SHAKESPEARE IN SWAHILILAND

Shakespeare in Swahililand is the story of a madcap research trip across eastern and central Africa to recover the extraordinary and unknown story of the part played by Shakespeare's works in the region's history.

Shakespeare's plays were (among many other things) carried into the lake regions by the explorers Burton and Stanley, performed in Mombasa by travelling Indian troupes, read by the Happy Valley Set and the first African revolutionaries, set as prescribed reading in colonial- era schools, translated by the first President of Tanzania, pushed by western oil companies during the Cold War, and read by boy soldiers in the Sudanese civil wars. To follow these characters and tell their story, I returned to the area where I grew up, navigating the many bewildering parts of modern African life to dig through mouldering archives and meet some of the few remaining witnesses to a scarce-believable world that is being quickly forgotten. This book aims to find the holy grail of literary studies – an answer to why Shakespeare should be so universally adored – in the most unlikely of places; but along the way it is a travelogue, a memoir, a satire, an ode to Shakespeare, and a potted history of a region which combines breathtaking beauty and cultural riches with the heartache of injustice, poverty, and amnesia. Edward Wilson-Lee was raised in Kenya, as part of a family of wildlife conservationists and filmmakers, and now teaches Shakespeare for a living at Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge, where he settled after periods of living in the Swiss alps, London, Mexico, New Orleans, New York, and Oxford. He has written and lectured widely on subjects from the Bible to Don Quixote, and is an expert on the early years of the printing press, chivalric romance, and the novel. He has won prestigious research grants from Cambridge University and the British Academy, and is currently reconstructing the greatest library of the Renaissance, which Columbus' bastard son collected and went mad trying to catalogue.