Assassinating Shakespeare: Confessions of a Bard in the Bush

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 naïve 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. Read more