I few weeks ago Susan and I spent the weekend in Zanzibar and despite the famous allure of its beaches, the Arab and Asian influences of Stone Town was just too amazing to leave unexplored.
Zanzibar is a fascinating mix of cultures – African, Asian, and middle-Eastern – all bound together by a single boom industry – the slave trade. From the 16th through the 19th centuries, Zanzibar and its mainland counterpart Bagamoyo were the central staging point for the slave traders of East Africa. (Here’s a great website with traditional photographs of Zanzibar.)
The Omani Sultans of the Arabian Peninsula once ruled the Swahili coast, before the colonialists of Europe arrived in the late 1800s. Swahili, the local language, is spoken in Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda and parts of Mozambique and the Congo. It is a Bantu-Arabic Creole spoken by about 50 million people worldwide. Bantu, the language family that originated in West Africa, is the dominant influence, but there is a lot of Arabic blended in as well, and Tanzania is approximately 35% Muslim. (Susan and I live right by a mosque; the call to prayer is a great alarm.)
We spent a day seeing the sights, the old Portuguese fortress next to the Sultan’s former palace, wandering the crowded streets of stone buildings piled atop one another. The Forodani Garden is the epicenter of the city. All streets seem to lead out of the labyrinth of Stone Town onto this small piece of coast where seafood vendors hawk skewers of fish and lobster. While it does look tantalizing, apparently it’s best to go only in the high season. The skewers tasted like they had been waiting around for a buyer for quite some time. Evidently turnover is low in the low season (March through May).
Zanzibar has fantastic wandering coffee vendors who trawl the streets with big tin kettles balanced on smoking coals, usually dressed in the embroidered cap and kanzu of a devout Muslim, serving coffee for 20-30 shillings a cup (equivalent to 1.5 cents).
We were enthralled roaming around the souk-like streets, with balconies, overhangs and buildings crowding the narrow and cavernous streets. I couldn’t stop examining the beautiful Zanzibar doors. These regal entryways are large wooden, two-panel structures with a central post, and elaborately carved in traditional Muslim motifs. They are strikingly framed by the white stone walls from which the name Stone Town is derived. (These doors are also found on the mainlaid – in Bagomoyo we saw a number of mud huts encompassing beautiful Zanzibari doors.) Apparently, this is where the phrase “open-sesame” is thought to have originated, as many of the doors are carved from sesame wood, imported long ago from India.
In the evening we sat down at a table of old men dressed in traditional Arabic clothing playing a heated game of dominoes (by their intensity, they must have been gambling). A Maasai tribesman in traditional dress was playing pool in a bar across the street. Susan was the only woman in a crowd of maybe fifty local men, chatting about the day’s events, reading the paper and relaxing in the cool dusk.
We sipped our coffee and watched the street unfold. It seemed as though the scene was timeless, as if it could have been a hundred years ago. Then my cell phone rang and we had to meet a friend for dinner.
