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.