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Shakespeare in Swahililand: In Search of a Global Poet
An exploration of Shakespeare as a global poetShakespeare in Swahililand tells the unexpected literary history of Shakespeare’s influence in East Africa. Beginning with Victorian-era expeditions in which Shakespeare’s works were the sole reading material carried into the interior, the Bard has been a vital touchstone throughout the region. His plays were printed by liberated slaves as one of the first texts in Swahili, performed by Indian laborers while they built the Uganda railroad, used to argue for native rights, and translated by intellectuals, revolutionaries, and independence leaders. Weaving together stories of explorers staggering through Africa’s interior, eccentrics living out their dreams on the savanna, decadent émigrés, Cold War intrigues, and even Che Guevara, Edward Wilson-Lee—a Cambridge lecturer raised in Kenya—tallies Shakespeare’s influence in Zanzibar, Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda, Ethiopia, and Sudan. Traveling through these countries, he speaks with everyone from theater directors and academics to soldiers and aid workers, discovering not only cultural dimensions traceable to Shakespeare's plays but also an overwhelming insistence that these works provide a key insight into the region. An astonishing work of empathy and historical vision, Shakespeare in Swahililand gets at the heart of what makes Shakespeare so universal and the role that his writings have played in thinking about what it means to be human.
313 pages, Kindle Edition
First published March 10, 2016
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August 9, 2018
Some fun material in this chronicle of Shakespeare's presence in East Africa (mostly Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania and Ethiopia). Wilson-Lee, who grew up in Kenya, covers the use of Shakespeare in the service of imperialism, the performance of plays by Indian laborers, the conflicts overs Shakespeare's place in a post-colonial education system. My favorite section concerns Tanzanian independence leader Julius Nyerere, who translated The Merchant of Venice and Julius Caesar into Swahili at the same time he was guiding Tanganyika (pre-merger) into independence and helping form the Organization of African Unity.
Wilson-Lee tends to meander off into travel narrative tinged with a bit of nostalgia, but the book provides interesting material for anyone interested in the question of whether Shakespeare is a truly "universal" figure. (His answer is a heavily qualified affirmative.)
Wilson-Lee tends to meander off into travel narrative tinged with a bit of nostalgia, but the book provides interesting material for anyone interested in the question of whether Shakespeare is a truly "universal" figure. (His answer is a heavily qualified affirmative.)
August 9, 2018
While most people who might pick up this book, would pick it up because of their interest in Shakespeare, I picked it up because of the word "Swahililand" in its title. Like the author of this book, I grew up as a "European" in East Africa (his "Swahililand"). I liked this history and travelogue around East Africa that is told through a Shakespearean lens. I had known most part of its history, and visited most of the cities and places mentioned in the book, but I found that I would have enjoyed the book much more if I knew Shakespeare's work much better. Still this Shakespearean lens is an interesting one in which to view this area of the world.
June 12, 2018
In Shakespeare in Swahililand, Edward Wilson-Lee traces the appearance and influence of William Shakespeare’s plays in and on the cultures of East Africa*, both from the perspective of the colonizers as well as the colonized. The journey begins with the first British explorers – men like Stanley, Burton & Rhodes – in the 19th century and follows their successors and native readers and authors who expropriated Shakespeare up to the beginning of the 1990s, with a brief detour into South Sudan just after it won independence in the early 2000s.
Lee explores the purported universalism of Shakespeare’s genius, asking how can “the writings of this glover’s son from a Warwickshire village retain their power wherever they go, and even when they are taken out of the tongue in which he wrote them and the stage for which he designed them?” (pp. xiii-iv) Like anything connected with Shakespeare, the answers he finds are…complicated. In fact, there’s no definitive answer. At it’s most crass and simplistic, one sees the Bard as an imposition of imperial masters. One he recognizes in passages like this from Antony and Cleopatra:
At its most sublime, however, “the experience of reading Shakespeare is rather like a form of exploration or an encounter with another culture: its essence…is always just beyond the translators reach, and the meaning of history is always an instant away from our grasp….
“Even if Shakespeare cannot be said to be universal in any simple sense…there is surely a hint of the miraculous in the fact that I share something with a man like Joseph Abuk [a South Sudanese author and translator], whose life could hardly have been more different from my own.” (pp. 226 and 241)
The greatest weakness of the book, and it’s not the author’s fault, is that it’s difficult to recapture the sense of Shakespeare in East Africa. Lee digs through “archives”** and uncovers some remarkable photos, translations and reviews, but I never quite grasped how the plays worked in the various settings he found them in. With the exception of the most recent decades: Lee’s discussion of the Ethiopian writer Tsegaye Gabre-Medhin or the aforementioned Abuk are richer in detail and impact than the sparer musings about earlier writers and productions.
SF fans should read this book in tandem with Dan Simmons’ Muse of Fire, where Shakespeare’s universality is taken to the extreme. But even if you aren’t a SF aficionado, I would recommend reading this tome.
* Primarily in – as the title suggests – the Swahili-speaking parts of the area but he makes forays into Ethiopia and South Sudan as well.
** I put archives in scare quotes because they often were little more than closets full of moldering records and rotting playbills.
Lee explores the purported universalism of Shakespeare’s genius, asking how can “the writings of this glover’s son from a Warwickshire village retain their power wherever they go, and even when they are taken out of the tongue in which he wrote them and the stage for which he designed them?” (pp. xiii-iv) Like anything connected with Shakespeare, the answers he finds are…complicated. In fact, there’s no definitive answer. At it’s most crass and simplistic, one sees the Bard as an imposition of imperial masters. One he recognizes in passages like this from Antony and Cleopatra:
…Saucy lictors
Will catch at us like strumpets, and scald rhymers
Ballad us out o’tune. The quick comedians
Extemporally will stage us, and present
Our Alexandrian revels. Antony
Shall be brought drunken forth, and I shall be
Some squeaking Cleopatra boy my greatness
I’ th’ posture of a whore. (V.ii.213-29, The Norton Shakespeare (2015))
At its most sublime, however, “the experience of reading Shakespeare is rather like a form of exploration or an encounter with another culture: its essence…is always just beyond the translators reach, and the meaning of history is always an instant away from our grasp….
“Even if Shakespeare cannot be said to be universal in any simple sense…there is surely a hint of the miraculous in the fact that I share something with a man like Joseph Abuk [a South Sudanese author and translator], whose life could hardly have been more different from my own.” (pp. 226 and 241)
The greatest weakness of the book, and it’s not the author’s fault, is that it’s difficult to recapture the sense of Shakespeare in East Africa. Lee digs through “archives”** and uncovers some remarkable photos, translations and reviews, but I never quite grasped how the plays worked in the various settings he found them in. With the exception of the most recent decades: Lee’s discussion of the Ethiopian writer Tsegaye Gabre-Medhin or the aforementioned Abuk are richer in detail and impact than the sparer musings about earlier writers and productions.
SF fans should read this book in tandem with Dan Simmons’ Muse of Fire, where Shakespeare’s universality is taken to the extreme. But even if you aren’t a SF aficionado, I would recommend reading this tome.
* Primarily in – as the title suggests – the Swahili-speaking parts of the area but he makes forays into Ethiopia and South Sudan as well.
** I put archives in scare quotes because they often were little more than closets full of moldering records and rotting playbills.
March 9, 2017
What a joy to read. I found this book at Mrs. Dalloway's in Berkeley, and picked it up on a lark. Wilson-Lee opened up a world to me - I do not have a lot of background in East African studies. Highly recommended!
September 16, 2018
After numerous African colonies won their independence from Britain in the wake of World War II, postcolonial critique of Shakespeare’s texts and their dissemination became common practice in academic literary study. Aimé Césaire’s A Tempest (Une Tempête) from 1969, for instance, became an emblematic reading of the Bard’s late romance, exposing the power dynamics embedded in the play from a “postcolonial” perspective. It was (and is) important to read Shakespeare’s reception history as a colonial imposition. However, to dismiss him as only an imposition would be reductive. Such a reading could help explain how his texts reached certain hands, but it could not justly account for how they transformed in this transfer. It would fail to respect the creative potential of his plays as well as their new audience.
In his recent book, Shakespeare in Swahililand, Edward Wilson-Lee seeks to appreciate the nuances of cultural interaction in the spread of Shakespeare throughout eastern Africa. The book is both a formal academic study and a personal account of how these interactions play out across landscapes, societies, centuries. Wilson-Lee grew up in Kenya under British parents who worked as conservationists. He later moved to England to earn conventional degrees in English literature. This book draws on memories of his cosmopolitan childhood, his experience of teaching Shakespeare in England, and his extensive travels in East Africa. It manages to be personal without being sentimental or self-absorbed. His scholarly curiosity thus takes on an intimate urgency.
Sampling the history of Shakespeare in East Africa, the book ultimately asks, “Do Shakespeare’s plays point the way beyond the jostling for power and prestige towards a shared humanity?” (xiv). By “Swahililand,” Wilson-Lee means “those countries…into which the Swahili tongue was introduced by Arab traders and European missionaries and where it later became a pan-East African language of sorts” (xiv). The chapters are named after the places he visits in the course of his research: Zanzibar, the Swahili coast, Mombasa, Nairobi, Kampala, Dar Es Salaam, Addis Ababa, Juba, and “Panafrica.” The range of his study may be dictated by one language, but the study is inherently comparative, since translations of Shakespeare have long spread through Swahililand alongside English versions. The project’s parameters are also dictated by politics and the development of Western industry – printing, travel, and map-making technologies, for instance.
The story begins in the early nineteenth century, when British explorers used the Bard’s collected works as “an amulet against the dark recesses of an unknown continent” (241). Wilson-Lee surveys the English practice of mythologizing Africa, showing how colonial delusions inspired the intrepid anglophones – such as Theodore Roosevelt – to visit the “heart of darkness” and bring back their own fictions. These bold men often paired their Shakespeare anthology with the New Testament as anchors of “civilized” culture in a “barbaric” environment.
Then, everything changes in the mid-nineteenth century, when the Anglican bishop Edward Steere introduces the printing press to East Africa on the archipelago of Zanzibar. There, he has ex-slaves print his Swahili translation of Charles and Mary Lamb’s Tales from Shakespeare (1807). This will prove to be one of the most important texts in the history of Shakespeare in Africa. As a fixture in Swahililand’s British curriculum, its stories pervade East Africans’ collective consciousness in unexpected ways.
But other languages soon enter the mix when railway projects lead to urban populations that can support professional theater scenes. Along with Indian railway laborers, colonial authorities unwittingly imported Indians’ established love of Shakespeare, in English as in other languages. Wilson-Lee notes the liberty with which Indian dramatists interpreted and adapted the plays, particularly in Mombasa. Part of the book’s mission is to emphasize the cosmopolitan nature of African history. It seems almost impossible to study Swahililand without involving other parts of the world.
Shakespeare in Swahililand becomes “a tool for testing what we share with others” in the European immigrant communities of the early twentieth century (118). One anecdote in particular stands out when Wilson-Lee recounts the Dane Karen Blixen’s attempts to explain Shakespeare to her black servants. One servant doesn’t understand why Portia outwits Shylock with such ease in the courtroom scene of The Merchant of Venice. Shylock wins his right to a pound of Antonio’s flesh – but Portia quibbles that he is entitled to no blood and that he must take only and exactly one pound. Blixen’s servant solves the issue instantly: the Jew could use a hot knife to keep from shedding blood, and cut the flesh off bit by bit until he had a perfect pound. Blixen was probably too disappointed at her servant “missing the whole point” of the play (i.e. the “villainous” Shylock’s defeat) to note his sober view of reparations.
The Bard becomes most subversive when used by East African rebels against the colonial order. It turns out that an astonishing number of future leaders in postwar independence movements studied English at Makerere University in Kampala. Wilson-Lee describes the devoted practice of staging Shakespeare plays there as these figures’ first experience with community organizing and oratory. Shakespeare thus becomes “a way for people without power to take for themselves something from the world of power.” At long last, “the Shakespeare made in Africa has come to replace the one that was taken there” (282).
Shakespeare in Swahililand is thus a study of the slipperiness of cultural phenomena such as creative texts. It shows how, much as people try to weaponize it, a work of art can maintain semantic plasticity, offering new ports of entry to each person who encounters it. Shakespeare’s talent, Wilson-Lee suggests – specifically, his broad-ranging creative vision and refusal to propound a single viewpoint – may make him an ideal example of this democratic quality of art. There is reason to believe that Shakespeare’s empathetic style at least partly allowed his texts to travel as broadly as they did: “into the speeches of politicians and lawyers…, into the folklore of rural villages…, into riots and guerrilla warfare and into concentration camps” (137). It’s hard to think of any other fictionist who might achieve so broad an audience.
Wilson-Lee’s style is erudite but accessible. With much of his narrative taking place far outside any academy, he models an academically qualified intellectual working for the enlightenment of the general public. His account mingles travel experiences with more formal research, memories with documents. The book is therefore attuned to the physicality of cultural transmission. It sifts for signs of the past in marginal, neglected archives. The memoiristic bent also personalizes the research, charming it with an individual’s attempt to understand an ever changing world. And Wilson-Lee’s kaleidoscopic knowledge base not only reflects the great variety of his personal experience. It bares the fruits of comparative study – and of comparative living.
In short, Shakespeare in Swahililand is an exemplary work of comparative literature for a global century. It evaluates the harm done with creative texts but also hints at their capacity for renewal. Globalization, despite its violent history, may revitalize even the dustiest of institutions in a given culture. Hauling their anthologies through foreign wilderness two hundred years ago, those British explorers could hardly have imagined the change for which they paved the way.
In his recent book, Shakespeare in Swahililand, Edward Wilson-Lee seeks to appreciate the nuances of cultural interaction in the spread of Shakespeare throughout eastern Africa. The book is both a formal academic study and a personal account of how these interactions play out across landscapes, societies, centuries. Wilson-Lee grew up in Kenya under British parents who worked as conservationists. He later moved to England to earn conventional degrees in English literature. This book draws on memories of his cosmopolitan childhood, his experience of teaching Shakespeare in England, and his extensive travels in East Africa. It manages to be personal without being sentimental or self-absorbed. His scholarly curiosity thus takes on an intimate urgency.
Sampling the history of Shakespeare in East Africa, the book ultimately asks, “Do Shakespeare’s plays point the way beyond the jostling for power and prestige towards a shared humanity?” (xiv). By “Swahililand,” Wilson-Lee means “those countries…into which the Swahili tongue was introduced by Arab traders and European missionaries and where it later became a pan-East African language of sorts” (xiv). The chapters are named after the places he visits in the course of his research: Zanzibar, the Swahili coast, Mombasa, Nairobi, Kampala, Dar Es Salaam, Addis Ababa, Juba, and “Panafrica.” The range of his study may be dictated by one language, but the study is inherently comparative, since translations of Shakespeare have long spread through Swahililand alongside English versions. The project’s parameters are also dictated by politics and the development of Western industry – printing, travel, and map-making technologies, for instance.
The story begins in the early nineteenth century, when British explorers used the Bard’s collected works as “an amulet against the dark recesses of an unknown continent” (241). Wilson-Lee surveys the English practice of mythologizing Africa, showing how colonial delusions inspired the intrepid anglophones – such as Theodore Roosevelt – to visit the “heart of darkness” and bring back their own fictions. These bold men often paired their Shakespeare anthology with the New Testament as anchors of “civilized” culture in a “barbaric” environment.
Then, everything changes in the mid-nineteenth century, when the Anglican bishop Edward Steere introduces the printing press to East Africa on the archipelago of Zanzibar. There, he has ex-slaves print his Swahili translation of Charles and Mary Lamb’s Tales from Shakespeare (1807). This will prove to be one of the most important texts in the history of Shakespeare in Africa. As a fixture in Swahililand’s British curriculum, its stories pervade East Africans’ collective consciousness in unexpected ways.
But other languages soon enter the mix when railway projects lead to urban populations that can support professional theater scenes. Along with Indian railway laborers, colonial authorities unwittingly imported Indians’ established love of Shakespeare, in English as in other languages. Wilson-Lee notes the liberty with which Indian dramatists interpreted and adapted the plays, particularly in Mombasa. Part of the book’s mission is to emphasize the cosmopolitan nature of African history. It seems almost impossible to study Swahililand without involving other parts of the world.
Shakespeare in Swahililand becomes “a tool for testing what we share with others” in the European immigrant communities of the early twentieth century (118). One anecdote in particular stands out when Wilson-Lee recounts the Dane Karen Blixen’s attempts to explain Shakespeare to her black servants. One servant doesn’t understand why Portia outwits Shylock with such ease in the courtroom scene of The Merchant of Venice. Shylock wins his right to a pound of Antonio’s flesh – but Portia quibbles that he is entitled to no blood and that he must take only and exactly one pound. Blixen’s servant solves the issue instantly: the Jew could use a hot knife to keep from shedding blood, and cut the flesh off bit by bit until he had a perfect pound. Blixen was probably too disappointed at her servant “missing the whole point” of the play (i.e. the “villainous” Shylock’s defeat) to note his sober view of reparations.
The Bard becomes most subversive when used by East African rebels against the colonial order. It turns out that an astonishing number of future leaders in postwar independence movements studied English at Makerere University in Kampala. Wilson-Lee describes the devoted practice of staging Shakespeare plays there as these figures’ first experience with community organizing and oratory. Shakespeare thus becomes “a way for people without power to take for themselves something from the world of power.” At long last, “the Shakespeare made in Africa has come to replace the one that was taken there” (282).
Shakespeare in Swahililand is thus a study of the slipperiness of cultural phenomena such as creative texts. It shows how, much as people try to weaponize it, a work of art can maintain semantic plasticity, offering new ports of entry to each person who encounters it. Shakespeare’s talent, Wilson-Lee suggests – specifically, his broad-ranging creative vision and refusal to propound a single viewpoint – may make him an ideal example of this democratic quality of art. There is reason to believe that Shakespeare’s empathetic style at least partly allowed his texts to travel as broadly as they did: “into the speeches of politicians and lawyers…, into the folklore of rural villages…, into riots and guerrilla warfare and into concentration camps” (137). It’s hard to think of any other fictionist who might achieve so broad an audience.
Wilson-Lee’s style is erudite but accessible. With much of his narrative taking place far outside any academy, he models an academically qualified intellectual working for the enlightenment of the general public. His account mingles travel experiences with more formal research, memories with documents. The book is therefore attuned to the physicality of cultural transmission. It sifts for signs of the past in marginal, neglected archives. The memoiristic bent also personalizes the research, charming it with an individual’s attempt to understand an ever changing world. And Wilson-Lee’s kaleidoscopic knowledge base not only reflects the great variety of his personal experience. It bares the fruits of comparative study – and of comparative living.
In short, Shakespeare in Swahililand is an exemplary work of comparative literature for a global century. It evaluates the harm done with creative texts but also hints at their capacity for renewal. Globalization, despite its violent history, may revitalize even the dustiest of institutions in a given culture. Hauling their anthologies through foreign wilderness two hundred years ago, those British explorers could hardly have imagined the change for which they paved the way.
March 24, 2020
You really must have a fairly critical knowledge of Shakespeare's plays before you can truly appreciate this book. I don't, so I didn't.
However, his history of events in Africa and his own travel experiences on the continent are quite fine.
His "Catalogue of Shipwrecked Books" was excellent, and that's what lead me to "Shakespeare in Swahililand."
However, his history of events in Africa and his own travel experiences on the continent are quite fine.
His "Catalogue of Shipwrecked Books" was excellent, and that's what lead me to "Shakespeare in Swahililand."
July 18, 2016
Thought this might be gross. It was not in fact gross, it was astonishingly good.
March 16, 2019
Some great information here, but it seems that the narrative can't decide if it is a history or a series of anecdotes, and the juxtaposition really didn't work for me.
December 20, 2016
Readable studies are emerging on Shakespeare's influence in many corners of the world. I recently read and reviewed Worlds Elsewhere, an excellent book by Andrew Dickon, which tells how Shakespeare has been studied and staged in Poland, Germany, the United States, India, South Africa, and China. I was glad to find Shakespeare in Swahililand by Edward Wilson-Lee, which is also good. Both authors celebrate the revision of Shakespeare's in the idiom of playwrights and producers around the world.
Wilson-Lee is a professor at Sidney Sussex College in England who grew up in Kenya and has traveled extensively in East Africa. He traces the reading of Shakespeare in Africa from the time of explorers like Richard Burton and Henry Morton Stanley who carried the complete works with them, both as talismans of England and because they liked to read the plays. When missionaries launched schools in East Africa, Shakespeare was on the curriculum.
Because or in spite of that, Shakespeare became popular. East Indians who came to work building East Africa's infrastructure (a deadly job, in which many died), built theaters and put on Shakespeare plays that were popular in their community.
Jomo Kenyatta, founder of independent Kenya, who tried to build a Kikuyu culture, privately read and loved Shakespeare. Milton Obote, founder of independent Uganda, acted in Shakespeare plays in college (Obote was Julius Caesar). Julius Nyerere, first president of Tangayika, which under his rule combined with Zanzibar to become Tanzania, translated Julius Caesar and The Merchant of Venice into Swahili when he was president!
Though plays by African authors have of course become popular in East Africa, Shakespeare still has a place there.
Wilson-Lee is a professor at Sidney Sussex College in England who grew up in Kenya and has traveled extensively in East Africa. He traces the reading of Shakespeare in Africa from the time of explorers like Richard Burton and Henry Morton Stanley who carried the complete works with them, both as talismans of England and because they liked to read the plays. When missionaries launched schools in East Africa, Shakespeare was on the curriculum.
Because or in spite of that, Shakespeare became popular. East Indians who came to work building East Africa's infrastructure (a deadly job, in which many died), built theaters and put on Shakespeare plays that were popular in their community.
Jomo Kenyatta, founder of independent Kenya, who tried to build a Kikuyu culture, privately read and loved Shakespeare. Milton Obote, founder of independent Uganda, acted in Shakespeare plays in college (Obote was Julius Caesar). Julius Nyerere, first president of Tangayika, which under his rule combined with Zanzibar to become Tanzania, translated Julius Caesar and The Merchant of Venice into Swahili when he was president!
Though plays by African authors have of course become popular in East Africa, Shakespeare still has a place there.
May 23, 2019
Edward Wilson-Lee schreibt in diesem Buch über seine Entdeckung, dass Shakespeare in Afrika eine Rolle gespielt hat und es Parallelen zu seinen Werken gibt.
Das ist alles schön und gut, wie Nahe Shakespeare vielem gekommen war und welche Lehren man aus seinen Geschichten ziehen kann. Wann er das erste Mal erwähnt wird und welche Rolle er scheinbar gespielt haben soll.
Und auch wenn ich bekennender William Shakespeare Fan bin, war mir all das irgendwie etwas trocken, langweilig erzählt.
Ich bin einfach nicht so gut hinein gekommen. Die Zitate und Anekdoten sind toll, aber mir war vieles zu weit hergeholt und abwegig, so dass ich mich irgendwann einfach durchgequält habe. Was echt schade ist, wenn man bedenkt, das ich Shakespeare liebe und ich diese Kombination mit Afrika sehr spannend finde.
Für mich war der Ton etwas merkwürdig, mehr lehrhaft, als erzählerisch. Als würde eine Herde Elefanten durch die Seiten trampeln und einen dann doch etwas verwirrt und durstig zurücklassen.
Möglicherweise gebe ich ihm irgendwann noch einmal eine Chance, markiert habe ich mir schließlich sehr sehr viel. Aber ich hab wirklich gekämpft.
Jetzt weiß ich allerdings, dass Roosevelt gerne in Afrika auf der Jagd war. Zusammenhang? Nun ja, er war eben auf diesem Kontinent.
Ein schöner Kontinent, mit einer beeindruckenden und doch sehr erschreckenden Geschichte.
Es ist schon interessant zu wissen, dass es Shakespeare bis dahin geschafft hat – schon zu viktorianischen Zeiten. Aber irgendwas hat mir gefehlt in diesem Buch. Was, das kann ich nicht sagen. Es gab einige gute und wirklich nützliche Informationen, aber auch vieles, was ich mir erspart hätte.
Das ist alles schön und gut, wie Nahe Shakespeare vielem gekommen war und welche Lehren man aus seinen Geschichten ziehen kann. Wann er das erste Mal erwähnt wird und welche Rolle er scheinbar gespielt haben soll.
Und auch wenn ich bekennender William Shakespeare Fan bin, war mir all das irgendwie etwas trocken, langweilig erzählt.
Ich bin einfach nicht so gut hinein gekommen. Die Zitate und Anekdoten sind toll, aber mir war vieles zu weit hergeholt und abwegig, so dass ich mich irgendwann einfach durchgequält habe. Was echt schade ist, wenn man bedenkt, das ich Shakespeare liebe und ich diese Kombination mit Afrika sehr spannend finde.
Für mich war der Ton etwas merkwürdig, mehr lehrhaft, als erzählerisch. Als würde eine Herde Elefanten durch die Seiten trampeln und einen dann doch etwas verwirrt und durstig zurücklassen.
Möglicherweise gebe ich ihm irgendwann noch einmal eine Chance, markiert habe ich mir schließlich sehr sehr viel. Aber ich hab wirklich gekämpft.
Jetzt weiß ich allerdings, dass Roosevelt gerne in Afrika auf der Jagd war. Zusammenhang? Nun ja, er war eben auf diesem Kontinent.
Ein schöner Kontinent, mit einer beeindruckenden und doch sehr erschreckenden Geschichte.
Es ist schon interessant zu wissen, dass es Shakespeare bis dahin geschafft hat – schon zu viktorianischen Zeiten. Aber irgendwas hat mir gefehlt in diesem Buch. Was, das kann ich nicht sagen. Es gab einige gute und wirklich nützliche Informationen, aber auch vieles, was ich mir erspart hätte.
September 14, 2022
I want to pick this book apart--to challenge and question so many of its pieces. But to do so would require another reading. And I'm left with a favorable opinion anyway; so what would be the point? It has whimsy, beautiful poetic moments and conducts an easy-breezy history of a part of the world that gets short shrift in...my...part of the world.
But I can't shake the discomfort of reading something that has left a hundred [tiny-TINY] pin-pricks: of occasional confusion, of suspicions that many conclusions are false/overwrought and of clear indicators that details are, more often than not, cherry-picked.
But I don't want to go tit-for-tat over that.
My biggest compliment (and, conveniently, my biggest critique) is the personal narrative. His "journey" between countries seems chronological; but that doesn't really provide a solid reason to order the chapters that way. His own experiences as a kid provide interesting contrast, but rarely illuminate any of the main concepts he's reaching for. In a nutshell, these stories are often enjoyable yet irrelevant.
Regardless, the book is an interesting take on the effects of colonialism, the power of creativity and the revered & historic beauty of both East Africa and the Bard himself (despite the two often having little to do with each other--even with the author's pained/strained/constrained efforts to connect them).
But I can't shake the discomfort of reading something that has left a hundred [tiny-TINY] pin-pricks: of occasional confusion, of suspicions that many conclusions are false/overwrought and of clear indicators that details are, more often than not, cherry-picked.
But I don't want to go tit-for-tat over that.
My biggest compliment (and, conveniently, my biggest critique) is the personal narrative. His "journey" between countries seems chronological; but that doesn't really provide a solid reason to order the chapters that way. His own experiences as a kid provide interesting contrast, but rarely illuminate any of the main concepts he's reaching for. In a nutshell, these stories are often enjoyable yet irrelevant.
Regardless, the book is an interesting take on the effects of colonialism, the power of creativity and the revered & historic beauty of both East Africa and the Bard himself (despite the two often having little to do with each other--even with the author's pained/strained/constrained efforts to connect them).
March 16, 2018
I must admit, I am very partial to Shakespeare's works and also on the way they are appropriated. I can only echo the author's sentiment of being struck by "the infinite resourcefulness and variety that readers have brought to their readings of Shakespeare, and the majestic consistency with which the works have risen to the task" (pg. 241). Highly readable for anyone interested how the English playwright has been instrumentalized by both colonizers and colonized. Wilson-Lee's enthusiasm sometimes gets in the way of providing a critical look, so you should be aware that it only provides an incomplete picture. But it is a good start.
January 20, 2019
Wilson-Lee uncovers zany stories from across East-Africa and reveals how Shakespeare is both a tool of colonization and a tool for rebellion against the colonizers. The eye for detail and scope of the project was phenomenal given the text's comfortable length of about 250 pages.
A strong read with an awareness that the author should not really be telling a history of East Africa. A little more discussion of he's personal implications in the history would have made the read even more compelling.
A strong read with an awareness that the author should not really be telling a history of East Africa. A little more discussion of he's personal implications in the history would have made the read even more compelling.
December 19, 2016
Part travelogue, part history, interspersed with bits of memoir, this was an intriguing book. The author traces Shakespeare readings and performances in East Africa from the early European "explorers" to the present day. Fascinating look at how Shakespeare's text has served a variety of purposes for everyone from colonial administrators to independence leaders and in into today's East African literary scene.
August 27, 2018
An interesting read; informative as far as African history goes, and how colonization has effected the various countries in East Africa. It occasionally reeks of what feels a lot like white privilege and the remnants of British colonialism. If you can get passed that, it’s worth at least one go through.
May 23, 2018
After a slow start, the book picked up. It wasn’t quite what I was expecting, but the mix of history, literature and personal anecdote made for an enjoyable read.
October 5, 2018
Interesting history of Shakespeare in Africa. A lot of information about social and political topics I knew nothing about before.
January 8, 2026
One of the more fascinating books I envisage reading this year
March 30, 2018
Professor Edward Wilson-Lee of Medieval and Renaissance literature at Sidney Sussex College of Cambridge, United Kingdom 2016’s book, Shakespeare in Swahililand: In Search of A Global Poet is a fun book if you like thinking about different versions of William Shakespeare’s works in different situations. I read the book on the Kindle. A note for this “review” I cited an interview with Edward Wilson-Lee in my “review” of the Shakespearean play, Cymbeline. Wilson-Lee shows in Shakespeare in Swahililand, how people in East Africa have interacted with Shakespearean works through time in surprising ways. For example, the first book printed in Swahili was the translation of four tales from Charles and Mary Lamb’s Tales from Shakespeare. Another example of the interaction between Shakespeare and East Africa is the fact “Julius Nyerere, the first President of Tanzania, who translated Julius Caesar and The Merchant of Venice into Swahili in spare evening moments during the very years that he was taking his country from British colony to independent nation and then to a grand experiment in African Socialism (163).” Wilson-Lee explores both these facts in Shakespeare in Swahililand. This book is full of factoids such as those listed above. I found the chapter on the interaction between the work of Shakespeare and the Ethiopian Emperor Haile Selassie the First interesting. In the words of Wilson-Lee, Ethiopia “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 for a time with unlimited power (188)” From the importance of Shakespearean works to European explorers of the East African Lake Regions, such as Richard Francis Burton and John Hanning Speke in the 1800s until the importance of the Shakespearean works to identity formation in South Sudan in the early 2010s, Shakespeare in Swahililand is full of interesting entertaining factoids that make the book a fun read.
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March 28, 2017This book was featured in the Nota Benes section of the March 2017 issue of World Literature Today Magazine.
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