Review of Shakespeare in Swahililand

                                      Shakespeare in Swahililand by Edward Wilson-Lee
                                                          ISBN 978-0-00-814619-1
                                                       William Collins h/b - 288 pp
                                                       (c) Edward Wilson-Lee 2016
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What this book reminds us is that Shakespeare is part of our collective heritage, a legitimate legacy of the Empire that cannot be simply airbrushed out of history.  Along with the English language, English law and other familiar institutions, the works of Shakespeare are firmly embedded in the cultural and literary consciousness of Britain`s former subject peoples and its diasporic offspring.  More than that, to speak of the universality of Shakespeare`s appeal may sound like a clichéd observation but it is quite apt nevertheless in the present context.

The book`s sub-title `Adventures with the ever-living poet` encapsulates its essence.  We are indeed taken on a journey of discovery and imagination, where the past and the present, the personal, the poetic and the political, are seamlessly threaded together to form a fascinating narrative of the importance and impact of Shakespeare in the East African hinterland, both metaphorically and geographically. The author, son of expatriate British and American wildlife conservationists, grew up in Kenya and retained an attachment to his childhood home well beyond adolescence, through school and university in Europe and the USA, to what he is now, a Cambridge academic teaching medieval and Renaissance literature.  It was a chance discovery that one of the first books printed in Swahili was a slim volume of the Bard`s stories, published as Hadithi za Kiingereza (`English Tales`), that led him to embark on a small research project which was to turn eventually into the writing of this book.  As he says in the Prelude (p xi), “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”.

The `hidden history` is in fact multiplied manifold in the pages of this book, beginning with Chapter 1 (`The Lake Regions: Shakespeare and the Explorers`). We learn how the 19th century British imperial adventurers (Burton, Speke, Stanley, et al) who traversed the lake region of East Africa carried Shakespeare with them as a comforting talisman of Englishness on their many expeditions.  We are told (at p 7) that Speke and Burton both read “Shakespeare intensively and repeatedly as the pair crossed the savannah scrubland [just] as I read my own Complete Works travelling through East Africa in their tracks”.

In Chapter 2 (`Zanzibar`) he delves into the extraordinarily varied background of the Hadithi`s compiler Edward Steere before he arrived in Zanzibar as a university sponsored missionary in 1864.  Zanzibar is also the starting point of the whole saga, throughout the course of which we are treated to a running stream of random glimpses into the author`s own personal history and encounters with locals of all varieties, including officials and historians, interspersed (as the rest of the book is) with his discursive analysis of a whole spectrum of Shakespearean and comparative literary references. 

And so from Zanzibar, the remaining chapter headings --`The Swahili Coast: Player-Kings of Eastern Africa`; `Mombasa: Shakespeare, Bard of the Railroad`; `Nairobi: Expats, Emigrés and Exile`; `Kampala: Shakespeare at School, at War and in Prison`; `Dar Es Salaam: Shakespeare in Power`; `Addis Ababa: Shakespeare and the Lion of Judah`; `Panafrica: Shakespeare in the Cold War`; and `Juba: Shakespeare, Civil War and Reconstruction` – signpost the full extent of Shakespeare`s footprints across the huge territorial mass represented by these places.

Even to readers of AwaaZ (www.awaazmagazine.com), however, it will come as a revelation that Shakespeare was performed in Mombasa circa WWI by various companies of Indian migrants (p 95): `In the eighteen months after February 1915, the [official] Gazette records licences for at least forty-three separate productions of plays in a range of Indian languages, especially Hindustani and Gujarati [though] while a few of the plays list [original] English titles – The Merchant of Venice, Richard III, Hamlet – the vast majority of them [were] poorly transcribed versions ... in Indian languages [but still there were] at least fifteen separate productions of Shakespeare plays in this eighteen-month period [which] made these Indian communities ... a considerably more concentrated centre of Shakespeare performance than London`s West End, and not too far behind Shakespeare`s birthplace in Stratford-upon-Avon`! The Gazette list is later reproduced in a detailed Appendix.

In the more sophisticated environs of Nairobi (with its mix of white settler, professional, business and colonial and post-colonial ruling elites) however we find echoes of Shakespeare in the writings of Karen Blixen, Evelyn Waugh and Peter Abrahams, and in the privileged life-styles of its inhabitants, past and present. But it is in Kampala that we get the full measure of Shakespeare in the academic setting of Makerere, from the 1940s onwards.  Here were to be found some future African leaders and writers and others engaging in public readings and performances of plays such as Julius Caesar, As You Like It and Hamlet: `And, since Makerere began admitting females students in 1945, these productions featured performers of both sexes` (p 141).
  

From Kampala we retreat back to the coast, this time to Dar es Salaam, `on the trail of Julius Nyerere, the first President of Tanzania, who translated Julius Caesar and The Merchant of Venice into Swahili in spare evening moments` (p 163) as he steered his country towards independence and then a better future thereafter. Wilson-Lee is fulsome in his praise for Nyerere`s singular accomplishments in this regard. He also typically finds a Shakespearean angle in the short period of exile that Che Guevara spent holed up `in a secret two-room apartment on the top floor of the Cuban embassy in Dar es Salaam` in 1965/66, of which `Nyerere was probably not even aware `(p 176-78)!

Next to Ethiopia - not exactly in Swahililand, though its proximity to East Africa proper brings the country within the book`s broader theme, even if `its ancient traditions` and `continuous history of sovereignty` untarnished by any real colonial occupation sets it apart: `Here, after all, as late as 1974, was an absolute monarchy of the kind that offered Shakespeare and his fellow playwrights an endless dramatic gift, intensifying human folly and fragility by investing it ... with unlimited power` (p 188).  All this is examined from a sharply observant and well informed perspective, with heart-warming anecdotal insights, to underline Shakespearean parallels with Ethiopia`s recent history, especially with reference to the `translations of Othello, Macbeth and Hamlet by the Ethiopian poet laureate Tsegaye Gebre Medhin forming a backdrop to the decadent reign and violent overthrow of Emperor Haile Selassie I`.  Wilson-Lee has excelled himself in this chapter in giving us a masterful exposition of the country`s rise and decline over centuries.  He draws on the works of legendary figures such as Francisco Alvares and `the Father of English dictionaries Samuel Johnson` (his 1759 novella Rasselas, Prince of Abyssinia) and of Tsegaye Medhin  – though he misses out on an insider`s account of the `King of Kings: The Triumph and Tragedy of Emperor Haile Selassie 1 of Ethiopia` by Asfa-Wossen Asserate, a blood relation of the old autocrat, no doubt because the publication of its English translation would have come too late for study and inclusion.

The final two chapters, `PanAfrica: Shakespeare in the Cold War` and `Juba: Shakespeare, Civil War and Reconstruction` bring us starkly face to face with contemporary African realities, first back in Nairobi and then in the eponymous capital of the newly born breakaway state of South Sudan after a long lasting civil war, which has since reignited internally.  In Kenya, the politics of Shakespeare played into the politics of the country with an extraordinary twist: `While Shakespeare`s plays were still taught in Swahili translations by Nyerere and others, the English originals had been taken out of schools following a 1981 Kenya Institute of Education report which attacked Shakespeare as a “colonial hangover” who had no place in an independent Kenya`. President Moi however disagreed and in 1988 ordered them to be reinstated, declaring that Shakespeare was `international` (p 216).  But, as Wilson-Lee points out, African intellectuals had long been engaged in a spirited debate about the place of foreign literature in the post-colonial national scheme of things, which made it `difficult ... even to ask questions about Shakespeare`s universal appeal` (p 220).  He even finds validation for his `bleak conclusions` about how `in the hands of the conquering nation, the culture of the conquered is reduced to the lowest possible level` in a somewhat arcane quotation from Anthony and Cleopatra (V.ii.213-19) (p 221).  He then strikes a positive note in discussing how circa 1989 events on the world stage were to transform not only the global political landscape but also Kenya`s domestic cultural dynamics, so that the Shakespeare that began to creep back in Nairobi was to assume a distinctive African profile and intonation, and thus more relevant to local audiences and sentiments. 

In Juba, Wilson-Lee meets Joseph Abuk, the translator of Cymberline for the South Sudan Theatre Company`s production in Juba Arabic for the 2012 London Cultural Olympiad. (Here in a critical aside aimed at the metropolitan pc brigade, he suggests (p 239) that `the reason the play could not have been put on in the new nation`s official language – English – is obvious: this would simply not have been exotic enough to figure in the Globe`s demonstration of Shakespeare`s universalism ... even if for those [foreign] cultures English in some sense provides a communal identity and a release from oppression`).  The two of them discuss a plan to publish the Juba Cymberline as a monument to the newly founded nation, but Wilson-Lee ends this encounter on a melancholic note with a quote from Cymberline itself (p 242).

What else?  To readers of AwaaZ, a fine collection of pictures, illustrations and other material will bring the Shakespearean theatre alive: among them a  monochrome photo of Milton Obote in the title role of the 1948 production of Julius Caesar at Makerere, with A F Mpanga who was later to become legal adviser in his government acting the part of Cassius; a set of black and white pictures of a production of Coriolanus also at Makerere in 1951 with Assiah Jabir in the role of Vlumnia; another of Tsegaye Gebre Medhin`s Ethiopian productions of Otello (1963) and Hamlet (1967); a series of photos provided by Neera Kapur-Dromson relating to a production of Khoon ka Khoon (a translation of Hamlet by Mehadi Hasan) featuring her grandfather Hiralal Kapur and of a publicity procession through the streets of Nairobi circa 1930; pictures of HM Stanley, Richard Burton and Teddy Roosevelt; a stunning colour print from the Juba Arabic 2012 production of Cymberline staged at the Shakespeare`s Globe in London; plus other sketches and plates illustrative of the text.

Most impressive is the author`s high regard for my fellow columnist on AwaaZ, John Sibi-Okumu, whom he describes as a `great Shakespearean actor`. Indeed the entire book is replete with references to a galaxy of luminaries and their use of Shakespearean analogies in furtherance of the cause of African freedom and dignity - among them Eliud Mathu at p 146/7; Nelson Mandela at p 148/9; Julius Nyerere at p 171/2; Ngugi wa Thiongo at p 142 – in a variety of scenarios. Ngugi`s  enthusiastic endorsement of the book actually features prominently in the author`s own website at www.edwardwilsonlee.com/.

Wilson-Lee`s meticulous and scholarly research has even yielded some surprisingly fresh perspectives into the subject.  For example (at p 59/60): ` ... one of the most incredible stories in all of Shakespeareana recounts how Shakespeare`s own work was acted off the East African coast during the poet`s own lifetime ... (t)he performances in question are said to have taken place on the Dragon ... [during] the third voyage of the East India Company ... [when] in March 1608  ... it ... was meandering between various islands north-west of Madagascar`!

His overall conclusion however is to marvel at the compelling phenomenon of what might be termed the Africanisation of Shakespeare: `Like language itself, which changes in the speaking and makes all previous versions obsolete, the Shakespeare made in Africa has to come to replace the one that was taken there`(p 241/2), attributing this metamorphosis to the practitioners of the art among the pioneer Indian settlers, the Ethiopian court, and Swahili and Masailand converts.  

In short, `Shakespeare in Swahililand` is a literary travelogue par excellence. It is a masterly critique of Shakespeare`s writings through time and space, and of their social and structural  significance everywhere.  This then is a timely and topical publication during this 400th year of the poet`s passing – a valuable addition to all the literature, plays, performances and other events commemorating his immortality.  It comes complete with copious endnotes and a comprehensive index.

RAMNIK SHAH
(c) 2016

Surrey, England