good twenty-five feet short of the computer. He places it calmly on the ground and walks to the computer, where he stops and looks back at the printer, before once again pacing the ground in between. I am unsure whether it would be wise to offer some observations at this point, so I remain quiet. The Director spends some time over at the printer, contemplating (it seems) whether he had best move the printer table towards the desk, or give the matter up entirely. Employing a tactic once suggested to me as a response to official delays, I remove my volume of Shakespeare from my satchel and begin to read. Emitting a sigh of resignation, the Director comes and sits down at my side.
Leaning towards me on his elbow with chin in hand, but still looking out into the body of the room rather than in my direction, he asks me the nature of my inquiry. Assuming what seems to be the only logical posture at this point, I also speak out into the room, telling him who I am and asking whether he might be able to provide any information on the photograph in the gallery below. There are the inevitable questions about letters of introduction, of which I am thoughtlessly unprovided. (Later in my trip I take to writing these on my own behalf from inventively named referees; my university identity card, which would have been infinitely more difficult to forge, is of no interest to such authorities as I meet.) After several repetitions of my question have produced no impression whatsoever on the mind of The Director, it appears that the only thing to do is to descend together into the gallery to inspect said photograph. This involves a great process of informing secretaries and locking offices – one or other of which one might reasonably have expected to suffice. The Director has evidently never set eyes on the photograph before, and indeed seems rather taken by the display as a whole. It is, he agrees, very interesting, but he can tell me nothing further about it.
Luckily I have another appointment, this time with a local watercolourist of Goan descent, John Baptist da Silva, who seems unnervingly to have been present at all significant events in the last seventy years of Zanzibar’s history. (It is, I suppose, a small island.) We sit on an open gallery overlooking the courtyard of his house; as with many townhouses in the old quarter, this one has inherited the Arab disdain for outward magnificence, and the heavy door which gives entrance to the elegant quarters opens off an alley which might easily be mistaken for an untended gap between buildings. His granddaughter brings us mugs of achingly sweet tea flavoured with husks of cardamom, and we look over portfolios of his exquisite paintings, which expertly capture the blend of rubbish and Moorish glamour that characterizes Stone Town. We discuss the irritability of the island during Ramadan, and I comment on the increased number of women wearing the full niqab covering since I was last here. Unfurling his glinting eyes from among their wrinkles, John Baptist smiles and tells me that they are, however, experts at flirting with their eyes, and often provocatively dressed underneath. My ‘flat’ in Stone Town confirms this sense of female freedom when off the streets. The ‘flat’ is, in fact, merely a room perched above a first-floor courtyard, reached by something more ladder than stairs; the entrance from the street is through the back of one of the many lean-to stores selling kikoi wraps, up stairs to a landing that has been converted into a hair salon by means of odd mirrors and chairs, and then into the courtyard which serves the dozen or so other residents of the tenement for all of life’s necessities. The ladies in the hair salon seem to have an arrangement by which each of them is dresser and each customer, without too much bothersome distinction between. One voluminous lady quickly senses my unsureness about local gender relations, and asks increasingly daring questions about my romantic interests, to gales of laughter from the other ladies.
When I tell John Baptist why I’ve come to Zanzibar, he is charmingly unfazed by the idea that I might try to understand Shakespeare (or anything else, for that matter) by coming to Zanzibar. He immediately recalls his own childhood experience of being made to learn Julius Caesar by rote for the Sisters of his Catholic convent school. His early memory is reminiscent of the semi-autobiographical passages in the novel By the Sea by the excellent Zanzibari novelist Abdulrazak Gurnah, which features a ‘teacher of English … who was a pious Muslim and an ardent Anglophile without contradiction or anxiety’, and whose efforts culminate in a bravura performance of Brutus’ speech in praise of Caesar, given by a young Zanzibari boy in an alley like that outside John Baptist’s house.18 It is rather poignant to think that Steere’s island would one day be populated by boys fluent in iambic pentameter.
John Baptist can confirm that the UMCA mission house was at Mambo Msiige, and that it later became (among other things) an embassy and part of the government telegraph office. Though it is still standing, he doubts that I am likely to find anything there; it is currently an empty shell, marooned in a legal battle over whether its proprietors should be allowed to convert another Zanzibari heirloom into a luxury hotel. He tells me not to expect too much in the archives or museum records: at independence in 1963 the new officials carted the records out of offices all over town in wheelbarrows and set fire to them on the front lawns, intent that the New Zanzibar should not be burdened by the clutter of the past. Much of Stone Town was appropriated under the subsequent socialist programmes of President (and Shakespeare translator) Julius Nyerere, given over to tenants who had no funds to maintain the merchant palaces in which they squatted.
I am shown the dozens of photograph albums John Baptist was given by a member of a Goan photographic dynasty, days before he was murdered in the looting that followed independence. John Baptist has since acquired more photographs and postcards of Zanzibar from visits to specialist fairs near Paddington railway station, which seems to be the only reason for which he leaves the island. The albums contain page after page of bug-eyed Victorian official portraits, as well as pictures of the town during the latter part of Steere’s life and a surprising number of louche pictures of all-male theatricals and costume parties on board navy vessels anchored off the island. Among the pictures is an old picture postcard depicting the UMCA mission House on Mambo Msiige, where Shakespeare first became Swahili in the thin pamphlet of stories. John makes a gift to me of the postcard, and, slugging the cardamom sugar at the bottom of my mug, I leave him to his afternoon nap.
A few days later, as I am carefully porting a paper plate full of barbecued seafood back to my rooms from the open-air market, the cry of Eid Mubarak! announces that Ramadan is at an end. A man from the crowd streaming down to the Forodhani gardens on the waterfront stops to tell me with no apparent irony that it is ‘not permitted’ to eat the street food in my flat, and (while dubious of the legal logic this entails) I take this as an invitation to join the revels down in town. The sense of relief is general. Even the dreadlocked Somali zealot I had watched a few days previously lambasting a tourist for wearing shorts during Ramadan seems to be letting his hair down.
When the archives finally open, and I have waited long enough for several ranks of officials to scrutinize my very august letter of introduction, I start on the boxes of UMCA papers. The going is slow, in part because I am only allowed one box at a time – the box being the natural unit with which the scholar can be trusted – and there are long intervals while a new one is fetched. The papers when they do arrive are terrifyingly brittle, and have to be handled like dried flowers. More than once it seems clear that I will be the last to read a letter or a diary page, and only reluctantly do I return the crumbling papers to their boxes and send them away into the hot-dry limbo in which they wait hopelessly to be read. Still, my time is short and I want to find out something about Steere’s printing works and his day-to-day life. So I pass over the touching details of the young slave boys’ daily routines, and the arrival of the first liberated slave girls, and the growth of outposts of the UMCA mission elsewhere on the Zanzibar islands and (slowly) on the mainland.
Here and there I come across a rich detail, such as the mission logbook entry which tells me that on 24 January 1867 – the very year in which Steere would set his printing press to the task of producing the Hadithi za Kiingereza – the mission staff (and perhaps some of the boys?) attended a ‘Theatrical Performance on board HMS Highflyer’; they also on that occasion received from the ship two further boys taken from slaving vessels.19 Even if this is no more than a tantalizing lead, I already know something about the contexts of this ship visit, which makes me thrill at the discovery. After all, the last time the Highflyer had been at Stone Town it had weighed anchor in the middle of the night, slipping