if his words, wherever spoken, were a foreign soil, like an embassy.
Many years later – now settled and teaching Shakespeare’s works for a living – I happened upon the unexpected fact that one of the first books printed in Swahili was a Shakespearean one. Not a play, mind you, but a slim volume of stories from Charles and Mary Lamb’s Tales from Shakespeare, published as Hadithi za Kiingereza (‘English Tales’) on the island of Zanzibar in the 1860s. Once again I felt that odd stirring of a beauty out of place. I began a small research project into this volume, its translator (the Missionary Bishop of Zanzibar Edward Steere), and the fascinating milieu in which he printed his books, with the help of former slave boys off the African coast. What I discovered during the momentous travels that followed, through Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda, Ethiopia and Sudan, was a hidden history that brought both Shakespeare and the land I thought familiar into richer focus than I had ever known them.
In part this was the story we already know of Africa – of the explorers who staggered through the interior of the continent, and the various eccentrics who developed a hothouse version of English culture as they tried to rebuild the Sceptered Isle on the African savannah – but made fresh by the disarming strangeness of the real experiences lived by well-known figures, figures whose stories are often reduced to cartoonishly simple fantasies of the ‘Dark Continent’ or of Happy Valley. But it was also a story of Africa less often told: a story of Indian settler communities coming to a land every bit as strange as that braved by white travellers; of African intellectuals and rebels in fledgling towns that grew up in the early twentieth century; of the private lives of the first African leaders of independent nations, and the Cold War intrigues that shaped the region at the end of the last century. Uncannily, what united all of these figures was their fascination with the British culture which was transplanted, like some exotic seedling, with the successive waves of settlers. More than anything else, this meant that they read, performed and idolized Shakespeare, who represented the pinnacle of that British culture. Though there were other challengers for Shakespeare’s cultural pre-eminence – amusing episodes in which Tennyson, Burns and Chekhov raised their heads above the ramparts – none of them came close to unseating his place in East African life.
It was unimaginable that literary culture – let alone a single writer – should have assumed such importance in the politics and history of Europe or America at the time. Even the extraordinary story with which this book concerns itself might seem at first to be a series of coincidences, if the sequence of events didn’t seem to take on an unstoppable momentum of its own. In uncovering the details of these lives and events two things became clear to me. I saw a new story of the land in which I grew up, an account which helped capture its history and its character not by focusing on matters of high government far removed from most people’s lives, or describing the wilderness whilst ignoring the people and the towns, but instead by looking steadily at those moments when the many Africas I knew met: the bush and the tribal dwellings, yes, but also the towns and their neighbourhoods of bantu peoples and Indians and Europeans. The stories I came across when following Shakespeare through East Africa were not neat accounts of the progress of history, but rather stirring resurrections of how that history must have felt to the people who lived through it. These stories also promised access to something else, something close to the Holy Grail of Shakespeare studies: an understanding of Shakespeare’s universal appeal.
That Shakespeare is venerated throughout the world is not open for question – the Globe theatre in London, after all, staged each of Shakespeare’s thirty-seven plays in a different language as part of the 2012 Cultural Olympiad, and most of the countries from which the performers came already had long and rich traditions of reading and performing the works.1 But we have become less confident than we once were as to why this should be the case. In the nineteenth century the answer would have been easy: Shakespeare’s genius gave him access to a transcendent, semi-divine reservoir of beauty, a beauty which naturally appealed to all men because it was above petty distinctions between one culture and another, and safe from becoming outmoded with the passage of time. Looking back, however, it is clear that there was more than a hint of aggression in how Shakespeare’s universal appeal was asserted. It is, after all, as Kant points out, precisely in those matters of taste, so resistant to scientific demonstration, that we are most determined that others should agree with us; as W. H. Auden rather more wittily put it, ‘A person who dislikes … the music of Bellini or prefers his steak well-done, may, for all I know, possess some admirable quality but I do not wish ever to see him again.’2 In the twentieth century, a West chastened by reflecting on the atrocities of the Second World War and of colonialism – and former colonial subjects newly emboldened to speak – produced much less comfortable explanations for the global ascendancy of European culture and its totem Shakespeare: perhaps this ‘love’ of Shakespeare in exotic places was really just a pretence, a desire to curry favour with the British ruling class, who left their Shakespeare-worshipping public schools to administer an Empire which covered much of the globe? Perhaps even the colonial masters’ love of Shakespeare was not something they came to naturally, but something drilled into them at public schools because it served the purpose of that ruling class to assert that the world’s greatest mind was a white British man? Hard as it is to argue against this explanation (especially as a white man of British descent), it is less than wholly satisfying for all who have read Shakespeare with little feeling that they are being forced into it or trying to coerce others, and rather belittling for all those who aren’t white and male and British, whose passion for Shakespeare was in danger of being written off as mere craven pandering to the overlord. My experience of teaching Shakespeare has been that he, almost alone among writers, defies such cynicism: whenever the time rolls around again to lead a fresh batch of students through the works, I wonder whether the reverence in which he is held might be some grand collective delusion, a truism rather than a truth. But, every time, the dawning freshness of a turn of phrase, a short exchange or an orchestrated speech makes dull the cleverness which wrote these impressions off as nostalgic. So what is it, then, that makes the writings of this obscure glover’s son from a Warwickshire village retain their power wherever they go, and even when they are taken out of the tongue in which he wrote them and the stage for which he designed them? Do Shakespeare’s plays point the way beyond the jostling for power and prestige towards a shared humanity?
This book is the story of an attempt to answer these questions. In service of that attempt, it is also a travelogue and a cultural history of ‘Swahililand’, by which I mean those countries (Kenya, Tanzania and Uganda, as well as parts of Congo, Malawi and Sudan) into which the Swahili tongue was introduced by Arab traders and European missionaries and where it later became a pan-East African language of sorts.3 The narrative sometimes has to leave Swahililand to fill in back stories or to follow stories out of Africa to their conclusions elsewhere, but it remains rooted in and dedicated to understanding eastern Africa.
It also became clear to me early on that any attempt to survey this landscape with an impersonal and objective eye would be not only dishonest but also doomed to failure. The questions I was asking were of so basic a nature, the story I was telling of transplanted culture was so close to my own, that I could not pretend that my answers were unaffected by my own past. As I thought through these questions, about why certain phrases and stories are significant and beautiful to us, and how this relates to where the words came from and where they ended up, I caught the memories of my childhood creeping into my peripheral vision. It seemed disingenuous to exclude them, to pretend that my conclusions were reached through cold logic rather than by the insuppressible return of moments from the past, and so occasionally in what follows I allow these things to well to the surface, to give some sense of the tangle of emotions from which my judgements proceed: a sense of fierce belonging to the places of my youth, but one now made difficult by an awareness of the wider story of which it was a part; a devotion and an atonement. It is, I suppose, no different from anyone else’s love affair with the past.
The story reaches a climax, if not quite an end, in 1989, after which Shakespeare’s prominence through most of East Africa abruptly evaporated, bringing this bizarre sequence of events to an even more mysterious close. I remember very clearly sitting that year on the