in love with a German banker, Heinrich Reute. The ship’s party must have spent part of the evening before settling down to watch their play congratulating Captain Thomas Malcolm Sabine Pasley on his successful part in this storybook romance, by getting the princess safely to Aden, from where she could pass on to Hamburg, to live out the rest of her life as Emily Reute, a prosperous burgeress and celebrated author of harem exposés. The logs and letters are silent about what the play was – though it strikes me that Shakespeare’s own Winter’s Tale of rescued princesses would have served the mythic balance – but it is still fascinating that these people, far removed from England and every day facing danger and confronted by disease and deprivation, retained a loyalty to the cultural rituals of their homeland.*
Days of sifting – sometimes literally – through the disintegrating documents in the archives shows me that I will learn little more of the Hadithi za Kiingereza (at least here). This is, of course, a disappointment, but it is one that those interested in the past become accustomed to. There is a tightness in the gut which comes from the sense that something wondrous is slipping ever further from us, like the vertigo in one’s bones when handling something delicate. Though this tightness never disappears completely, it is sometimes relieved when a fragment brings us closer to the disappearing past, like a ghostly hand clasped for a moment. The feeling is succinctly captured in Shakespeare’s famous Sonnet 30:
When to the sessions of sweet silent thought
I summon up remembrance of things past,
I sigh the lack of many a thing I sought
And with old woes new wail my dear time’s waste.
Then can I drown an eye, unused to flow,
For precious friends hid in death’s dateless night,
And weep afresh love’s long-since canceled woe,
And moan th’expense of many a vanished sight.
Though convention required that Shakespeare turn in the end to a rather anodyne comment on the power of love (‘But if the while I think on thee, dear friend / All losses are restored, and sorrows end’), the force of the sonnet lies in Shakespeare’s unmatched evocation of loss. The phrases are riddling – how does one ‘sigh a lack’ or ‘moan an expense’? – but they summon precisely the defeat of language in the face of ‘time’s waste’, ‘death’s dateless night’, a defeat that can be brought on by the loss of ‘precious friends’, yes, but also by the loss of ‘things’ or even those ‘sights’ which are by nature ephemeral. The ‘sessions of sweet silent thought’ that characterize scholarship are often driven by much the same yearning.
Later, however, I do come across one enticing story which deserves to be told here even if it happened many decades afterwards. Though Steere and his printers were long dead, the episode takes place on the island of Zanzibar and is reported by a member of the Universities’ Mission to Central Africa – it is, in fact, a throwaway anecdote in one of their newsletters from 1934.20 In it he reports a large gathering of Africans, Arabs, Indians and Europeans at the village of Mbweni, where a troupe of local men were putting on an impromptu performance. The text on which the drama is based, it transpires, is none other than Kuwia na Kuwiwa, the rendering of The Merchant of Venice from the Hadithi za Kiingereza.21 The production, it is reported, was very basic: a petrol lamp, a table, a chair and five actors – Antonio, Bassanio, Shylock, a Judge and the ‘ugliest man in the village’ as Portia. The setting was only indicated by signs (Nyumba ya Portia, ‘Portia’s House’, etc.); and the tale of the Jewish moneylender had been turned, as it would often be afterwards in East Africa, against the wealthy Indians who were closer to their own lives. The punchline of the anecdote – and what particularly intrigues me about it – is that the cast of the play have no idea of its connection to Shakespeare, or even that it was once a dramatic text. For the correspondent in the newsletter this is evidently amusing – like Arthur Neumann putting Shakespeare into the hands of his unwitting elephant hunter; but I think we might take it rather differently. This, after all, is Shakespeare in the hands of those who have no reason to think of it as ‘Shakespeare’; ‘all ignorant of Shakespeare’s efforts’, we are told, they ‘decided it had great possibilities of dramatization’. While the appeal of Shakespeare’s play to a group of provincial Zanzibaris who had no reason to revere the text as canonical is not unassailable proof of Shakespeare’s universal appeal, it certainly has the flavour of a beginning.
Before leaving Zanzibar to follow the spread of Shakespeare on the mainland, I go to visit the Universities’ Mission house at Mambo Msiige, approaching it by walking along the beach among joggers and fishermen. I also pass groups of Maasai elmorani (warriors), long and thin and draped in their traditional plaid, like tartan Giacomettis; these nomadic herders from the inland plateau, disconcertingly out of place, have been imported by luxury hotels to give the place an authentically African air which the Arab coastal Africans apparently lack. The building is, as John Baptist had said, more or less abandoned – almost, that is, save for the dozen or so security guards, who in grand African tradition are armed to the teeth in blithe disregard for the fact they are sentries to a hollow shell. My original romantic notion of breaking into the empty building is replaced by an equally romantic notion that I will bribe my way in. It is very rare for Shakespeare scholars to have the opportunity to cover up criminal proceedings in the course of their research, so this was clearly an opportunity not to be missed. In the event, the guard I approach seems delighted that anyone had been tempted to breach the cordon, and offers to guide my tour personally.
We traipse around for a considerable time up narrow staircases comically unsuited to luxury, and through stripped-bare low-ceilinged spaces furnished only with curling posterboards with mockups of the high-ceilinged ballrooms the hotel will contain. Eventually, we find the nondescript room captured in the museum photo, where the Universities’ Mission had set up its printing operation. This was where my first Swahili Shakespeare had been typeset by fingers that had come from inland villages down to the coast in cages, out to sea in bondage, back to shore on ironclad Royal Navy ships. I have worked with old-fashioned hand-presses myself, and even to someone who knows what to expect they are a frightening confusion of pistons and levers and traps; I imagine the boys must have felt, like Conrad’s native boiler feeder in The Heart of Darkness, as if they were in ‘thrall to some strange witchcraft’. They did, however, seem to accommodate themselves to their new surroundings with reasonable speed, aided in part by the clearing up of certain misunderstandings. As Steere says,
It was not long before even the natives perceived that our boys had an air and a bearing such as their old companions never had. It was their Christianity beginning even so soon to show itself, as sound religion must, even in their speech and bearing. We taught our children that white men might be trusted. They have told us since that their impression was, that first night they slept in the house, that they were meant to be eaten.22
Steere is unfailingly confident that it was his religious teachings which made the boys feel superior to those around them, though being inducted into the mysteries of print may in and of itself have had a powerful effect on them. It is difficult for us, who spend our lives trying to keep above a sea of printed matter that threatens to drown us, to remember the strangeness and power of a process that produces uncannily identical objects, objects which constrain those holding them to speak the same words.23 Indeed, it is often far from clear in his writings that Steere felt he had come to the Dark Continent to bring the Christian message, rather than the tools of language which were only supposed to be servants in the Lord’s work. In a series of letters in 1872, prompted by Bishop Tozer’s resignation and the likelihood that he would succeed as Bishop, he wrote repeatedly to the UMCA asking to be left to his translation and printing: he was, he said, more ‘useful to the Mission as an interpreter of European thoughts to negroes and of negro thoughts to Europeans’.24 For Steere, it seems, establishing a shared