in Suffolk, where he inspired the destitute farmhand Samuel Speare to follow him back to Zanzibar as a missionary. Another of the young recruits, Owen Makanyassa, was put to work in the printing office, where he was soon in charge and running a brisk business for local clients as well as setting the pamphlets composed by Steere.14 Ironically, the boy christened ‘William Shakespeare’ was considered among those ‘who shew no sign of teaching power’, and was put out to apprentice as a mason.15
It is hard to decide quite what to think of the evangelizing activities of Steere and his kind. The intentions with which Steere embarked upon his life in Africa were undoubtedly noble ones, just as his life before Zanzibar had been a catalogue of selfless aspiration. Though he had followed his father and studied law at University College London, he was distracted (as I was when an undergraduate there) by the variety of the metropolis and spent most of his time in the Reading Room of the British Museum studying ancient tongues, as well as learning to print (and learning botany, conchology and brass rubbing). (Admittedly, my own distractions were not always as salubrious.) He was called to the bar in 1850, but soon left in hopes of helping the needy. He sold all of his books and other possessions to support his work in various Brotherhoods dedicated to helping the London poor, though he left this life in disgust at the internal politics and what he viewed as the lack of zeal in many of the participants.
Joining the church seemed the next logical step, and Steere volunteered for one of the least desirable postings in the British Isles, where his Skegness parishioners remembered him as a ‘downright shirt sleeve man, and a real Bible parson’.16 When even this proved insufficiently testing, he signed on to accompany Bishop-elect Tozer into what could only have seemed to him the last place on earth. So if Steere’s actions in offering safety and a livelihood to utterly helpless orphans in exchange for their adherence to his own Christian beliefs strikes me as hard to sympathize with, it is nevertheless clear to me that Steere was benevolent and believed unquestioningly that what he was giving these boys was salvation. He was, I suppose, not asking of them anything more than what he was asking of himself, and this sets him apart from the explorers. As his translation of the Tales from Shakespeare suggests, Steere’s belief in the equality of our souls meant he also believed in the possibility of shared thought, language, culture, of a common humanity which reversed the fragmentation of human society after the Tower of Babel.
This is not to say that Steere could not be rather self-righteous, perhaps even too much for the woman he married in 1858, Mary Bridget. It seems clear that there was a separation between Steere and the woman who persuaded him to accept the African posting, for all that the biography written soon after Steere’s death gives an (amusingly melodramatic) explanation for why they never lived together again:
Mrs. Steere had bravely consented to his former sacrifice [his solitary move to Skegness], and now she bade him God speed on his second venture [to Africa], and quite intended following herself, accompanied by a sister. We may add that the idea was not definitely abandoned until some years afterwards, when delicacy of health, ending, alas! in disease of the brain, rendered it impossible.17
Although Steere and his wife never lived together again, their letters and papers do show rather touchingly that she spent much of her remaining life visiting English churches to sketch the masonry and woodwork that Steere would copy for the vast neo-gothic cathedral he erected in Stone Town, on the site of the Zanzibar slave market he had helped to put out of commission.
Christ Church, Zanzibar, the cathedral that Steere built during his time as Missionary Bishop to Central Africa. (Reproduced by kind permission of the Syndics of Cambridge University Library)
My progress in reconstructing the Stone Town of Steere’s day is immeasurably slowed during my first days in Zanzibar by the fact that Ramadan is being observed. For this I have calculated: things would be open erratically (if at all), and any officials whom I do manage to locate will be hungry and uncooperative from observing their daytime fast. This is fine – I have a pile of nineteenth-century accounts of Zanzibar to work my way through, and a list of infidel contacts whose availability should be less affected by the religious calendar. What I had not realized, however, is that Zanzibar is practically alone in the Islamic world in not observing a set date for the end of Ramadan: instead, Eid al-Fitr will only be declared when the new moon is actually seen by the famished and expectant faithful. Each cloudy evening, then, will mean another day’s wait, and a day less of my limited time in the archives. I spend my days, then, walking the alleys that have remained unchanged since Steere’s time, trying to pinpoint the location of the UMCA mission and of Steere’s printing venture. Here is what was once the American Consul’s house, where Henry Morton Stanley spent nights on the roof in his tent to prepare himself for the hardships of his expedition to find Livingstone. This palace became the club for colonials in the twentieth century, where Evelyn Waugh spent a week trying to weather the unbearable heat by sitting under a fan with eau de quinine on his head; it is now a public hotel selling smart cocktails at souvenir prices to visiting cruise passengers. Here is Steere’s cathedral, and nearby the chains that serve as reminders of the slave auctions once held on the site. Here would have stood the building where a princess, Seyyida Salme, was kept under house arrest during Steere’s time after assisting her brother in a failed coup. Seyyida Salme, who will play a part in Steere’s life in Stone Town, is a figure whose daily life is recorded in unparalleled detail in the intimate memoirs she left of life in the harem.
The brother whose rising she supported, Barghash, did eventually become Sultan, and his palace, the Beit al-Ajaib (or ‘House of Wonders’), is now a sparsely filled museum, with exhibits in the corners of its vast reception rooms. As an Arab palace, the Beit al-Ajaib is of an open design to allow the sea breeze to draw the hot air out of the upper floors, and many of the lighter exhibits seem on the point of fluttering away. The rickety vitrines, dwarfed by the echoing and palatial rooms, contain the few surviving pieces of Limoges porcelain and Venetian glass with which Barghash tricked out his palace, pieces which in their exotic fragility seem faintly like butterflies pinned to their velvet boards. Among these moulting remnants of Barghash’s splendour and their curling typewritten labels, I come across an intriguing early photograph of a group of men, both black and white, working in a large room filled with what are unmistakably typesetting cases: inclined desks, like architects’ drawing-tables, with dozens of cubby holes for the pieces of moveable type that will be put together to make a printed page. The photograph is labelled ‘Universities Mission to Central Africa, Mambo Msiige’, and by the look of their dress the photograph was taken at the end of the nineteenth century. There is no one to ask for further information other than the small crowd of women lazing on the verandah at the front of the palace, of whom all and none seem to be employed by the museum. I shall have to see The Director; The Director is unlikely to be in until after Ramadan; my existing ticket will certainly not allow me to enter the museum again to see if he has returned.
After several unsuccessful return visits I manage to secure an interview with The Director. No further mention is made of new tickets, and indeed after my first reappearance I have the run of the museum, as the women have evidently become bored by the whole matter and make no protest at my comings and goings. I find my way to The Director’s office, which turns out to be another cavernous reception room in which he occupies a small desk at the far end, by one of the two walls of windows, which remain firmly shuttered in an attempt to keep the stacks of paper on his desk. The Director is a small, round man in a navy blue suit, squared off by shoulder pads of a remarkable breadth. He invites me to take a seat, an offer which occasions some confusion on my part as the only two chairs in the near-empty office are next to one another behind his desk. I take a seat behind the desk, though it becomes clear that this is not the commencement of the interview, as The Director is engaged in Solving a Problem. On his desk is a computer; on another table, a good thirty feet away across the palace room, is a printer. These two are evidently plugged into the two power sockets in the room. The Director returns to the printer, which he seems to have been examining for some time, and walks