Assassinating Shakespeare

by Goltz, Thomas

• ISBN13: 9780863567186
• ISBN10: 0863567185
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2006-11-01
• Publisher: Al Saqi

Summary

Work your way around Africa putting on one-man Shakespeare performances? It's the type of escapade that could only have sprung from the restless, feverish mind of the young Thomas Goltz, then a naive twenty-one-year-old in 1976 looking for adventure and an errant brother.   Goltz is now an acclaimed author and journalist who has reported extensively on the upheavals of the post-Soviet Caucasus, and this impulsive trip of his youth saw him wandering through the cities and villages of east, central, and southern Africa.   His first port of call after hitchhiking through Eastern Europe and the Middle East is Ethiopia, where he is greeted by a civil war in full flame. Close encounters follow with bandits, guerrillas, missionaries, prostitutes, savvy street kids, bureaucrats, unrequited loves, and, of course, ordinary, Shakespeare-loving Africans.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements	9	(2)
Prologue: Stratford in Front of the New Stanley	11	(8)
A Once and Future Bard	19	(9)
Haile Selassie's Revenge	28	(14)
Stanley Misses Livingston	42	(10)
A Con Man Among the Makondi	52	(9)
Romeo and Juliet on an Indian Ocean Island	61	(7)
A Bard is Born	68	(6)
Mzungu on the Make	74	(10)
Serengeti Shakespeare	84	(13)
The Smell of Greasepaint, the Roar of the Expatriate Crowd	97	(14)
Busted in Botswana	111	(14)
White Man in Apartheid Land	125	(10)
Disneyland, or an Excursion to War-torn Rhodesia	135	(11)
Cape Town Races, or Stanley Finally Finds Livingston	146	(18)
Sand-surfing in Swakopmund	164	(21)
Friar Lawrence of the Kalahari	185	(14)
Zonked in Zambia, or Camp Bitter Hunger	199	(13)
Temporarily Tamed Tokolosh	212	(12)
The Foul Fiend Flibbertigibbet	224	(21)
Epilogue: Assassinating Shakespeare	245