa Thiong’o, includes the story of a local official in the Kenyan colonial administration whose grand plan to Anglicize the local Africans is laid out in a tract entitled PROSPERO IN AFRICA. That Prospero’s colonization project ended in the enslavement and torture of Caliban is, of course, entirely lost on Ngugi’s deluded visionary.

      Interestingly, however, Shakespeare’s Tempest provides not one but two prophecies of colonization, and if Prospero’s overlordship takes the form of tragedy, the second version is unmistakably in the key of farce. This subplot features the clowns Stefano and Trinculo, who are shipwrecked in the storm that opens the play and who imagine themselves the sole survivors to have been washed up on the island. In a series of burlesque episodes that run parallel to the main action of the play, Stefano (fuelled by the vat of wine on which he drifted ashore) conceives a plan to murder Prospero and rule over the island with the aid of Caliban, who (in his inebriation) believes Stefano to be a god. In the first great colonial narrative in English, at that time largely a matter of speculative fiction, Shakespeare had not only predicted with uncanny accuracy the course of Britain’s future colonial empire, but also the many comically botched and bungled amateur attempts at colonization which preceded it.

      A few days after Eid I pick my way down to the dock, back past the Beit al-Ajaib and the shorefront restaurant celebrating Queen’s frontman and local boy, Freddie Mercury, in search of a passage to the mainland. Ferry travel here, as in so many parts of the Third World, creates a class system with stark boundaries: a relatively comfortable passage for me and other travellers who can afford it, and dangerously overcrowded hulks for those who can’t. The number of sunken vessels is astonishing, though for one reason and another they hardly register a blip on the Western media radar. The week after I make the short hop over warm waters to the mainland a cheap-passage ferry, with an official capacity of 645, capsizes with 3586 people on board; 2976 of them – roughly the number of excess passengers – are drowned.2

      Though it is not the hovercraft on which I came to the island as a child, my ferry is sufficiently commodious for me to continue to read during the crossing, and to think about the first performances of Shakespeare in East Africa. Striking as John Baptist’s photographs of shipboard actors are, they cannot claim to record the first English stage plays acted on (or off) the coast of Swahililand. In fact, one of the most incredible stories in all of Shakespeareana recounts how Shakespeare’s work was acted off the East African coast during the poet’s own lifetime. The performances in question are said to have taken place on the Dragon, which led the Hector and the Constant on the third voyage of the East India Company between 1607 and 1610, years during which Shakespeare’s Sonnets were published and when he was himself writing about sea travel in Pericles and The Winter’s Tale. While the Constant made a swift passage around the Cape of Good Hope to its destination of the Molucca Islands (the fountainhead of the early modern spice trade, now in modern Indonesia), the Dragon and the Hector were beset by a litany of disasters and spent much of the next year and a half coasting slowly around Africa. In extracts supposedly taken from the diary of Captain William Keeling of the Dragon, first published as a postscript to an article on Hamlet in The European Magazine of 1825–6, we hear that the ship’s crew were distracted from more dangerous temptations by being allowed to stage two of Shakespeare’s plays on board:

      Sept. 5, 1607. I sent the Portuguese interpreter, according to his desire, aboard the Hector, where he broke fast, and after came aboord me, where we had the TRAGEDY OF HAMLET; and СКАЧАТЬ