Zanzibar Town - Blood on the Stones - Part 2

 Westerners have always been fascinated by the romantic allure of Zanzibar. It was the reason for my spur-of-the-moment decision to visit after a week of work with an NGO in Dar es Salaam. My first encounter with the word, Zanzibar, was as a schoolboy reading and memorizing Bliss Carmen’s poem, The Ships of Yule.  

                               With cocoanuts from Zanzibar,

                               And pines from Singapore;

                               And when they had unloaded these

                               They could go back for more.

      

            Carmen was a latecomer in romanticizing the place. Eusebius of Caesarea, Palestine, a historian and bishop of Caesarea Maritima in about 314 AD wrote this ode to the island. 

                               O take me back to Zanzibar

                               Where I may sleep and dream some more

                               And wake to dawn of cinnabar.

                       

            Perhaps surprisingly, the list of writers who’ve waxed lyrical about Zanzibar includes Allan Ginsberg, Spike Mulligan, Marcus Garvey, E.J. Pratt and Emily Dickinson. As an article in The Christian Science Monitor stated, “There are few places in the world with an evocatively exotic name as Zanzibar.” But, as I discovered, there is a dark side to this idealization. Garth Myers, a former Professor of African/African American Studies at the University of Kansas writes, “Popular Western writings about Zanzibar have been vital to European imperialist domination of the place for 150 years.” In an article, “Isle of cloves, sea of discourses: writing about Zanzibar,” Myers said this racialization and creation of otherness is part of an “Imperial predilection for objectification.” David Livingstone, Reader in the School of Geosciences at Queen’s University of Belfast suggests in his book The Geographical Tradition that “Geography in the age of imperialism was not merely engaged in discovering the world, as it was in creating it.”

            I had to admit that my own understanding of this exotic island was as insubstantial as a frigate bird feather fluttering to the sea. To correct this gaping lack, I decided to walk up the hill after lunch. My destination was the Anglican Cathedral of Christ Church, a soaring edifice of coral stone in the middle of the old town and built intentionally on the former, blood-soaked grounds of Zanzibar’s largest slave market. In fact, the alter is said to be over the site of the market’s whipping post where naked men, women and children were lashed with stinging nettles. The more stoic the slave, the higher the price. There’s a white marble circle on the stone floor that marks this special piece of hell. An adjoining slave heritage centre contains more horrors including admission to two dark, crypt-like cells which were often crammed so full of slaves that many died of suffocation or starvation before they could be auctioned off. Outside in the fresh air, there’s a memorial to the misery inflicted on the people of Africa, a rectangular stone pit at least a metre deep in which five iron figures stand in mute despair, linked in the actual chains that once circled the legs, wrists and necks of slaves. It reminded me of Rodin’s sculpture, The Burghers of Calais in Paris, with one important difference: the slaves hadn’t volunteered.

            The British had been campaigning for years to end the enslavement of Africans and finally succeeded in shutting down this Arab slave market in 1873 after the threat of a naval blockade. The archipelago became a British protectorate in 1890 while still being ruled by the local sultanate. The arrangement lasted for seventy-three years until 1963 when the British declared Zanzibar a constitutional monarchy under the sultan. It lasted for one month. The African citizens, a majority of the population, had had enough. In January, they rose up and deposed the sultan in the Zanzibar Revolution. Blood flowed in the streets. More than 20,000 people were clubbed, shot and hacked to death, and thousands of Arabs and Indians who had dominated the merchant class fled as refugees. The new socialist government created the Peoples Republic of Zanzibar and in April that year, Zanzibar joined with Tanganyika on the mainland to become a new country - the United Republic of Tanzania. Zanzibar was recognized as a semi-autonomous region.

            Today, there are about 1.3-million people on the islands of Zanzibar, 99 percent of whom are Sunni Muslim who live according to Sharia law. The beating heart of Islam lies in Zanzibar City where there are perhaps as many as 50 mosques. They coexist side-by-side with Indian temples and the two Christian cathedrals, and many are tucked into the labyrinthine alleys of Stone Town. Some are beautiful with brilliant, white-washed exteriors and carved wooden doors and staircases; others show their age with crumbling plaster and faded wood. That afternoon, as I was winding through the narrow streets a large door swung open revealing a spacious square inside. Out poured a stream of young girls, chatting and laughing like children anywhere when school is out, all wearing black abayas and white hijabs. They swept by me like a flock of starlings.

            Zanzibar is famous for its doors which are wonders to behold. They are massive, usually double doors, generally made of teak, mahogany or black wood and are carved in beautiful, intricate patterns. Some have large brass studs in a style adapted from India. Others reflect the Omani influence with carved Arabic symbols and passages from the Quran. Swahili doors are carved in simpler patterns yet are still ornate. While many home owners have restored their doors with fresh coats of stain and varnish, others have been left battered and worn by daily use and the elements, the faded paint barely clinging to the weathered wood. Still others of these relics have been snapped up by collectors and shipped to other parts of the world.

            “Some beautiful paths cannot be discovered without getting lost,” said Erol Ozan, an American professor. The narrow alleys of Stone Town are the perfect place to lose your way. They wind in all directions, some take you to dead ends, others spill out onto squares with cafes, coffee shops and boutiques selling colourful African khangas. Still in others, you can stumble upon boutique hotels and restaurants. Many of the homes have balconies on the upper floors enclosed with wooden lattice from where devout Muslim women can enjoy fresh air in privacy and a view of life on the street below. Along the alleys which are paved with stone, there are raised concrete ledges (baraza) running the lengths of many homes. It’s where men can greet and chat with visitors outside without violating their wives’ privacy. I saw many women in groups of two and three, sitting on them, talking, while their children played and rode their bicycles. During the rainy season of March, April and May, the ledges also function as elevated sidewalks when water comes cartwheeling down the narrow streets.           

            Democracy is still a fledgling thing in Zanzibar. In January 2001, the army and police fired into crowds of people protesting the election results. More than 35 people were killed, and at least 600 were injured. Mobs went house-to-house beating and raping. Two-thousand people fled to Kenya. Four years later, there was more bloodshed after the election when nine people were killed. In 2015, the election was declared invalid due to fraud and a re-run the following spring was boycotted by the opposition. Fifteen observers from Europe and the United States issued a statement that questioned the results.         

            Power of a different kind has also been problematic. In the spring of 2008, an electrical failure due to problems with the high voltage cable from the mainland lasted for one month. Then, from December 2009 to March 2010, there was another failure that lasted four months. Without electricity, water couldn’t be pumped to homes or businesses. It was a huge blow to hotels and restaurants which scrambled to buy truckloads of bottled water, fuel, and generators to keep food cold and make ice. The situation was much worse for local residents. Alex Dunham, a South African filmmaker said many residents couldn’t afford to buy water so they began to drink contaminated water from old wells and suffered from diarrhea. In Dunham’s documentary, The Dark Side of Paradise, a doctor in one outlying village said 102 people had contracted cholera and three of his patients had died. 

            It would soon be time to catch the ferry back to Dar es Salaam.  I wandered into The Floating Restaurant which was not floating at all but built on pilings above the harbour near Forodhani Park. It was a beautiful place with a massive deck and a sprinkling of tourists enjoying the late afternoon sun. While waiting for my Kilimanjaro beer, I made friends with a skinny, long-legged cat that looked like its ancestors might have once belonged to the pharaohs. I was saddened by what I’d seen that day. Life here is hard. People are poor, living on the edge. They wore the evidence of their daily struggles on their faces. Where is the hope, I wondered?

            Several years ago, the Revolutionary Government of Zanzibar published a sleek 150-page Investment Guide that painted a rosy picture of future possibilities. The economy grew by 7.5 percent in 2017 and the government says there are business opportunities in agriculture, fishing, light industry and tourism. Just as Zanzibar was historically a strategic location for trade, so it is today with ready access to a market of 300 million people in the eastern and southern countries of Africa. It’s the spice industry, mainly cloves, that still provides 45 percent of its gross domestic product while tourism produces 20 percent of the GDP.

            Today, there’s a new crop in Zanzibar that’s driving entrepreneurship and creating wealth: seaweed. Seaweed has become a superfood that’s also used in toothpaste, medicine and shampoo around the world. When the idea to harvest seaweed here as a cash crop was first introduced, Muslim men didn’t want to do it. The women did. Farming the ocean for seaweed has become a lucrative business. It’s freed women to leave their cloistered lives at home and wade literally into business working with other women. The BBC reported that many of the men who were against their wives working changed their minds when the money started rolling in. Suddenly, women had purchasing power and families had better homes, better food, new furniture, and kids had new books for school. It’s given many women a measure of financial independence and has altered the balance of power between the sexes. 

A recent webinar sponsored by The Nature Conservancy and Reef Resilience reported that 23,000 people in Tanzania are now involved in seaweed farming, that 80 percent of them are women, and that seaweed exports are the third greatest contributor to Zanzibar’s GDP after tourism and the export of cloves.

The Kilimanjaro catamaran had a full load of passengers. It eased its way out of port and into the Indian Ocean as the sun sank lower in the western sky. It was still hot. I was at the stern again in the open seats and watched the buildings of Stone Town recede, then the coast of Zanzibar as we sped toward the mainland and Dar es Salaam. I looked for the ferry guy and was relieved when I didn’t see him. Still, I wished him well. 

Zanzibar Town: Blood on the Stones - Part 1

     There was something sketchy about the guy. The way he sidled up to me at the stern rail, crowded in way too close. He had shifty eyes, brown skin, slim, with short black hair, maybe in his twenties. I was quite possibly a mark -- tourist, white, much older, head and shoulders taller. Nevertheless, I made sure my daypack was tucked safely between my legs. My digital SLR camera was in there. I’d read the warnings to travellers.

            Directly below us, the high speed ferry unspooled a boiling wake that carved a long white furrow across the Indian Ocean. Sprinkled here and there on the glittering water, weather-beaten wooden dhows with stained and patched lateen sails criss-crossed the sea as their crews fished. If we hadn’t been on a sleek, 35-metre catamaran travelling at 22 knots, the scene could have been a thousand, maybe two-thousand years old. We were out of Dar es Salaam, as the sailors say, bound on a quick day trip for the storied island of Zanzibar. As we headed north, the Swahili Coast of Tanzania lay low and green to the west until it finally disappeared.

            I understood that different cultures have different ideas of personal space, but I didn’t trust this jittery kid with the furtive eyes. I kept a close watch on him until he finally left, disappearing into one of the large salons on the boat. The massive ferry – named Kilimanjaro – was modern and pristine with three decks of comfortable seating including open air sections forward and aft, and inside, luxurious cushioned chairs in economy and business class with air conditioning and television. The ferry was part of a fleet built by an Australian company for the billionaire owner who had been born in Zanzibar.

            Our early morning passage would take two hours. Plenty of time to imagine the people who’ve sailed these historic waters. Archeologists found stone tools on Zanzibar that were made by Africans from the mainland who’d risked the 30-kilometre journey 22,000 years ago. They were followed over the centuries by traders from Yemen, the Persian Gulf and from India. Some stopped and married into the local population. Vasco da Gama planted the Portuguese flag on the island in 1499 and it soon became part of their colonial empire that lasted for two centuries.

            Zanzibar Island (Unguja in Swahili) is part of an archipelago off the east coast of Africa. It’s a strategic location with ocean access to the entire eastern flank of the continent, the Middle East to the north, and to India and Sri Lanka across the Arabian Sea. The island also has arable land, plenty of fresh water, and a natural harbour, all of which explains why so much blood has been spilled on its sandy shores. The Sultan of Oman threw out the Portuguese in 1698, planted vast plantations of cloves and the islands became known as the Spice Islands. Their fragrant cargo was carried away on sailing ships to markets around the world. 

        The sultan had two other resources to export: ivory from elephant tusks and slaves from the mainland. The Sultan rulers of Zanzibar imported as many as 50,000 African slaves annually. Some they kept to work in the fields, the rest they sold to the Arab world, India and beyond. According to Islamic jurisprudence, free Muslims could not be enslaved and so in the countries of Islam demand was high for this cheap labour. According to the BBC, an estimated 17-million Africans were sold into slavery in countries on the coast of the Indian Ocean, the Middle East, and North Africa. Historians claim the Arabs were especially brutal. In Zanzibar, as many as one-third of the slaves died every year.

            Over the years, merchants on Zanzibar added gold, frankincense, weapons, silks and turtle shells to their list of goods for sale. The island became the commercial capital of East Africa. The ruling sultans and wealthy traders built a new town out of blocks hewn from coral and so it became known as Stone Town. Awe-struck sailors wrote home about its beauty as they approached from the sea. But when they got closer, the stench of garbage, excrement, and rotting bodies filled the air. Once ashore, they were greeted by the threat of tropical and venereal diseases and the sight of skeletal slaves dying in the streets.

             It was just the salty tang of the ocean that greeted us as we sailed into the harbour under a cloudless sky. A couple dozen dhows large and small were moored in quiet water. Some were fishing boats, others were used for freight or ferrying passengers among the islands of the archipelago. Many take tourists out on day trips to dive and snorkel among the reefs or to visit the island’s vast white beaches. The ocean front of Stone Town is lined with ornate and stately buildings many hundreds of years old, a melange of styles built by Africans, Arabs, Portuguese, Indians and Persians. They face a boulevard dotted with palm trees that follows the serpentine seawall. The rich beauty and history of the architecture prompted the United Nations to name Stone Town a UNESCO World Heritage site in 2000. Further up from shore, the spires of the Anglican and Catholic Cathedrals and the minarets of mosques rise above the neighbouring three and four-storey stone buildings. To the north of the ferry dock, the harbour is devoted to shipping, with huge cranes hovering over stacks of multi-coloured cargo containers ready to load or unload.

            Once the ferry docked, we disembarked into a large, open air reception area where Customs and Immigration officials of the Revolutionary Government of Zanzibar, stern-faced as they are at any border these days, demanded to see our passports and vaccination certificates. After being waved through, the next hurdle was to navigate the crowd of shouting taxi drivers and travel guides offering their services. I didn’t need either. Guidebooks, government websites and bloggers warn travellers not to take any taxis here unless pre-arranged by their hotels. The same goes for hiring would-be tour guides. Tourists can be targets for robbery, kidnapping and sexual assault.

Out on the street, I stopped to admire the beautiful buildings across the road, but first I needed to find an ATM to withdraw more Tanzanian shillings as the ferry company hadn’t accepted credit cards.          I walked along a main road that skirted a fetid marsh choked with reeds and strewn with a magnificent array of garbage which someone was burning in smouldering piles. I was grateful for having taken my malaria pills and shots for yellow fever.

I approached one bank but the two armed soldiers standing guard said there was no cash machine there. Down the dusty road another block or so, I found a bank with a small, glass-enclosed ATM. I stepped inside and withdrew more cash. As I turned to go out, I almost ran into the guy from the ferry, the one who’d crowded in so closely. He had just taken a step to come in. I was surprised to see him.

“Habari,” I said (hello in Swahili), and walked past him and out to the road, my daypack slung over my shoulder. I’m not a timid traveller but quickly realized what might have happened. Stories are legion here of tourists convinced by the sharp point of a knife at their backs to withdraw their daily limits and hand over credit cards and PIN numbers as well as their passports. I wondered what Canadian passports were worth on the black market. About US$2600 or more according to a newspaper article I read later.

            I turned east, strolled uphill on a street lined on both sides with stores selling plumbing supplies, hardware and clothing. It was a beautiful morning. The area wasn’t busy, just a few knots of local men in their kanzu and kofias chatting over coffee while women dressed in abayas and hijabs opened up their shops. I was simply wandering about checking out the town, seeing how people lived. I was happy to be there, smiled and said Habari, but noticed that while some nodded only a few smiled back, just a couple of mumbled hellos. It was easy to understand. They must grow weary of gawking foreigners with their pockets full of money.

            I continued up the road then stopped and looked behind me. There was the guy from the ferry again. He was on the other side of the street. He saw me watching him. I turned and kept walking, then stopped and looked. He was almost directly across from me. Was I being stalked? I stood still and waited as he walked past, and as he did, he motioned to someone up the street, pointing to his head as if to say, “He’s onto me.” I couldn’t see the other person, so I stayed there until the guy moved on, then turned and walked back toward the harbour.

            Tourists from so-called developed countries need to be more than careful here. Common sense and humility are required. In the Zanzibar archipelago, one of every two people live below the poverty line. The average annual income is US$907. One lens in my backpack – just the lens – was worth double that. It was an easy decision to leave my camera in the bag.

            It was time for a coffee. I headed to The Old Dispensary just across from the ferry terminal. It’s a four-storey wedding cake of a building with carved wooden balconies, elaborate cornices and an exuberant amount of gingerbread. I walked through the huge wooden doors into a courtyard paved with stones and open to the sky. I sat at one of the tables, enjoyed a coffee from the southern highlands of Tanzania and admired the balconies on the upper floors that overlooked the courtyard. Birds flew freely in and around the massive pillars. The friendly waiter told me it had once been a charity hospital for the poor built by a wealthy Indian trader in the 1880s. Later, it became a dispensary, providing basic medical care and medicines. Over the years it deteriorated until The Agha Khan Trust restored it in the early 1990s. It was a cool oasis, a perfect place to check my guidebook and map.

            I can’t resist an old fort and so downed my coffee and walked south along Mizingani Road, the stately route that follows the harbour seawall. Ngome Kongwe, Swahili for old fort, is a brooding beast of dark coral stones. It was built by the Omanis at the end of the 17^th century to protect the town from the acquisitive Portuguese. It’s the oldest building in Stone Town and looks it. The decrepit hulk contains a large inner courtyard lined on two sides with the kiosks of local artisans selling clothing, purses and other souvenirs to tourists. Up a flight of ancient stone steps to the top of a circular tower, a cultural centre sold work by local artists. I bought three small ink and water colour pieces from the artist who painted them – a dhow at sea, a pair of massive wooden doors, and a street scene -- which are now framed and hanging on my living room wall. Adjacent to the square within the walls of the fort is an amphitheatre for live dances, musical performances, and movies shown at the Zanzibar International Film Festival.

            Two of Stone Town’s architectural jewels are right next door.  The House of Wonders (Beit-al-Ajaib in Arabic) was built in 1883 as the Sultan’s palace and became the first building in Zanzibar to have electricity and an elevator. Next to it, the Palace Museum or Sultan’s Palace (Beit el-Sahel) is a group of buildings that includes the palace and the sultan’s harem. The palace was built in 1832 in the Omani style – formal simplicity with local materials ­­­­-- and was home to the local sultans until the Zanzibar Revolution. The museum contains roomfuls of the rulers’ rich furnishings, including ornately carved wooden chairs, settees, Persian rugs, four-poster beds, and oil paintings.

            The fort, House of Wonders and Sultan’s Palace all face Forodhani Gardens overlooking Stone Town’s sea wall. It’s a small, well-kept park with a white band shell and green lawns where several local teens were hanging out while a couple of older men were enjoying naps on the grass in the warm sun. At the edge of the quay were two take-out food kiosks. I stopped at Café Foro and ordered grilled fish and rice and spent a pleasant lunch at an outdoor table watching boats, dhows mainly, coming and going in the harbour. Among the handful of people strolling by were a well-dressed Arab man and two women wearing fashionable abayas and hijabs. I wondered if they were his wives.   

See Part 2