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

Contents Cover Title Page Copyright Dedication PRELUDE – Beauty out of Place 1 THE LAKE REGIONS – Shakespeare and the Explorers 2 ZANZIBAR – Shakespeare and the Slaveboy Printworks 3 INTERLUDE: THE SWAHILI COAST – Player-Kings of Eastern Africa 4 MOMBASA – Shakespeare, Bard of the Railroad 5 NAIROBI – Expats, Emigrés and Exile 6 KAMPALA – Shakespeare at School, at War and in Prison 7 DAR ES SALAAM – Shakespeare in Power 8 ADDIS ABABA – Shakespeare and the Lion of Judah 9 PANAFRICA – Shakespeare in the Cold War 10 JUBA – Shakespeare, Civil War and Reconstruction APPENDIX – A Partial List of Theatrical Performances Picture Section A Note on Sources and Further Reading Acknowledgements References Index About the Publisher

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This eBook first published in Great Britain by William Collins in 2016

Copyright © Edward Wilson-Lee 2016

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Source ISBN: 9780008146214

Ebook Edition © March 2016 ISBN: 9780008146207

Version: 2017-01-24

For my parents

Cover

Title Page Contents Cover Title Page Copyright Dedication PRELUDE – Beauty out of Place 1 THE LAKE REGIONS – Shakespeare and the Explorers 2 ZANZIBAR – Shakespeare and the Slaveboy Printworks 3 INTERLUDE: THE SWAHILI COAST – Player-Kings of Eastern Africa 4 MOMBASA – Shakespeare, Bard of the Railroad 5 NAIROBI – Expats, Emigrés and Exile 6 KAMPALA – Shakespeare at School, at War and in Prison 7 DAR ES SALAAM – Shakespeare in Power 8 ADDIS ABABA – Shakespeare and the Lion of Judah 9 PANAFRICA – Shakespeare in the Cold War 10 JUBA – Shakespeare, Civil War and Reconstruction APPENDIX – A Partial List of Theatrical Performances Picture Section A Note on Sources and Further Reading Acknowledgements References Index About the Publisher

Copyright

Dedication

PRELUDE – Beauty out of Place

1 THE LAKE REGIONS – Shakespeare and the Explorers

2 ZANZIBAR – Shakespeare and the Slaveboy Printworks

3 INTERLUDE: THE SWAHILI COAST – Player-Kings of Eastern Africa

4 MOMBASA – Shakespeare, Bard of the Railroad

5 NAIROBI – Expats, Emigrés and Exile

6 KAMPALA – Shakespeare at School, at War and in Prison

7 DAR ES SALAAM – Shakespeare in Power

8 ADDIS ABABA – Shakespeare and the Lion of Judah

9 PANAFRICA – Shakespeare in the Cold War

10 JUBA – Shakespeare, Civil War and Reconstruction

APPENDIX – A Partial List of Theatrical Performances

Picture Section

A Note on Sources and Further Reading

Acknowledgements

References

Index

About the Publisher

Beauty out of Place

Once on a visit to Luxor in southern Egypt I was stopped by a man who called out to me from where he sat, crumpled in the shade of an August afternoon, with a famous line from Shakespeare’s Macbeth : ‘Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow …’. It was the summer at the end of my first year of reading English at university, and though it was uncomfortable to stand in the throbbing heat swapping iambic pentameters, I was sure I was more than a match for this stranger with his long white kanzu shirt and papyrus mat. I responded with the next line, and he in turn; and, after that speech, we migrated on to others, though now I cannot remember which ones, and would almost certainly exaggerate my recitational prowess if I were to try to recall them. After a few minutes, we fell silent. I, at least, was probably out of breath (and lines) in the thick desert air, and panting like a lizard; I had no Arabic other than swearwords I learned at school, and if the man did have conversational English he showed no inclination to use it. We grinned at each other and I moved on, in search of another sweating glass of fresh iced lemon juice.

Odd as it seemed at the time, I am now very glad that I did not break the spell by drawing the encounter out. For although later I sometimes thought about what this moment might have been – an act of cultural comradeship or a defiant exhibition of superiority over the presumptuous tourist – it has more recently occurred to me that its poignancy was in part owed to its being out of place and unaccounted for. Shakespeare may have distantly heard of Luxor – though he would have known it as Thebes, from the ancient Greek romance Aethiopica which was popular in his day – but it is unlikely that he imagined lines written for performance in Shoreditch or Southwark would ever end up being spoken there, close by the feluccas sailing on the Nile and the acres of pharaonic ruins beyond. The poignancy was, I suppose, the experience of one’s own culture as something exotic, like Tarzan finding a relic of the jungle in an English country house. The fact that I was so unprepared for this, however, seems to be in retrospect the most remarkable thing. After all, I had been brought up in Kenya, and had lived my life in a jumble of African places filled with things from elsewhere. These had, of course, included Shakespeare, though it seems to me now that I had always managed to keep his plays separate from the place in which I lived. It was as if his words, wherever spoken, were a foreign soil, like an embassy.