Zanzibar: The spice of East Africa

Zanzibar resonates with history.

To quote former President Amani Abeid Karume, landing on the spice Indian Ocean resort is tantamount to engaging reverse gears into the past.

What the affable Karume omitted during the recent birth on the resort of Africa Leadership Mission on Peace Building that he midwifed, was mention of a past steeped in slavery.

The world of spices and historic sites that define Zanzibar and the island of Unguja in general, are only 55 minutes away by air from Nairobi but hours upon hours by road and ferry across the choppy sea from Dar-es-Salaam.

Modern Zanzibar with its classic beach hotels is awesomely beautiful, but nothing compares to the antiquity and relics that beckon at every turn.

For those arriving by air, movement is fast from the modest Abeid Amani Karume International Airport, thanks to the virtual absence of traffic jams in this city of roughly 300,000 with its epicenter at Stone Town. It is so named because of its concrete character that like Kenya’s Lamu, incorporates narrow, concrete roads.

Stone Town is built on the sweat and blood of African slaves trafficked from as far afield as Mozambique, Zambia, Malawi, Rwanda, Burundi and DRC Congo. The town and all its eerie fascination that include bustling bazaars, is but a pep to the rich recipe that awaits a curious visitor.

For a Kenyan, what immediately comes to mind in Stone Town is that a 10-mile Coastal strip, including the important port of Mombasa, was ruled from here by the sultan of Zanzibar until 1964 when our nation became a republic.

The stone jungle that reflects the diverse influence underlying Swahili culture is an architectural showcase of palaces, forts, residential houses, mosques, churches and ancient graves.

A visit to the old Anglican Cathedral Church brings you face to face with the orgy of slave trade. Completed in 1883 after 10 years of construction, the church sits squarely on the site of a huge slave market, its altar nestled where the whipping post for slaves once stood.

The wooden cross in the church is itself a symbol of the war against slave trade. It is part of a tree under which the heart of Dr David Livingstone was buried in 1873, the year the anti-slavery crusader died in Zambia.

The church’s grounds are a scene of one of the most famous slave monuments in the world, featuring miserable human figures in chains emerging from a pit. Saint Joseph’s Catholic Cathedral, a coralline building whose foot facing the sea is washed by high tides, majestically stands out as a symbol of Christian war against slavery.

The cathedral, located at the spot where slaves disembarked en-route to the notorious slave market, was built between 1893 and 1898. It was designed by the same architect who designed the Notre Dame Basilica at Marseilles in France.

Zanzibar, and especially so Stone Town, prides itself on being the cradle of modernisation in this region. It was at a building christened Beit el Ajaib or House of Wonders in Stone Town where electricity was first switched on in East Africa.

Built in 1883 by the flamboyant Sultan Barghash Bin Said as his grand ceremonial palace and official reception hall, it also featured East Africa’s first elevator. Surprised?

Colour television was first watched in this very building when mainland Tanzania had no television at all and black and white images was all that Kenyans and Ugandans knew.

These were real wonders at the time, hence the name. Beit Al Ajaib today houses some government departments and serves as a museum of Zanzibar’s rich history and culture of the entire Swahili Coast from southern Somalia to northern Mozambique.

Sultan Barghash, who reigned from 1870 to his death in 1888, also built the Mahrubi palace that today lies in ruins about four kilometres from Stone Town.

Destroyed by a fire in 1899, the palace housed the Sultan’s wife and over a 100 concubines drawn from the island and the mainland. What remains of the palace are the large stone columns that once supported a large wooden balcony circumnavigating the upper floor that separated bathrooms for the women and the sultan’s own large bathroom.

On the verdant grounds are shade trees, large lawns and the original water reservoirs now overgrown with water lilies. Old mango trees the Sultan imported from India still flourish.

Nudging the shores of the Indian Ocean is the old Arab fort that the natives fondly call ngome kongwe, a large imposing structure with high walls that was built between 1698 and 1701 to provide defence against the Portuguese.

It converted into a prison where criminals were jailed and executed in the 19th century, and later became a depot for a railway line that ran between Stone Town and Bububu to the north via Mahrubi palace. The line is no more.

The fort overlooks the aptly named palace museum dedicated to the history and lifestyles of the Sultans of Zanzibar from the late 1820s when Said Bin Sultan moved his capital from Muscat in Oman to Stone Town.

Built in the late 1890s for members of the Sultan’s family, the museum’s ground floor is dedicated to the early years of the sultanate (1828 to 1870), and the upper floors to the latter more affluent period of 1870 to 1896.

Artifacts on display include thrones, paintings, and family photographs, banqueting tables, ceremonial furniture and sultan’s personal water-closet among others.

The famous Princess Salme, daughter of Sultan Said, who eloped to Hamburg with a German merchant in 1866 is significantly represented in a room complete with her bed and manuscripts of her autobiography, Memoirs of an Arabian Princess from Zanzibar, the only known written account of what life was like for Arab women of the Royal Court in the 1800s.

In the palace garden is Makusurani graveyard with the tombs of Sultans Said, Barghash, Majid, Khaled, Khalifa and Abdullah.

Just outside the pre-historic town is the busy Darajani area, famous for its open and indoor markets where everything, from fish, meat, fruits, bread, coconut and dates are sold.

Once the night falls, the open market converts into an open-air eating area. Darajani also serves as the terminus for passenger vehicles plying the Island routes from Kizimkazi in the south to Mkokotoni in the north.

Zanzibar is not the only hotbed of spices on the east African Coast, the Island of Unguja like Pemba, its twin to the north, teems with fruits and fish.

Cloves — those aromatic flower buds of a tree that is the native of Indonesia — are a fascination to see, even as one samples vanilla, nutmeg, cinnamon, ginger, turmeric and black pepper.

Fruits range from mangoes to oranges, lemons and tangerines to varieties unknown on the East African mainland. Mchicha, and not sukumawiki, is the most popular vegetable and fish is available in species that are staggering in size and variety.

Zanzibar is not short of high-class and slap-up hotels, among them the ultra-modern Zanzibar Melia Hotel, the site of the birth of Africa Leadership Mission of Peace Building.