As our ferry approached Zanzibar (or Unguja as it’s known in Swahili), the late afternoon light shone its golden sheen on a harbour full of dhows interspersed with modern ferries. From this first island view of ancient and modern moored together, I realized that not only did Zanzibar evoke romantic images that glitter alluringly, inviting nine-to-fivers stuck in traffic jams to dream of frolicking on a tropical island, it was dripping with history and culture. Cultures past and present had synthesised into a Swahili culture, a fusion of peoples. The island was a twenty-first-century location, a piece of paradise and a third world African island, blending into each other with the intimacy of waltz partners and the ease of an embrace.
I made my way into the old Stone Town weighed down by a heavy pack and the unknown, accompanied by two men advising (or pestering me, depending on interpretation) which hotel to choose. Zigzagging through narrow winding alleyways, stepping over trash, we passed small shops and women in veils and long dresses sitting in doorways, encircled by old carved frames. Buildings were crumbling down revealing their initial stone masonry. They stood among food shops, internet cafes, tourist shops selling bright tingatinga paintings and small hotels, one in which I found a bed for the night. Venturing to find the Forodhani food market on the seafront, I noted landmarks to help me find my way back into the labyrinth before me as the dark began to colour the day.
Situated across the road from the House of Wonders, so named for being one of the first buildings in East Africa to have electricity and running water and now a Swahili museum, Forodhani Market comes alive at night. Foodsellers set up their tables with a selection of skewers threaded with prawns, meat and fish, amidst huge red crabs, octopi, squid and breadfruit. As the sun set, pans of oil started sizzling, the sugar cane juice sellers started pushing their sugar cane through presses and Zanzibar pizza sellers began to knead their dough. As I sampled the delights and drank spice tea on the sea wall, they lit their lanterns and fried chips in large frying pans. Two boys walked in the shallow water below, looking for octopi. They created an eerie picture, two spectres with lantern and stick in hand as they waded through the dark water.
The Swahili coast, where Africa meets the Indian Ocean has been a crossroads of goods and culture for thousands of years. Traders and travellers navigated these waters in dhows made from strong wood and powered by lateen sails. Kiswahili, originally a Bantu language, became peppered with Arabic, Persian and Indian words and transformed into the language of the Swahili people, coastal Africans who absorbed Eastern influences through the centuries and moulded themselves into a distinct culture with Islamic religious overtones and hints of old African culture.
Having once been the centre of slave trade in East Africa, Zanzibar holds a dark and tragic past. I visited underground slave chambers and the Anglican Cathedral built on the site of the old slave market. The church transformed the old whipping post into its altar and holds a cross made from the tree where Livingstone’s heart was buried in Zambia. Livingstone’s efforts assisted in abolishing the legal slave trade in 1873. Slaves from Ethiopia, Zambia and Malawi were held on Zanzibar to be sold and sent to work on the clove plantations on the island and to the Persian Gulf as domestics, concubines and pearl divers. They were used on the Omani date plantations and the French colonies of Mauritius and Reunion. The Islamic slave masters recognised their mixed children as free, unlike the North American slave trade and further amalgamating the Swahili people. Sultan Seyyid Said, the Omani ruler who transferred his capital to Zanzibar died in 1856 leaving behind 36 children all born to slave mothers, some succeeding to the throne. This strange fusion of people is Zanzibar’s legacy.
Deep in Stone Town, I awoke before first light to the sound of roosters crowing and to the Muslim call to prayer. Spice Island needed to be explored. Spice tours depart daily to the Kizimbani government plantation. In the lush tropical plantation, Zanzibar’s riches are revealed. Once constituting 90 per cent of the gross profit, now shared with tourism, Zanzibar’s selection of spices is vast, a few well known ones indistinguishable in their green finery until pointed out by a guide. Nutmeg encased in an apple-like fruit adorned with a red veil around its kernel, cardamom growing berry-like as a secondary root at the base of the plant, multicoloured pepper, cinnamon bark, ginger root, turmeric, cloves, vanilla. Small children ran after the group giving bouquets of lantana flowers in a leaf wrap to the ladies and woven leaf bracelets to the men. Feeling like dignitaries we walked through the green trees.
Star fruit, jackfruit, custard apples. We sampled these exotic fruit from a stall on the roadside and enjoyed a village lunch of rice and spinach cooked with coconut milk and spices. On the return journey we passed the Mangapwani slave chambers, used to conceal slave trade after its abolishment, and then stopped to swim on a littered beach. The combination of our third world lunch destination and the trash accumulated on the beach from sea and land traffic, acted as a reminder that paradise is in the eye of the beholder, and that there is a flipside to this shining coin.
Beaches, white fringed with palms, coconut milk drunk straight from the fruit, dive charters from wooden boats and sunset cruises are all on offer on Zanzibar, as advertised in the tourist brochures. A journey on a potholed road, past small villages, took me to the northern beaches of Zanzibar to enjoy a day of frolicking in the sea and a full moon party. The early morning beckoned and inspired me to walk to the top of the island where sunrise and sunset can be seen in a day, past women at low tide searching the waters for shells, men fixing their wooden boats, children running circles around a pied piper blowing his wooden trumpet-like flute. I walked on, finding large cone shells and cowries and enjoying paradise mixing with rural Africa. The clouds built up and it showered down, fusing with the music that cascaded from the lodges up on the rocks. The sun burst out as I returned to the hotel, one of a number on the stretch of beach, in time for a swim in the warm blue sea and to have a massage on the beach given by a woman wearing a bright khanga and a wide smile. I was anointed in coconut oil and lemon grass as I lay on a coconut fibre bed on the white sand. The next day I had my body decorated with henna designs – for celebration and spirit of place.
Back in the old Stone Town of Zanzibar, chewing on sugared baobab seeds, I walked the alleyways. People popped their heads out of the windows, greeting me with the many Swahili greetings. “Jambo, jambo.” I sat at the internet shop next to a Maasai man dressed in his red robe and sandals. He dropped his stick to the ground and typed like a demon.
Aaaaah Zanzibar…… I felt sad to leave the local friends I had made as I sat with them on the water’s edge at the Forodhani Market on my last night on the island. It was a Saturday and I enjoyed watching people sitting in the long grass, the sea breeze, the lanterns flickering on the tables. I savoured my last taste of spice tea and night in the old Stone Town.
I discovered that the ferry which I had arrived on spent its nights in the ocean, mattresses provided, covering the three-hour journey back to the mainland in the early hours of the morning. I declined this strange African service for the quicker, more expensive daytime ferry, joining the people prone to sea-sickness on the small outside deck. As the bright sea put distance between us and the coast, a little girl was deposited into my lap. Looking over I saw her mother lying on the floor, eyes shut, bracing herself against the movement of the ship. Holding the small child, I watched the familiar landmarks becoming smaller and smaller as we travelled further out into the vast ocean.
We sped past the dhows flying free on the water: rough weathered wood, white sails whipping in the wind, spray flying. As in time immemorial, they travelled the Indian Ocean, once the vehicle for bringing new people and trade to this small island. Zanzibar Island disappeared into the distance.
