Shakespeare in Swahililand

The author spent his youth in Kenya, and returns as an adult to track the spread of Shakespeare in East Africa. 

The book is packed with historical and literary detail, and at times reads like a travellogue as the author slips into the first person to describe the places he visits and recall some youthful experiences in Kenya.

The Lake Regions

Early travellers like Richard Burton and Henry Morton Stanley carried pocket versions of Shakespeare's works as a "talisman of Englishness."

Zanzibar

A British missionary, Edward Steere, translated into Swahili four of the stories in Tales from Shakespeare by Charles and Mary Lamb. He published them as Hadithi za Kiingereza.

Mombasa

A "vibrant culture of East African Shakespeare performance in the early years of the twentieth century" was brought from India by the labourers who built the railway from Mombasa to Nairobi. Travelling theatre groups performed versions of the plays in Hindustani, Gujurati, and other Indian languages. 

"This made these Indian communities in those years a considerably more concentrated centre of Shakespeare performance than London's West End." The plays received peevish reviews by the English.

Nairobi

This section is enlivened by quotes from Karen Blixen and Evelyn Waugh. The political awakening of Jomo Kenyatta is mentioned, as described in a novel by Peter Abrahams, A Wreath for Udomo.

Kampala and Dar es Salaam

At Makerere University in Kampala the future first president of Uganda, Milton Obote, played the lead role in a production of Julius Caesar. 

In Tanzania, Julius Caesar and Merchant of Venice, were translated into Swahili by Julius Nyerere while he was president of Tanzania.

Miscellaneous Bits

• The half-year that Che Guevara spent hiding out in Dar es Salaam.
• The "uncannily parallel lives" of Jomo Kenyatta and Louis Leakey'

Quotes

"It is inescapably true that the story of Shakespeare in East Africa is one caught up in colonial history and its failings."

"The breakthrough novel (A Grain of Wheat,1967) of Kenya's most celebrated writer, Ngugi wa Thiong'o, includes the story of a local official in the colonial administration whose grand plan to Anglicize the local Africans is laid out in a tract entitled PROSPERO IN AFRICA."