Shakespeare in Swahililand

May 23, 2016
Wilson-Lee, a fellow in English at Cambridge University, spent his childhood in Kenya, and he intersperses his scholarly, rather esoteric study of Shakespeare in colonial East Africa with his own recollections and impressions in this complex, challenging work. As Wilson-Lee admits, his book is as much personal memoir and travelogue as inquiry into Shakespeare’s appeal across continents. He begins with explorers Richard Burton and Henry Morton Stanley, who brought Shakespeare
to the region
he calls Swahililand—today’s Kenya, Tanzania, and Uganda—and fetishized Shakespeare as an antidote to “going native.” He then describes how, in 1867, the missionary Edward Steere translated storybook versions of Shakespeare’s plays into Swahili. Wilson-Lee draws a rich portrait of a region of Africa in which Shakespeare was familiar, adored, and widely performed with numerous local embellishments. Acrobatic in style and impressive in scholarship, his account arrives 400 years after Shakespeare’s death with a cross-cultural bang. It is not an easy book to digest. Wilson-Lee’s florid language, off-topic ramblings, travel adventures, and speculative flights widen his report but come at the cost of coherence and clarity. Agent: Isobel Dixon, Blake Friedman Agency.

July 1, 2016
Pursuing the Bard across the history, geography, and culture of East Africa.Wilson-Lee (English/Sidney Sussex Coll.; co-editor: Translation and the Book Trade in Early Modern Europe, 2014), who spent his childhood in East Africa and teaches Shakespeare, takes readers on a trek through Zanzibar, Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda, Ethiopia, and Sudan to discover Shakespeare's legacy on those areas. He begins with famous African explorers for whom Shakespeare was indispensable; Sir Richard Francis Burton carried a volume of Shakespeare while crossing both bog and savanna when he set out to find the source of the Nile. Henry Morton Stanley "recounted burning his copy of Shakespeare to mollify tribesmen who viewed his books as witchcraft. Wilson-Lee chronicles his visit to Zanzibar, the site of Edward Steere's 1867 printing of the Hadithi za Kiingereza, a collection of four Shakespearean tales and one of the earliest printed publications in Swahili; and Mombasa, where, at the end of the 19th century, tens of thousands of Indians arrived to build the railways, bringing their love of Shakespeare with them. The author also discusses his visit to Makerere University in Kampala, where teaching and performance of Shakespeare flourished during the 1940s; Dar es Salaam, where the first president of Tanzania translated Julius Caesar and The Merchant of Venice into Swahili; and Ethiopia, where Poet Laureate Tsegaye Gabre-Medhin won favor from Emperor Haile Selassie for his production of Othello. In Nairobi, on the grounds of the coffee farm described by Karen Blixen in Out of Africa, Wilson-Lee reminisces about his youth among the Gikuyu people there. At its core, Shakespeare in Swahililand is as much the author's story as it is Shakespeare's or Africa's. Wilson-Lee enjoyably melds memoir, history, and literary travelogue to reveal the surprising hold that Shakespeare continues to have on a culture remote from his own.

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October 1, 2016

Wilson-Lee (English, Cambridge Univ.) rejects the view that Shakespeare represents British imperialism. Part travelog, part meditation on Shakespeare's role in East Africa ("Swahililand"), his book explores diverse ways in which Shakespeare has been adapted to situations and needs of countries in this region. Julius Kambarage Nyerere, first president of Tanzania, translated The Merchant of Venice as a vehicle to foster his anticapitalist agenda. George Mungai staged the play in Nairobi, Kenya, with Gikuyu businessmen. Tsegaye Gabre-Medhin produced Othello in Ethiopia because he thought it mirrored his country's condition. On South Africa's Robben Island in the late 1970s, Nelson Mandela and 33 other political prisoners marked their favorite passages in a volume of Shakespeare that has become known as the "Robben Island Bible." For the imprisoned men these lines expressed their political struggle. To mark South Sudanese independence from Sudan, actors from that fledgling country performed Cymbeline at the Globe in London in 2012 because the play recounts a successful rebellion against a dominant overlord. VERDICT This readable account shows that Shakespeare is universal because his work can be read in all types of environments, reflecting eternal truths and current conditions worldwide.--Joseph Rosenblum, Univ. of North Carolina, Greensboro

Copyright 2016 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

September 1, 2016
Like Andrew Dickson's inspection of Shakespeare in the U.S., Germany, India, South Africa, and China, Worlds Elsewhere (2016), Wilson-Lee's historical-cultural account of Shakespeare in East Africa is formally a travel book. Indeed, Wilson-Lee's chapters bear the place-names of principal stops as he got the goods on the book's heroes, including European explorers (Livingstone, Stanley, etc.); early translators; major modern African authors; and statesmen who forged postcolonial nations, such as Julius Nyerere and Jomo Kenyatta. Wilson-Lee's experience as the son of American conservationists who raised him in Kenya crucially informs the book, enabling piquant comparisons between what Wilson-Lee recalls and present-day realities, which often differ greatly despite a span of only some 30 years between them. A thematically premonitory Shakespearean passage kicks off every chapter, and that archetypal drama of colonialism and liberation, The Tempest, is the work most often cited, though The Merchant of Venice and plays dealing with the hazards of rule figure in, too. If colonialism is the ground-bass here, Shakespeare's moral balance gradually becomes a main theme.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2016, American Library Association.)