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

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СКАЧАТЬ literary culture somehow belong among the ‘blood, sweat, gun oil, dust, and ashes’, that reading them in the most inhospitable climes demonstrated both that the works’ seeming delicacy was illusory, and that the reader’s poetic soul was immune to the lures of barbarism.

      As one quickly comes to realize in reading the accounts of explorers, naturalists, hunters and opportunists travelling the African wilderness, Roosevelt was following a tradition which had become firmly established between Burton’s time and his; the only unusual thing about the President’s actions was that he took so many books, whereas most travellers in the African interior publicly affirmed that they took Shakespeare as their only literary reading. Compiling an inventory of his own expeditionary supplies in 1886, Walter Montague Kerr protests at the meagreness of the baggage which accompanied him overland from South Africa to the Lakes, noting that his

      baggage … would have made a poor show beside the enormous stores carried by some expeditions to the interior of the dark continent … I also had some books – a small edition of Shakespeare, a Nautical Almanac, logarithmic tables, and Proctor’s Star Atlas.13

      Once again, a volume of Shakespeare is found nestled in among technical manuals, and after a while it does not seem out of place. It becomes, in effect, a cultural tool as necessary for survival as any of the cartographer’s manuals. Another traveller in the interior, Thomas Heazle Parke, writing from a sickbed just west of Albert Nyanza (in modern-day Congo), mentions that he is ‘filling up [his] time reading Shakespeare and Allingbone’s Quotations. The former, with the Bible, and Whittaker’s large edition, are the best books for Africa when transport is limited.’14 The printing of Shakespeare, like the Bible, in dense double columns on thin paper allowed for a great deal of powerful language to be squeezed into a small space. It is easy to forget, however, that Shakespeare’s works were made portable because they were thought to be indispensable, and not the other way around. Roosevelt captured this perfectly when he said that his three volumes of Shakespeare were ‘the literary equivalent of a soldier’s ration – “the largest amount of sustenance in the smallest possible space”’.15

      A riposte of sorts is delivered to this gung-ho world of expeditionary Shakespeares by one of the few female explorers to find a place in these overwhelmingly masculine ranks. Gertrude Emily Benham, who at the same time that Roosevelt was careening through East Africa on a private train was becoming the first woman to ascend Kilimanjaro (and who would later walk across the continent from east to west), similarly recorded the ‘few books’ that she took with her on this expedition and others: ‘Besides the Bible and a pocket Shakespeare, I have Lorna Doone and Kipling’s Kim.’ Unlike her male counterparts, however, Benham professed never to have carried firearms on her expeditions, nor to have shot any game; she traded her own knitting for local produce as she went, and testifies that she found all the locals she encountered pleasant and welcoming. Her Shakespeare, it bears mentioning, was not holstered in pig leather as Roosevelt’s was; the cloth covers of her own making, she says, were enough to keep them safe during her travels on every continent.16

      The nuances of these (male) travellers’ attachment to Shakespeare starts to become clearer in another passage where Parke, who served as medical officer on the celebrated Emin Pasha Relief Expedition of 1886–9, writes before setting out about how he came by the Works that he took with him:

      A former patient of mine presented me with a copy of Shakespeare, as a parting gift and remembrancer on my journey. I cordially appreciated the kind attention, and, now that I am about to penetrate the undiscovered country, from whose bourn so few white travellers have safely returned, I trust the perusal of the pages of the immortal dramatist will help me to while away many a weary hour.17

      Though Parke is clearly trying to be witty, he cannot prevent his anxiety about the expedition from showing through, and the passage is riddled with worries about mortality. Africa here becomes the underworld, which in Hamlet’s description is ‘that undiscovered country from whose bourn / No traveller returns’, and there is a sense in which the works, written by an ‘immortal dramatist’ and given as a talisman-like ‘remembrancer’, gives Parke hopes of returning from the underworld, like the Golden Bough which allowed Aeneas to visit his wife in Hades and return to the land of the living. This fear is captured succinctly in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, where the madness of the colonist-run-amok Mr Kurtz is attributed (in part) to his lack of books:

      How can you imagine what particular region of the first ages a man’s untrammelled feet may take him into by the way of solitude – utter solitude without a policeman – by the way of silence – utter silence, where no warning voice of kind neighbour can be heard whispering of public opinion? These little things make all the great difference. When they are gone you must fall back upon your own innate strength, upon your own capacity for faithfulness. Of course, you may be too much of a fool to go wrong – too dull even to know that you are being assaulted by the powers of darkness.18

      Kurtz’s famous final words – ‘The horror! The horror!’ – gesture to exactly what Shakespeare was supposed to conjure away: the chaos, depravity and existential nihilism that lay just at the doorstep of Victorian confidence.

Parke may well have returned from his expedition with an even greater belief in Shakespearean magic than he had when he left, given that he survived relatively unscathed an expedition which shocked the world with revelations of barbarity unusual even for ventures of this type. The Emin Pasha Relief Expedition had departed in great fanfare to save a German national named Eduard Schnitzer, unremarkable before his life in Africa, who had set himself up as a petty king in the Sudan. Now named ‘Emin Pasha’, Schnitzer soon became embroiled in warfare with religious fanatics and ending up a hostage to his own subjects; he is the first upstart settler-king in this story, but he certainly will not be the last. The expedition quickly ran into trouble, however, and split into a vanguard scouting party (led by Henry Morton Stanley and Thomas Heazle Parke) and a rear column, in which the bulk of the Europeans remained with a small group of Zanzibari porters. Though they succeeded in building a makeshift fort, the rear column were constantly assailed by poison arrow attacks, and the maize they tried to grow was incessantly trampled over by elephants, reducing them to near-starvation only relieved by dire expedients including donkey tongues and grass. Their long wait inside their fort did, however, leave the rear column plenty of time for reading, and they had dutifully brought with them the Works, which by this point were almost issued as standard.* William G. Stairs, one of the Europeans in the rear column, dryly remarks in a diary entry on Monday, 29 October 1888, that ‘if we stay here much longer we shall all be great authorities on Shakespeare & Tennyson’.19 Though most of the Europeans did survive to tell the tale, the expedition became a scandal on its return to Europe, when it emerged that one of the officers in the rear column had beaten a man to death for the presumption of defending his wife from rape, and another had paid to watch a young girl being ritually eaten.

      Although not all of the exploratory expeditions were quite so despicable, those who read Shakespeare in the course of them were often drawn towards the darker reaches of the works. The Shakespearean magic that lies buried in Parke’s description comes out into the open in many of these stories, which multiplied as the tradition became established. Arthur H. Neumann, in his Elephant Hunting in East Equatorial Africa, recounts the following episode:

      Lesiat [his Ndorobo tracker] had for long been bothering me to give him a charm to increase his power in this pursuit [i.e. the hunting of elephants]. My assurances that I had no such occult powers merely made him the more importunate. He regarded my objections as a refusal СКАЧАТЬ