Apr 19, 08:28 PM
Return from Zanzibar
We had a great time on the Spice Island of Zanzibar. The first two days we got to know Stone Town, the historic old district of Zanzibar Town, which is the largest community on the island. The unique, Arab-influenced architecture is a treat to see, and it’s fun to get lost in the maze of narrow streets.
But as in visiting a beautiful old plantation house in the American South, it’s hard to get out of the back of your mind that what you’re seeing was built through cruelty. These thoughts were brought forward as we visited one of the most important historic sites on the island, the former slave market. There is a narrow hole in the ground where slaves were packed together before being sold, and the place where the whipping post once stood is now the altar of the Anglican church. The Church pressured the Sultan of Zanzibar to outlaw the slave trade, and when this happened in 1873, they built the church to commemorate the end of that inhuman business.
We visited the Zanzibar Museum and agreed that it was the best museum we’ve seen so far, though the competition hasn’t been very stiff. Merely having displays without regular spelling and grammatical mistakes, as we saw at the Arusha Declaration Museum and Museum of Natural History in Arusha, and the Tanzanian National Museum, in Dar es Salaam, might have put the Zanzibar Museum at the top. But it was good even without the benefit of relatively bad competition.
The museum is in a former palace of the Sultan, and the building itself is worth the price of admission, with giant carved wooden doors (supposedly the largest in East Africa), towering ceilings, a winding staircase, etc. The exhibits did an excellent job of laying out the history of the hybrid culture of the Swahili coast, and the cosmopolitan mixture of influences that was created by the dhow trade plied along the monsoon wind routes from India, to China, to Arabia, to East Africa. I gained a knew appreciation for a moment in history and a culture that I hadn’t known much about.
But I wasn’t impressed with what amounted to an apologia for slavery and the slave trade in Zanzibar. The museum exhibit stated, basically, that the East African slave trade was more humane than the Atlantic slave trade that brought people to work in North and South American plantations. Slaves in Muslim countries had the opportunity to escape slavery through marrying their masters, for example, and there was not the rigid belief that Africans were subhuman and could never rise to a higher station in life.
I’ve always thought that comparing the relative awfulness of different types of enslavement is a worthless undertaking, and in this case in particular it’s hard to argue that slavery in Zanzibar was somehow defensible. I happened to be re-reading John Reader’s Africa: A Biography of the Continent and I looked up the statistic that the Spice Islands (Zanzibar and Pemba) Zanzibar by itself (corrected 4/23) had no fewer than 100,000 slaves every year between 1830 and the end of the 19th century (slavery itself didn’t end with the end of the slave trade) and the plantation masters needed 15,000 to 20,000 new slaves every year to replace those that died making spice plantation owners wealthy. The Zanzibar Museum didn’t mention anything about this, and I think it really needs to find a way to enlighten people about the richness of Swahili culture without ignoring such an important part of the Islands’ history.
Each night while in Stone Town, we continued to eat at the aforementioned Forodhani Gardens, where the bounty of sea and field are laid out before you on greasy newspapers on plywood tables, waiting to be chosen—or thrust upon you by the pushy salesmen—and grilled before your eyes.
It’s also where you can see some of Zanzibar’s gritty underbelly, that, we have to admit, is part of the charm. There were three near-fights while we were there, one involving a largish kitchen knife, and enough stray cats, hustling islanders trying to sell tourists anything and everything, and haggling and bargaining over everything you tried to buy, that one was constantly reminded that, Thank God, this was not exactly the TGIF’s in Bloomington.
In my favorite incident, I watched a spaced out looking guy turn to the tourist next to me and ask, “Hey man, maybe you want to rent car tomorrow?” The man said no, so the persistent salesman turned to me and whispered, “Hey man, maybe you want to smoke some ganja?” I declined. Undeterred, he walked three feet and tried to sell someone a guided spice tour. Later he came back to me and offered a beach tour. Apparently if you needed it, he could provide it.
So after all that, it was time to relax. We hit the beach, staying in a great bungalow that was not quite finished and so very cheap. It was right on the water. We snorkeled in amazing coral reefs; Jerri got a massage; we drank big beers with some new Norwegian friends. It was great.
And we decided to take the bus to Rwanda after all. We were a bit over budget, and travelling with the people is more our style in any case. It’s 26 hours to Kampala, Uganda, then a rest for one day and on to Kigali.