Burton and Stanley in part because they were escorting a treasure into the unknown, where it did not seem to belong. Their feelings were not, one suspects, altogether different from those of the missionaries who dedicated themselves to bringing the Gospel into strange lands, though of course the explorers showed little wish to share Shakespeare’s powerful language with the natives they met. Burton carried Shakespeare with Euclid because both were felt to contain unalterable, universal truths – in beauty as in geometry – and the unshakeable nature of the works was demonstrated by carrying them into unsettling places.* Yet though it is possible that the first white travellers met peoples who had not seen paper books before (if not likely, given that Arabic slaving caravans had long been visiting these areas), the sense that the works were wholly alien to Africa was largely an adventurer’s fantasy during the time of the later safaris. By the time Roosevelt visited in 1909–10, a generation of young Africans were not only familiar with Shakespearean narrative, but had even been learning to read and write Swahili using the stories of Shylock and Lear.
It was to understand the setting in which this schoolbook – the Hadithi za Kiingereza, or ‘Tales from the English’ – was printed that I first returned to East Africa. Though Africa would long since have swallowed up any traces of Burton and Stanley’s encampments, the Hadithi was printed in a town which might retain traces of its genesis. Frustratingly, not a single copy survives of the book’s first edition, printed by Edward Steere on the island of Zanzibar in 1867, and we are reliant on later editions for details of its contents.1 Though a tragedy, this is no great surprise: such a slender volume, with pages sewed together by Steere’s own hand, was designed for immediate use by the boys liberated from slaving vessels; copies of it would have quickly disintegrated in the dust and heat and sweat of excited, fearful, frustrated hands, and it was likely that no one thought it worth preserving a copy of such an ephemeral thing for the record.2 Karen Blixen’s Beethoven-loving houseboy, Kamante, was shrewd in casting doubt upon the merits of his mistress’s typed manuscript pages:
‘Look, Msabu,’ he said, ‘this [a leatherbound hardback Odyssey] is a good book. It hangs together from the one end to the other. Even if you hold it up and shake it strongly, it does not come to pieces. The man who has written it is very clever. But what you write,’ he went on, both with scorn and with a sort of friendly compassion, ‘is some here and some there. When the people forget to close the door it blows about, even down on the floor and you are angry. It will not be a good book.’3
Although the episode is intended to demonstrate Kamante’s charmingly naïve assessment of a book by its cover, he is of course right: literary longevity has everything to do with a good solid binding. Though reasonably good records were kept of the missionary printing activities during the later years of Steere’s stay in Zanzibar, the early print experiments like the Hadithi were not seen for what they would become: among the earliest physical relics of Swahili, a language spoken today by over a hundred million people in eastern Africa. It is one of the ironies of history that the true character of each age is lost in those things thought not worth preserving, and this was the fate of the first Swahili Shakespeare.
Steere’s thin Zanzibari pamphlet consisted of four stories, taken from the pages of the popular children’s book Tales from Shakespeare by Charles and Mary Lamb: The Taming of the Shrew (Mwanamke Aliyefunzwa), The Merchant of Venice (Kuwia na Kuwiwa), The Tragedy of King Lear (Baba na Binti), and The Life of Timon of Athens (Kula Maji). Steere’s choice of these four stories seems baffling at first. They are not unified by genre, including as they do two comedies and two tragedies (though Timon is a slippery fish and doesn’t sit easily in any category). Yet the idea that Steere might have chosen these four widely differing plays to give a sample of Shakespeare’s range is also unconvincing: while the Merchant and Lear are undisputed high points of Shakespeare’s writing, it seems certain that no one choosing four Shakespeare plays to take to a desert island would settle for The Taming of the Shrew and Timon of Athens. The answer, it seems, must lie elsewhere, and my first guess is that these four plays suggested themselves to Steere as Shakespeare’s clearest parables for everyday life: each of them is, in this highly simplified form, a morality tale about the proper relations between individuals, their families and the societies in which they live, and each offers a message that Steere might have expected to be acceptable to readers in an Islamic society. Taming warns of the dangers of unsubmissive women, and offers a path to bring them back to the desired obedience, while Lear shows the disastrous consequences of allowing children to wield power over their parents. The Merchant of Venice corrects the evils that arise in society from usury – a practice forbidden by Islamic law – and Timon demonstrates the fickleness of earthly possessions while portraying the sin of ingratitude. If this was Steere’s motive in choosing these four tales, he would have been following a time-honoured missionary practice of focusing first on elements likely to be familiar to the culture to be evangelized, just as the early Apostles had portrayed Christ as a warrior when it helped to get more bellicose peoples on board. Whatever Steere’s motives, they seemed to have struck a chord, as the collection was later taken up by the Society for the Promotion of Christian Knowledge and printed in regular editions (including at least eight between 1940 and 1972), forming part of their schoolbook distribution in eastern Africa, which would exceed 100,000 books a year in the middle of the twentieth century.4
Hadithi za Kiingereza. (Reproduced by kind permission of the Syndics of Cambridge University Library)
The language of the Hadithi is simple in the extreme, easily legible even to me with the impoverished Swahili that I have retained from my childhood. Each tale begins with a storybook formula: ‘Palikuwa na mtu, akikaa Venezia, mji wa Uitalia, jina lake Shailoki, kabila yake Myahudi; kazi yake kukopesha fedha na mali’ – ‘In the beginning there was a man, living in Venice, a town in Italy, named Shylock, of the Jewish people; his business was to lend money and property.’5 The use of this opening formula is striking, because Steere used the same words a few years after his Swahili Shakespeare to translate the haunting first words of the Gospel of John – ‘Mwanzo palikuwa na Neno, Neno akawa kwa Muungu, Neno akawa Muungu’ (‘In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God’).6 To the young boys and girls who were his first readership, the boundaries between Steere’s evangelizing mission and his role as a cultural ambassador must have seemed very hazy indeed, introduced as they were by the same man with identical formulas. There were no simple, physical signs by which to distinguish storybook Shakespeare from the Word of God: each of these early Swahili books is a flimsy, pocket-sized pamphlet, and while the title of Hadithi (‘stories’) might seem to signal that these are lighter fare, things may not have been so simple to children who had heard of the hadith that are the foundations of Islamic law. Hoping to find out more about Steere and the world into which he brought this oddity, I started my travels where the Hadithi did – in Zanzibar.
Shakespeare set two of his finest plays, The Comedy of Errors and The Tempest, on magical islands where all expectations are confounded, and he could have done worse than take his inspiration from Zanzibar, which was in his lifetime receiving its first visits from merchants of the newly founded East India Company.* The main city, called Stone Town to differentiate the whitewashed coral stone palaces on the seafront from the earthwork dwellings that once lay inland, is a labyrinth of narrow alleys winding between high smooth walls, topped by arabesque parapets. These walls are punctuated only by brass-studded heavy wooden doors and windows opening onto fretwork balconies, which for all their artistry give the stranger few distinguishing marks by which to find his bearings. Shakespeare’s own disorienting island of Ephesus provokes his traveller Antipholus