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

Continent, to sing (as the text of Bishop Tozer’s first Zanzibar sermon would have it) ‘the Lord’s song in a strange land’ (Psalm 137).6

      As I read through the memoirs of the early travellers and settlers, a pattern becomes increasingly clear. This was, in effect, a strange feedback loop in which fortune hunters, drawn to East Africa by literary fantasies cobbled together from accounts by Stanley and others like him, returned with yet more travellers’ tales which confirmed to the hungry audiences at home that the reality matched their fevered expectations. Evelyn Waugh joked, on his return from a tour of the region, about that time when travellers