Edward Wilson-Lee

Shakespeare in Swahililand 

William Collins (UK) Farrar, Straus & Giroux (USA). German translation from btb/Penguin Random House. Shortlisted for the William M Saroyan Prize for International Writing (Stanford).

​

Shakespeare in Swahililand is the story of a search 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 East 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; 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. 

 

Shakespeare in Swahililand is published in the UK by William Collins and in the USA by Farrar, Straus & Giroux. A German translation is forthcoming from btb/Random House Germany.