A host of books is being published this year to commemorate the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare's death. The most striking common trait among them is a desire to explore Shakespeare's afterlife beyond the shores of "this sceptred isle", in places where we might least expect to find him. The following two books look at Shakespeare's influence in Africa.Edward Wilson-Lee's Shakespeare in Swahililand is part memoir of his Kenyan childhood, part travelogue and part literary criticism.Pursuing Shakespeare's legacy throughout the Swahili-speaking parts of East Africa, Wilson-Lee moves from the 19th-century adventures of Richard Burton and Henry Morton Stanley, who explored the continent's interior armed with their Complete Works, to the 2012 performance of Cymbeline in Arabic at the Globe by the South Sudan Theatre Company.Along the way, Wilson-Lee uncovers captivating glimpses of the "ever-living poet", how Shakespeare affected the lives of the missionaries, railway labourers, colonial settlers, revolutionaries and politicians that made modern-day East Africa.We find Karen Blixen discussing The Merchant of Venice with her Kenyan servants; the future president of Uganda, Milton Obote, playing the part of Julius Caesar at Makere University; Julius Nyerere, the first president of Tanzania, translating both those plays into Swahili while struggling for independence from British rule; and the Kenyan president Daniel arap Moi playing fast and loose with Shakespeare's controversial place in his country's school curriculum in the 1980s.The book's strength is Wilson-Lee's own East African heritage. He travels to Zanzibar, Mombasa, Nairobi, Kampala, Dar es Salaam and Addis Ababa in pursuit of Shakespearean stories. His kaleidoscope of personal memoirs captures the region's vibrant, chaotic diversity.Andrew Dickson makes a cheerful virtue of his parochial Englishness in a far punchier whistle-stop tour of Shakespeare's globe, Worlds Elsewhere. Dickson travels from Europe to America, India and China to discover why the work of an untravelled writer like Shakespeare flourished in such unlikely places as communist East Germany and apartheid South Africa and why more people now encounter his work in translation than in his original language.He excavates the remarkable story of the "Robben Island Shakespeare", a Complete Works smuggled onto the island in the 1970s, its passages signed by the prisoners. Nelson Mandela wrote his name beside the lines from Julius Caesar that begin: "Cowards die many times before their deaths". Dickson is bewitched by India and its Shakespearean tradition, from the Raj to contemporary Bollywood versions. When he confesses that he could go on chasing adaptations of Shakespeare across the world forever, a comforting Hindu professor retorts: "Isn't that rather the point?"Solipsism often gets the better of Dickson, as it did of Wilson-Lee; we learn far too much about his jet lag and existential ruminations on the universe. But he is shrewd enough to acknowledge, at the end of his journey, that Shakespeare has "a disconcerting habit of reflecting your own self back to you". For all their globetrotting in search of Shakespeare, both Wilson-Lee and Dickson end up gazing at themselves, as if through a glass darkly. ..