Let the Bard be your guide

Michael Kerr meets Edward Wilson-Lee, whose African travels show Shakespeare and the continent in a different light

neatly with the commemorations this month of the 400th anniversary of the Bard’s death. He tells how the explorers Richard Burton and Henry Morton Stanley carried Shakespeare as an amulet against the danger of going native; how Julius Nyerere, first president of Tanzania, spent his days forging a new nation and his nights translating Julius Caesar into Swahili; how Brig-Gen Awur Malual, who is making English the working language of the army of South Sudan, read Shakespeare while fighting for independence.

Wilson-Lee’s book is a travelogue, too, with crisp sketches of modernday African cities and a cultural history of Swahililand – that region Keats once said that reading Homer was like being Cortez staring off into the boundless Pacific, referring, I suppose, to the vertigo that great beauty brings on, the sense of possibility quickly expanding beyond our ability to grasp it. Shakespeare, I think, provokes this even more completely: the sense that his meaning, that the great answers, are just over the horizon. We are driven to explore, to encounter and to read because we hope that what we find will settle things.

You grew up in Kenya in a family of conservationists, within the bounds of what had been Karen ( Blixen’s coffee farm. You got to know East Africa well, but you say your travels for the book have brought it into richer focus. In what way? I spent much of my childhood in the bush – though often with my nose stuck in a book – and I don’t think I ever appreciated the cultural and intellectual richness of the region until I started on this writing project. It brought home to me both what so many Europeans came to the bush looking for – that horizon that Keats and Shakespeare gesture to – and how this made them want to keep the region wild. It made, I suppose, an area that had been for me like a fable in its uncomplicated beauty into one that was more like a play, bristling with exchanges and tension.

Ethiopia isn’t Swahili-speaking; you include it because it’s the country “where Shakespeare’s East African adventure... reached its climax”, with translations of the plays by the poet laureate forming a backdrop to the decadent reign and violent overthrow of Haile Selassie. You found Addis Ababa very different from cities elsewhere in the region... Yes, Addis is an extraordinary city. It was founded with an ambitious vision in the 19th century, rather than growing up rather later and more haphazardly as Nairobi and Dar es Salaam did, and its elites have Shakespeare in Swahililand is available from Telegraph Books (0844 871 1514; books.telegraph. co.uk) at £16.99 plus p&p