The other day I wanted to look up something in Shakespeare in Swahililand by Edward Wilson-Lee but couldn’t find my copy of the book. Searching online, I stumbled across the podcast of Shakespeare Unlimited’s Episode 83: Shakespeare in Swahililand from October 2017, with Edward Wilson-Lee and Ngũgĩ Wa Thiong’o as guests. From the episode:

Edward Wilson-Lee, the son of white wildlife conservationists, spent his childhood in Kenya. Today he teaches Shakespeare at the University of Cambridge in England. Over the past few years he has spent extended periods back in Kenya, as well as in Tanzania, Uganda, Ethiopia, and South Sudan, researching his book, Shakespeare in Swahililand. Edward is joined by one of his great literary heroes, the renowned Kenyan playwright, novelist, dissident, and social activist Ngũgĩ Wa Thiong’o. Ngũgĩ also grew up in Kenya – when it was still a British colony. Ngũgĩ is now a Distinguished Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of California, Irvine. His most recent work is the memoir Birth of a Dream Weaver.

It’s a brisk 34-minute episode, using Shakespeare in Swahililand as a starting point to “discuss Shakespeare’s influence on the politics, history, and literary culture of East Africa.” It was a nice refresher on Wilson-Lee’s book (or introduction if you haven’t read it), with the addition of Thiong’o’s personal interaction with Shakespeare’s plays growing up and in his professional life. A bit more on these two:

Edward Wilson-Lee, the son of white wildlife conservationists, spent his childhood in Kenya. Today he teaches Shakespeare at the University of Cambridge in England. Over the past few years he has spent extended periods back in Kenya, as well as in Tanzania, Uganda, Ethiopia, and South Sudan, researching his book, Shakespeare in Swahililand. Edward is joined by one of his great literary heroes, the renowned Kenyan playwright, novelist, dissident, and social activist Ngũgĩ Wa Thiong’o. Ngũgĩ also grew up in Kenya – when it was still a British colony. Ngũgĩ is now a Distinguished Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of California, Irvine. His most recent work is the memoir Birth of a Dream Weaver.

The “need” for Shakespeare’s works as companions on the explorers trips as well as the “need” to impose him on the people living in this area reflects on not just those people but the mindset of the time in general. Permit me one more quote:

[I]t’s representative of a particular urge that 19^th century Romantic and Victorian British culture felt to find Shakespeare in the quote-unquote “dark continent.” There was almost this kind of symbiotic relationship where Shakespeare’s universality couldn’t really prove itself unless he showed himself to also be capable of existing in this faraway place. And this becomes part of a tradition when Captain Sir Richard Francis Burton and John Hanning Speke go off on their cartographic exhibition to try and establish the source of the Nile, and they take with them the complete works of Shakespeare, and spend the time reading the complete works of Shakespeare.

As Thiong’o points out in several ways, Shakespeare found fertile ground in East Africa but not always for the reasons the explorers and colonizers intended. The episode is a good overview of Wilson-Lee’s book and more. I was unfamiliar with the Shakespeare Unlimited podcasts, so it looks like yet another great resource to explore. The link to this episode again: Shakespeare Unlimited: Episode 83.