by M G Vassanji
There’s a story Zanzibaris like to tell—and similarly other people on the coast—to explain their pace of life.
A fisherman lies stretched out on the beach, relaxing, when a tourist—a white man, to be precise—strolls by.
“Relaxing?” asks the tourist.
“I caught my fish and sold it,” replies our local.
The tourist looks doubtful. “Really? No more fish in the sea?”
“I caught what I needed.”
Like many a foreigner who comes to these parts, the tourist wants to help, to advise.
“If you caught more fish wouldn’t you earn more money?”
“Yes … And then?” asks the fisherman, looking confused.
“You could save money, and put it in a bank. And then, after some time, with all your money saved in the bank you could buy a bigger boat and catch a whole lot of fish. Make a lot of money!”
Our man looks seriously doubtful. “And then what?”
“Why, you could let others do the work!”
“Aha! I see. And what would I do?”
“Why, you would relax …!”
The Zanzibari says nothing and the tourist walks away.
In Dar es Salaam, there were many Zanzibaris—Jangbari, we called them—people who were born on the island and had moved to the mainland. There was always something upbeat about these people—a certain lively sense of common identity and wholeness that must come from living on a small island. You could identify Zanzibari Asians by their forthright manner, their sense of high drama, and the rather sweet Kutchi-Swahili they spoke that the rest of us enjoyed imitating. It sounded something like this: Nimekuja gharé yako, niliona vado-vado-taado; basi nime dharé umekwenda baaré. This means, I came to your house, I saw a big-big padlock; and so I thought you had gone out. (The words in italics are in Kutchi.) Not only the nouns, the verbs too got replaced and inflected. Two of my Zanzibari aunts were dramatists par excellence. Fatu Masi, having had a premonition of her death, went around wishing goodbyes to the entire extended family. Bai, she said to my mother, my time has come; the two embraced. As expected, Fatu Masi died many years later and left a lot of memories. And big-hipped Fatu Mami, whose father was a fearsome exorcist, once at the Odeon sprang up angrily to her feet in the midst of a movie, exclaiming, “Allah!” thereby startling the entire theatre. This, to voice her objection to the goings-on of a scene. And moments later, satisfied that nothing was amiss, she sank down back to her seat, saying, “I see!”
Long after the heinous excesses of the Zanzibar revolution of 1964 and its repressive aftermath, and long after the union of Zanzibar and Tanganyika that became the United Republic of Tanzania, the Zanzibari sense of self persists in a way in which a Dar one doesn’t, the latter easily being subsumed into the larger Tanzanian identity. Zanzibaris, regardless of race, will affirm that the unification of their island with the mainland stole away their Zanzibar. (Though mainlanders are likely to retort, “But when there is trouble in the islands, it is to Dar that you will run!”) The irony is that in the past Zanzibar had ruled the mainland coast, and dominated much of the hinterland. Zanzibar was a multiethnic cosmopolis when the mainland boasted at most a few small towns. Therefore today Zanzibaris tend to be anxious about their history, culture, and traditions, lest they be lost or forgotten. Memoirs and histories of Zanzibar, both amateur and professional, buzz over the Internet, contributed by former citizens of the island now living on every continent.
Before it gained prominence, however, for much of the second millennium of the common era Zanzibar had been a minor island entity, and it was Kilwa, Mombasa, Malindi, and Mozambique that thrived as major Indian Ocean ports. In 1330 the Moroccan traveller Ibn Battuta, after completing his pilgrimage in Mecca, sailed from Aden down the African coast to Mogadishu then on to Mombasa and Kilwa; he does not mention Zanzibar. Nor does John Milton in Paradise Lost (1667), though his angel Michael points out Kilwa, Mombasa, and Malindi to the exiled Adam. Milton’s knowledge of the Indian Ocean world would have come from Portuguese accounts of their voyages. Vasco da Gama had in fact bypassed Zanzibar on his way to India in 1498, sailing to the east of it; on his return trip a year later, however, he did sail into the channel between the island and the mainland, and anchor offshore, where the ruler of Zanzibar sent him refreshments.
In later years, Zanzibar became a tributary to an ascendant Portugal. It is known that the Portuguese built a chapel and a small factory during their period of dominance, which lasted until 1698, when the Omanis of Muscat wrested control of the East African coast and made it a part of their own Indian Ocean empire. They constructed a fort on the site of the chapel. In 1832 Seyyid Said, the sultan of Oman, made the momentous decision to move his capital from Muscat to Zanzibar, changing forever the fortunes of the island and the mainland across. By the mid-nineteenth century, under the Omanis, Zanzibar had become a major Indian Ocean entrepot, a “great mart … the Bagdad, the Ipahan, the Stamboul, if you like, of East Africa,” as declaimed H.M. Stanley in 1872. Stanley, a reporter for the New York Herald, did tend to exaggerate. He had arrived in Zanzibar to begin his search for Livingstone. He described his first sight of the island, seen from the harbour, thus:
Towards the south, above the sea line of the horizon, there appeared the naked masts of several large ships, and towards the east of these a dense mass of white, flat-topped houses. This was Zanzibar … which soon resolved itself into a pretty large and compact city, with all the characteristics of Arab architecture. Above some of the largest houses lining the bay front of the city streamed the blood-red banner of the Sultan, Syed Burghash, and the flags of the American, English, North German Confederation, and French Consulates. In the harbour were thirteen large ships, four Zanzibar men-of-war, one English man-of-war, the Nymphe, two American, one French, one Portuguese, two English, and one German merchantmen, besides numerous dhows … traders between India, the Persian Gulf, and Zanzibar.
With great exuberance Stanley goes on to describe the town of Zanzibar, its tumultuous “crooked, narrow lanes” with the “red-turbaned” “Banyans” in the Indian quarter outside their stores, which sold anything from cloth and raw cotton to ivory to crockery and hardware; the African quarter, its people sitting outside their huts; Europeans strolling along in the evenings on “Nazi-Moya” [Mnazi Mmoja] with “languid, moribund steps to inhale the sweet air that glides over the sea”; and the Arabs.
For centuries, as the Portuguese had already observed when they arrived on the scene, Indians from Gujarat had been a small but significant presence all along the East African coast. In the later-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, however, they came to Zanzibar in greater numbers, driven away by the droughts in their native land and attracted to the Eldorado of Africa. In the 1920s many of the Khoja Ismailis, who were the largest Indian community in Zanzibar, upon advice from their leader moved to the mainland of Tanganyika and Kenya. Legend has it that a bloodshed had been prophesied for the island that was fulfilled in the revolution of 1964. Whatever the case, it was wise to move to the mainland, even though it must have seemed then a cultural nullity; but Zanzibar had reached its saturation, whereas the mainland, recently colonized by the European powers, promised greater opportunities and a vast space for new immigrants to move into. Dar es Salaam, initiated as an escape or a resort by Zanzibar’s Sultan Majid, and later developed by the Germans, was a small town of a few thousand people at the turn of the twentieth century; today it has close to four million. The entire island of Zanzibar on the other hand can boast a little more than a million people; it has stagnated, and if it has any attraction today, it is as a romantic getaway of short duration. Many of the Indian families of Dar and Mombasa came originally from Zanzibar following that prophecy, or advice or command. My maternal grandparents, originally from Jamnagar and Porbandar, were among them.
My taxi driver is an Asian, a big heavy-set man who speaks to me in Swahili. He is known as Suli, he says, and then elaborates, Suleman. Everyone kno
ws him. How nice, I think. Two people of Indian origin driving a bargain, conversing in Swahili. It turns out that Suli speaks nothing but Swahili. He takes me to my hotel in Stone Town, the old city behind the beach. This is an area of hotels, tourist shops, restaurants, and government offices, but it’s quiet; motor traffic is spare, the touts numerous and listless; business is slow, one of them tells me later, begging me to go see the dolphins.
I was informed in Dar about a restaurant on the island that serves absolutely the best biriyani; it’s called, somewhat improbably, Passing Show, and that’s where I head off for lunch. Walking along the shore, past the old fort (site of the seventeenth-century Portuguese chapel), the museum called the House of Wonders, the Sultans’ Palace, and the “Old Dispensary” (the Jubilee Hospital built to commemorate Queen Victoria’s Golden Jubilee in 1887), I reach the harbour and godowns, where the quiet road bends and suddenly transforms into a busy street. Here, at one edge of Stone Town, I find the restaurant, a joint run by Arabs for working people. There are a couple of tourists or expatriates about. The food is good, the biriyani of the familiar Kutchi variety—meat or chicken cooked with browned onions and gharam masala and served over yellow-specked rice; and it amazes me again how a dish that once was an Asian specialty for occasions like weddings and festivals has become so commonplace. The yellow in the rice, however, is food colour and not saffron, a luxury that the patrons of the Passing Show can hardly expect or afford. Banana stew, curry, pilau, ugali, and chapati are also served here. Zanzibar may seem stagnant, but it maintains a delightful sense of the authentic. How more satisfying this local fare than the chicken and soggy chips, or the globally standard “North Indian” so common in Dar!
Zanzibar is an elongated green island spanning roughly fifty miles north to south and twenty miles at its widest. On its west side on a small triangular peninsula, facing the mainland, lies Zanzibar Stone Town, the commercial and political centre of the island and its tourist town, where the ferry unloads daily visitors. Except for a connecting neck of land to the south, some three hundred yards wide, Stone Town used to be separated from the rest of the island by a creek, “Pwani Ndogo,” which at high tide would be crossed by a boat. It was filled in the early twentieth century and is where the old Creek Road, now the bustling Benjamin Mkapa Road, runs. The area across the creek is still called Ngambo, “the other side.” It was the poorer section, with mud and thatch dwellings—very much like Dar’s Kariakoo, where Indian stores served a mainly African clientele.
The maze of narrow streets in the ancient Stone Town makes navigation seem daunting, but its geometry is best grasped when one realizes that—as in other old cities—it is made up of distinct little neighbourhoods, each with a suggestive, picturesque name: Shangani (at the sands), the area close to the tip of the peninsula; Gerezani (at the old fort), farther along the shore; Forodhani, still farther down; Sokomhogo (the cassava market, that is, the people’s market), which lies behind Shangani; farther inland one finds Kajificheni (hide yourselves); Hamamni (at the Persian baths); Darajani (at the crossing, near the former creek).
Shangani is now the heart of the tourist area, with its hotels, curio shops, and hungry touts; at its tip, in a leafy enclave away from the crowds and the shops, the luxurious Serena Inn occupies pride of place, next to (according to an 1892 German map) the site of the old British Consulate—which was described by Richard Burton as “a large solid pile, coloured like a twelfth-cake, and shaped like a claret chest, [lying] on its side, comfortably splashed by the sea.” Burton stayed here in December 1856 at the beginning of his East African adventures, when he explored Zanzibar before heading off to the mainland. The Consul was an ailing Atkins Hamerton.
Farther up from the Serena is the location of the former American Consulate. As early as 1833, the Americans had concluded a trading treaty with Zanzibar, and in 1837 the United States was the first foreign power to open a consulate, more than a decade before Britain did. By the mid-nineteenth century the United States was Zanzibar’s biggest trading partner, exporting predominantly coarse but durable cotton cloth from New England, known locally as marikani, and importing ivory and copal. The American civil war ruined that trade, and marikani started coming from India. During the European colonial era that ended in the 1960s, American presence in East Africa was minimal. The American Consulate in Zanzibar was closed in 1915. It was reopened in 1961, at the height of the Cold War.
All around Shangani were located the other European consulates and trading companies. This compact breast-shaped peninsula, with its nipple at the British Consulate, was the springboard for the colonization of East Africa. Here the missionaries and the explorers first came and prepared themselves for their journeys to the mainland, the reports of which so shaped public opinion at home; and here the European warships came to loom and threaten, one of them ultimately bombarding the hapless Sultan’s Palace in August 1896, in what the British proudly called “the shortest war in history,” lasting thirty-eight minutes.
Walking northeast along the shore from this nipple, perhaps after a cold beer at the Serena, we come to the old fort or Gereza to the right, behind which used to be the principal market, the Soko Kuu. The fort now houses a few rudimentary tourist kiosks. Farther up along the road come the Palace and the Beit al Ajaib, the House of Wonders, which is a museum. Opposite is the promenade called Forodhani, beyond which is the old Customs House, once the busiest part of town and now the place where the ferries and ships arrive, marked by a prominent heap of containers.
Richard Burton, impressed by the market behind the fort, uses it to describe his impression of the town’s population:
Motley is the name of the crowd. One officer in the service of His Highness [the Sultan] stalks down the market followed by a Hieland tail [whip], proudly, as if he were the lord of the three Arabias. Negroes who dislike the whip clear out like hawk-frightened pigeons. A yellow man, with short, thin beard, and high, meagre, and impassive features, he is well-dressed and gorgeously armed …
Right meek by the side of the Arab’s fierceness appears the Banyan, the local Jew. These men are Bhatias from Cutch [Kutch] in western India; unarmed burghers, with placid, satisfied countenances, and plump, sleek, rounded forms, suggestive of happy, well-to-do cows. Their skins are smoother and their complexions are lighter than the Arabs’.… They wear the long moustachio, not the beard, and a Chinese pig-tail is allowed to spring from the poll of the carefully shaven head. These top-knots are folded, when the owners are fully dressed, under high turbans of purple or crimson stuff, edged with gold.
So much for the happy cows in their turbans. There are also at this market the Baluchi mercenaries, “comely brown [men] with regular features” and flowing, henna-dyed beards, sporting long-barrelled matchlocks; as well, “the wildest and most picturesque figures … the half-breeds from the western shores of the Persian Gulf.… Their elf-like locks fall in masses over unclean, saffron-stained shirts [kanzus].” They wear heavy swords over their shoulders and daggers at their waists, and their whips “await immediate use.”
Burton goes on with full hyperbolic gusto,
Add half a dozen pale-skinned Khojas, tricky-faced men with evil eyes, treacherous smiles, fit for the descendants of the “Assassins,” straight, silky beards, forked after the fashion of ancient Rustam, and armed with Chinese umbrellas. Complete the group by throwing in a European—how ghastly appears his blanched face, and how frightful his tight garb!
Burton, a British secret agent a few years before, had intrigued with the first Aga Khan in Persia, not a happy experience for him, and is under the misapprehension that the Khojas (who follow the Aga Khans) were Persian in origin; they were in fact Indians, cousins of the Kutchi Bhatias, the “Banyans.” But whatever value one gives to this portrayal of the island’s inhabitants, one still takes away a sense of its tumult and diversity, and the arrogance of the Zanzibari Arab, not to mention the white man, in this case the Englishman who observes and reports.
Forod
hani is the grassy plain next to the harbour, across from the palace, where townspeople and tourists come in the evenings to shoot the breeze, and young people come for overt trysts. Formerly a part of the palace establishment, the ground was laid waste by the British bombardment in the Anglo–Zanzibar (thirty-eight-minute) “war” and became a public space, where for decades now a nightly food court has indulged the public with sizzling snacks. Vendors arrive at dusk and set up their stalls, offering grilled meat and seafood, breads, fruit juices, and sodas. The smoky dark, lit up with sporadic lamps, the charcoal fires, and the quiet chatter of people strolling about combine to produce a uniquely Zanzibari ambience reflective of its attitude to life. There’s no hurry. Recently the park was renovated with paved paths, stone benches, a bandstand, thick bounding walls to sit on, and rows of built-up stalls for the vendors. It looks clean and pretty and perhaps a bit touristy, but Zanzibaris are grateful; tourists are needed to boost the economy.
All the young visitors who were on the ferry with me this morning are here, what else is there to do in Zanzibar but wander about on this beautiful, balmy evening? Out in the distance a ferry takes on its last batch of passengers for the mainland; farther away a container ship lies in apparent coma. A bunch of touts appear, call out in English and Italian—“Amici!”—to the young Europeans hovering around in small groups, many of them actually Italian. Caution on their minds, they are hesitant initially to savour the food so abundantly and aromatically on display. But then gradually one by one and then all together they yield. The grills are crowded, the vendors sound relieved.