gave daily bulletins on the collapse of the Soviet Union. I’m not sure I fully understand even now the exhilaration of this historical moment for many who lived through it; it is very difficult to inhabit the passions of the past, even though (as in this book) we cannot kick the habit of trying.
I am certain, though, that I did not understand it then. It seemed not to fit in with the house surrounded by woodland at the edge of Nairobi, with its makeshift cricket pitch between the washing lines, besieged by monkeys who would steal fruit from the kitchen table. That was a world of animals great and small, eating and being eaten and trying to stay clear of unruly children’s traps. It did not seem to fit in with the life of the city either, where people queued endlessly on broken pavement to watch films like Moonwalker and Coming to America, which the main cinema played continuously and exclusively in that year and the next. But even if I had understood the Cold War and what its end meant to those who had lived through it, it would not have explained to me why, during the devastating withdrawal of billions of dollars of aid money meant to keep African countries from defecting to Soviet allegiance, the President of Kenya spent part of his summer defending the greatness of Shakespeare as a writer. It would not have made any sense of the fact that a new English-speaking country would appear on the upper reaches of the Nile in part through a young boy soldier’s love for Shakespeare, and nor would it have solved the dozen other literary mysteries that I later came across during my travels through Africa and through the archives. For that I would have to start long before the Cold War, and to understand something not just of the high politics and the many societies that make up Swahililand, but also of how beauty works in the world, how, in the words of Shakespeare’s Joan of Arc,
Glory is like a circle in the water,
Which never ceaseth to enlarge itself
Till by broad spreading, it disperse to naught.
1 Henry VI (I.ii.133–5)
For this, I began by looking at first contacts between the British and East Africa, and the strange story of how Shakespeare became an indispensable bit of safari kit in the nineteenth century.
1
Shakespeare and the Explorers
… they take the flow o’th’ Nile
By certain scales i’th’ pyramid. They know
By th’ height, the lowness, or the mean if dearth
Or foison follow. The higher Nilus swells,
The more it promises; as it ebbs, the seedsman
Upon the slime and ooze scatters his grain,
And shortly comes to harvest.
Antony and Cleopatra (II.vii.17–23)
Although the world was beginning to open up during Shakespeare’s lifetime, with Jesuit missions to the Far East and growing settlements in the Americas, he lived in an age in which the Mediterranean still merited its name as ‘the middle sea’, the place in the centre of the world. Around this great inland sea all places of importance were arranged – notably excluding the backwater island which Shakespeare never left – and through it man’s greatest voyages had taken place. The classical geographer Pliny, still a respected authority in the Renaissance, declared that while men of the south were born burnt by the sun, and those of the north had frosty complexions, the blended climate of the middle lands made for fertile soils and minds. Only there, he contends, do the people have proper governments, while ‘the outermost people … have never obeyed the central people, for they are detached and solitary, in keeping with the savagery of Nature that oppresses them’.1 About half Shakespeare’s plays are set in his native Islands; the rest, with the important exception of that strange beast Hamlet, arrange themselves around the Med. Its waters were so thick with history and myth that Odysseus’ ten-year cruise from Asia Minor to the Greek Islands remained the archetypal sea voyage even long after Shakespeare’s contemporaries had circumnavigated the globe through far more treacherous waters. And into this central body of water flowed the most famous and strangest of rivers, the Nile.
Every year, at the end of summer, the waters of the Nile rose above its banks and flooded the plains of northern Egypt, a potent symbol of the unexplained and irresistible force of nature. ‘My grief’, says Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus at the sight of his raped and mutilated daughter Lavinia, ‘was at the height before thou cam’st / And now like Nilus it disdaineth bounds’ (III.i.70–71). The destructive power of the Nile, however, was matched by its near-magical fertility. As the annual flood subsided, the river left behind water and silt rich enough for agriculture to flourish in the middle of a desert land. The power of the Nile mud to make things grow was held in such high regard that naturalists from ancient Greece to Renaissance Europe believed it capable of spontaneously generating animal life, though (as was fitting for a river whose source lay deep in an unknown continent) the ‘fire / That quickens Nilus’ slime’ (Antony and Cleopatra, I.iii.67–9) could only produce monstrous serpents and crocodiles.
By the middle of the nineteenth century, much of the mythical aura had evaporated from the Nilotic delta. If the British biologist Thomas Huxley would soon suggest that all life did ultimately have its beginnings in the primordial slime, few believed any longer in life regularly emerging from the inanimate. Egypt had been invaded by Napoleon and had then fallen (as he had) under the growing British sphere of influence; its ancient artefacts were fast becoming familiar exotics in the museums of Europe. (By the end of the century, Sigmund Freud would plumb the middle-class European mind from a consulting room bursting with Egyptiana, including a mummy’s mask that he liked to stroke.) The Egyptian floodplains had been given over to the industrial-scale production of cotton and fledgling tourism was starting to be seen in Cairo and on the river. Much of the continent from which the Nile flowed, however, was still completely unexplored, and the undiscovered source of the great river remained a tantalizing symbol of the stubborn resistance of parts of the world to the increasingly bullish European powers. Sir Roderick Murchison, the President of the Royal Geographical Society, blended the languages of intellectual and financial speculation when he declared (in his presidential address of 1852) that there was ‘no exploration in Africa to which greater value would be attached’ than establishing the source of the Nile, and that the men who achieved it would be ‘justly considered among the greatest benefactors of this age of geographical science’.2
Though Vasco da Gama had pioneered the sea route to India around the Cape of Good Hope as early as the 1490s, European travel into the interior had not greatly progressed by 1800, and settlement was very thin and almost entirely restricted to the coast. Africa had, for a long time, been an extremely unattractive prospect to the white traveller: its landscape, its illnesses, and the extremes of its climate were death both to the unwitting European traveller and to the pack animals on which he was wholly reliant; and even if the central African environment had not proven quite so resistant, the interior of the continent offered few obvious prizes to adventurers, apparently having none of the great mercantile empires of the East Indies, nor the bottomless mines and rolling grasslands of the Americas. That Africa became suddenly and immensely attractive to Europeans and Americans in the mid-nineteenth century was the result of a number of factors which were closely related. The Industrial Revolution had both created new markets and reaped great wealth from them. Industrial philanthropy paid in large measure for the scientific and evangelical expeditions that made their way into Africa, and these expeditions saw the lack of ‘civilization’ in the continent as an opportunity rather than a deterrent. Africa would provide both souls for religious instruction and challenges to be overcome by the unstoppable leviathan of Western Knowledge. In the event, and not unpredictably, the altruism of these philanthropists was lucrative beyond imagining. Despite the fact that these ventures were thought of by contemporaries as foolishly benign, often being