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

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      Sir, he hath never fed of the dainties that are bred in a book.

      He hath not eat paper, as it were; he hath not drunk ink.

      His intellect is not replenished; he is only an animal – only sensible in the duller parts.

      Love’s Labor’s Lost (IV.ii.21–3)

Carrying Shakespeare into Africa felt momentous for Burton and Stanley in part because they were escorting a treasure into the unknown, where it did not seem to belong. Their feelings were not, one suspects, altogether different from those of the missionaries who dedicated themselves to bringing the Gospel into strange lands, though of course the explorers showed little wish to share Shakespeare’s powerful language with the natives they met. Burton carried Shakespeare with Euclid because both were felt to contain unalterable, universal truths – in beauty as in geometry – and the unshakeable nature of the works was demonstrated by carrying them into unsettling places.* Yet though it is possible that the first white travellers met peoples who had not seen paper books before (if not likely, given that Arabic slaving caravans had long been visiting these areas), the sense that the works were wholly alien to Africa was largely an adventurer’s fantasy during the time of the later safaris. By the time Roosevelt visited in 1909–10, a generation of young Africans were not only familiar with Shakespearean narrative, but had even been learning to read and write Swahili using the stories of Shylock and Lear.

      It was to understand the setting in which this schoolbook – the Hadithi za Kiingereza, or ‘Tales from the English’ – was printed that I first returned to East Africa. Though Africa would long since have swallowed up any traces of Burton and Stanley’s encampments, the Hadithi was printed in a town which might retain traces of its genesis. Frustratingly, not a single copy survives of the book’s first edition, printed by Edward Steere on the island of Zanzibar in 1867, and we are reliant on later editions for details of its contents.1 Though a tragedy, this is no great surprise: such a slender volume, with pages sewed together by Steere’s own hand, was designed for immediate use by the boys liberated from slaving vessels; copies of it would have quickly disintegrated in the dust and heat and sweat of excited, fearful, frustrated hands, and it was likely that no one thought it worth preserving a copy of such an ephemeral thing for the record.2 Karen Blixen’s Beethoven-loving houseboy, Kamante, was shrewd in casting doubt upon the merits of his mistress’s typed manuscript pages:

      ‘Look, Msabu,’ he said, ‘this [a leatherbound hardback Odyssey] is a good book. It hangs together from the one end to the other. Even if you hold it up and shake it strongly, it does not come to pieces. The man who has written it is very clever. But what you write,’ he went on, both with scorn and with a sort of friendly compassion, ‘is some here and some there. When the people forget to close the door it blows about, even down on the floor and you are angry. It will not be a good book.’3

      Although the episode is intended to demonstrate Kamante’s charmingly naïve assessment of a book by its cover, he is of course right: literary longevity has everything to do with a good solid binding. Though reasonably good records were kept of the missionary printing activities during the later years of Steere’s stay in Zanzibar, the early print experiments like the Hadithi were not seen for what they would become: among the earliest physical relics of Swahili, a language spoken today by over a hundred million people in eastern Africa. It is one of the ironies of history that the true character of each age is lost in those things thought not worth preserving, and this was the fate of the first Swahili Shakespeare.

      Steere’s thin Zanzibari pamphlet consisted of four stories, taken from the pages of the popular children’s book Tales from Shakespeare by Charles and Mary Lamb: The Taming of the Shrew (Mwanamke Aliyefunzwa), The Merchant of Venice (Kuwia na Kuwiwa), The Tragedy of King Lear (Baba na Binti), and The Life of Timon of Athens (Kula Maji). Steere’s choice of these four stories seems baffling at first. They are not unified by genre, including as they do two comedies and two tragedies (though Timon is a slippery fish and doesn’t sit easily in any category). Yet the idea that Steere might have chosen these four widely differing plays to give a sample of Shakespeare’s range is also unconvincing: while the Merchant and Lear are undisputed high points of Shakespeare’s writing, it seems certain that no one choosing four Shakespeare plays to take to a desert island would settle for The Taming of the Shrew and Timon of Athens. The answer, it seems, must lie elsewhere, and my first guess is that these four plays suggested themselves to Steere as Shakespeare’s clearest parables for everyday life: each of them is, in this highly simplified form, a morality tale about the proper relations between individuals, their families and the societies in which they live, and each offers a message that Steere might have expected to be acceptable to readers in an Islamic society. Taming warns of the dangers of unsubmissive women, and offers a path to bring them back to the desired obedience, while Lear shows the disastrous consequences of allowing children to wield power over their parents. The Merchant of Venice corrects the evils that arise in society from usury – СКАЧАТЬ