existence to a single god might suggest that there are other things that link us – a shared morality, a culture which is similar at its heart for all the superficial differences. But this logic could also be reversed: evidence that there are shared, universal aspects to our culture might serve as proof that we derive from a single point of origin, an Edenic and united past.
We should not forget, however, the power that even this cultural authority was to confer on Steere and his kind. Looking out from the UMCA house on Mambo Msiige at the same seascape Steere would have seen, I am reminded of two Shakespeare quotations which evidently meant much to him. They are quoted prominently in his commonplace book, where Steere (like many readers before the twentieth century) gathered his most treasured bits of text. The first of these is from The Tempest, that perennial lens through which Englishmen saw Africa:
My Library
Was Dukedom large enough …25
This sentiment is voiced by Prospero (The Tempest, I.ii.109–10), magician and exiled Duke of Milan, whose death we saw being plotted by Caliban in the last chapter. As suggested by the need to burn his books before murdering him, Prospero’s library is the immediate source of his strength, like Samson’s hair, and destroying it will leave him vulnerable. But Prospero’s library has a more complicated relationship with power in the play than simply providing him with magic tricks. It is, in the first place, the reason that he has lost his Dukedom: Prospero’s bookish belief that his ‘library / Was Dukedom large enough’ distracted him from the dangers of his court and the conspiracy which unseated him. As so often in Shakespeare, however, a lack of interest in political power is the best evidence that someone deserves it. Two of Shakespeare’s great actor-politicians, Julius Caesar and Richard III, demonstrate their awareness of this when they make a great show of refusing a tyrant’s crown when it is first offered to them, only to condescend at the appropriate moment to accepting the burden. In a similar way, Prospero’s books are both a symbol of his lack of interest in power and the ultimate proof that he deserves it – as shown when he is reinstated to his Dukedom at the end of the play.
The suspicion that these lines are the key to Steere’s personality is confirmed by the fact that the second treasured quotation encapsulates the same paradox of power and books, even if it comes from a different play. The lines are from the opening of the second Act of As You Like It, where the ousted Duke Senior is praising his woodland exile over the cares of court. The lines (mis)quoted by Steere are given here in italics:
Now, my co-mates and brothers in exile,
Hath not old custom made this life more sweet
Than that of painted pomp? Are not these woods
More free from peril than the envious court? […]
Sweet are the uses of adversity,
Which like the toad, ugly and venomous,
Wears yet a precious jewel in his head.
And this our life exempt from public haunt
Finds tongues in trees, books in the running stream,
Sermons in stones, and good in everything.
As You Like It (II.i.1–4, 12–17)
Duke Senior argues that simply being away from the corridors of power has such a salutary effect that the very woodland becomes like a library in the reflections it affords. Again, like Prospero, it is the very fact that Duke Senior is content to give up his ducal rule for a bookish wilderness which advertises his fitness for authority, and he is duly returned to his Dukedom at the end of the play. So when Steere wrote these lines in his commonplace book, was he stirred by their humility, their idyll of a life contented with books, or with the righteous claim to power entailed by that humility?
Steere’s awareness of the role that printing and language-teaching would play in the struggle to dominate Africa meant that the relationship between power and books may not have been a subconscious one. As he wrote about one tribe shortly after an expedition into the interior, ‘It seems to me morally certain that the Yaos will be Christians or Mahommedans before very long, and I think the question will turn a good deal upon which is the first to write and read their language.’26 So the boys who learned to print in this room looking out to sea from Stone Town were, unbeknownst to them, building an arsenal which would conquer the inland communities from which they had been kidnapped. I thank the security guard, who is wavering between boredom with and suspicion of my glassy-eyed pensiveness in an empty room, and leave.
* Even in Shakespeare’s time, Euclid was carried into exotic places as a totem of the Christian West’s access to universal truth – as when the Jesuit missionary Matteo Ricci presented Euclid’s Elements to the Chinese Emperor, in hopes that the awestruck audience would accept the truths of Christian doctrine as equally indisputable.
* Shakespeare would also have had access to information about Zanzibar from John Pory’s translation and edition of the Geographical Historie of Leo Africanus, first published in 1600, where the inhabitants are described as ‘much addicted to sorcery and witchcraft’. The Geographical Historie is largely confined to northern and north-western Africa, and Pory’s supplement on sub-Saharan Africa was drawn from the reports of other travellers.
* Indeed, some indication of the success of Steere’s project to plant bardolatry on the East African coast is given by the action of Seyyida Salme’s brother, Sultan Barghash, during his state visit to London in 1875. Not only did Barghash insist on pausing to pay respect to the bust of Shakespeare in Westminster Abbey, but Shakespeare also helped to avert a diplomatic crisis: after the Sultan objected, during a ceremonial dinner given by the Worshipful Company of Fishmongers, to the use of the epithet ‘Worshipful’ for anyone other than God, he was apparently placated by the information that the company was sufficiently venerable to have merited a mention in the works of Shakespeare (The Times, 26 June 1875, p. 12). Although some commentators at the time suggested that Barghash was being coached by his British escorts into locally appropriate behaviours, they seem not to have considered that Barghash may have been evangelized for Shakespeare before setting foot in Britain.
3
Player-Kings of Eastern Africa
STEPHANO (to Caliban):
Monster, I will kill this man. His daughter and I will be king and queen – save our graces – and Trinculo and thyself shall be viceroys. Dost thou like the plot, Trinculo?
The Tempest (III.ii.101–3)
If The Tempest ensured that the Victorian explorers arrived in Africa with readymade ideas about the book-burning savages they expected to meet, it also provided predictions of how the colonizing powers would behave towards them. The prescience of its narrative – the occupation of land through various legal and technological tricks, initial belief in the aptness of the native for education, followed by horror when the same natives begin to demand to be treated as their education merits (as Caliban does in casting a desiring eye upon Miranda) – was not lost on East African observers, who after gaining independence repeatedly reflected on the way in which Shakespeare’s works both predicted and served as patterns for colonial actions.1 The breakthrough novel (A Grain of Wheat, 1967) of Kenya’s most celebrated writer, Ngugi wa Thiong’o, includes the story of a local official in the Kenyan colonial administration whose grand plan to Anglicize the local Africans is laid out in a tract