The Trip
We waited in the first class lounge for about 30 minutes and then boarded into the first class area. Nice seats and not crowded. The ride on the Kilimanjaro V ferry boat was uneventful. Nice, smooth ride across the Zanzibar Channel. We arrived at about 11:30 and had walking directions to the hotel, but it was hot, the bags were heavy and I was disoriented and not sure where to go, so we took a cab. $3.50. The driver took the long way around and we got to see a bit of Stone Town's boundaries, but the walk would have been doable if I had known where to go.
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| Business class on the ferry |
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| Dar es Salaam skyline |
From the guide, museums and the tourist book I learned:
History
The Zanzibar archipelago has a long history that differentiates it from the rest of east Africa. It is made up of two main islands, Pemba (we did not go there) and Unguja. Due to its location and the Monsoon winds that blow across the Indian Ocean, early on Zanzibar served as a trading crossroads for goods and people from Persia, Arabia, India, and even goods from China in the east, and from the west, the Greeks, Romans, Egyptians and Phoenicians. The Arab traders called the islands Zinj el Barr, meaning land of the black people.
In the 7th century Arabs started migrating to Zanzibar in larger numbers and brought Islam with them which was adopted by some of the locals. One of the stories in the 9th century The Arabian Nights, Sinbad the Sailor is based on a voyage to East Africa by Arabs. Trade between the locals and the Arabs/Asians exported ivory, rhino horn, tortoiseshell, palm oil and African slaves. and imported metal tools, weapons, Indian cloth, Chinese porcelain, wheat and wine. Much of it was carried out in Swahili dhows, based on Arabic design. To facilitate these contacts a new language developed, Swahili, which came from the Arab word sahil, meaning coast. It incorporated the local Bantu language, as well as Arab and Persian words.
By the mid 15th century trade had greatly expanded, even though around that time after a giraffe had been delivered to the Emperor of China, the successor emperor banned Chinese merchants from going abroad, and the chain of Swahili Islamic city states along the east Africa coast were thriving.
Then came Prince Henry, "the Navigator", looking for a sea route to the east as well as the legendary Christian kingdom of Abyssinia (present day Ethiopia). Subsequent Portuguese expeditions followed and by 1503 the Portuguese had conquered Zanzibar, although they permitted the local ruler, the Mwinyi to remain in place as a figurehead to whom the local population continued to pay allegiance.
The Portuguese remained in control for almost two centuries, until the Omani Arabs drove them out in 1698. However their legacy remains in the many Swahili words with a Portuguese origin.
The Omanis had large date plantations in Oman that were very labor intensive. Islam prohibited the enslavement of other Muslims, so the Omanis turned to Africa for slaves. Many of these were transported through Zanzibar. The market for slaves was seemingly inexhaustible since the Omanis did not permit their slaves to have children and many of the slaves were worked to death. By the end of the 18th century the demand for slaves was so great that Arab and Swahili slave traders were penetrating the African interior and bringing large caravans of slaves to Zanzibar for transshipment to Arabia, Reunion Island and the Dutch East Indies.
However by the early 19th century slavery and/or the slave trade was banned in most of western Europe and the US. The slave surplus was addressed by importing Clove trees from Reunion Island to Pemba and some of the slaves were diverted to work on the clove plantations. Trade in high priced cloves increased Zanzibar's wealth and strength. Reflecting this, in 1840 the Oman Sultan moved his capital from Muscat, Oman to Zanzibar City which prospered and developed. During this period the British were putting increasing pressure on the Sultans to restrict and ultimately abolish slavery and the slave trade and by 1889 the British forced Zanzibar to do this. With the source of much of its wealth gone, during the European scramble for Africa in the late 19th century, Zanzibar became a British protectorate.
Zanzibar became independent in 1963, but in 1964, following a revolution that resulted in the massacre of more than 17,000 Arabs and Indians, Zanzibar joined with newly independent Tanganyika to form Tanzania. After the revolution virtually all the remaining Asians and Europeans left Zanzibar. To replace them Zanzibar sought assistance from Cuba, China and East Germany. The architecture outside of Stone town has blocks of Stalinist brutal buildings and there are pockets of that in Dar.
Today Zanzibar still has a special status in Tanzania. Unlike the other states it has a President and Vice President, it requires passports upon entrance and it is overwhelmingly Muslim.
Hotel
We are staying in a very nice place, Tambo House Hotel. This turned out to be a great location on Shanghai Rd. just west of the Forodhani Gardens and with a patio leading right down to the beach. The dining area overlooks the ocean and its tables are under almond trees. The room décor is Indian, there are lots of Arabesque arches and plants and the bathroom has a Turkish mosaic tile bath. The building was built in 1834 and served as the American consulate for many years. Two subsequent additions form a courtyard around a large pool. The word tembo means elephant in Swahili and the hotel sports a grey elephant sculpture at its entrance. Across the road is the Freddy Mercury House, the star of the recently seen Hungarian Rhapsody movie, who was born in Zanzibar.
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View from our hotel room |
Touring
After settling into the hotel we walked over to the Stone House Cafe. It was a short walk on Kenyatta St, which has lots of shops and street vendors. This is an Aussie-Zanzibarian run cafe. We ate outside under an oasis of lush palm trees and umbrellas. The fresh fruit smoothie was good.
We then walked down Gizenga Street, a main shopping thoroughfare. All these streets are very narrow, more accurately characterized as alleys, and lined with stone buildings. We stopped in several shops and purchased a small painting and some spices. Lots of bargaining. There are lots of galleries and other touristy type shops, as well as restaurants and small hotels.
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| Stone town street |
As we continued to walk along and through the tangle of alleys we stumbled upon the Eco+Culture tour center. The tourist book highly recommended them. I had a nice discussion with the agent, but the prices were high. They we went into the Princess Salme Museum. This is a fascinating place. It is a small place housed within the Emerson on Hurumzi hotel.
This museum was created and curated solely by a delightful man, Said El-Gheithy. He served as our guide through the museum. ($10 entrance fee and $10 additional for his guidance.) He has developed and cared for the museum out of devotion to Princess Salme. It is a homage to the Princess, told through photographs, story boards, family trees and artifacts, and the adoring explanations of our guide. The Princess had quite a life. She was the daughter of Sultan Said and his Russian "secondary" wife. She received an education in womanly arts: sewing, embroidery, etc, but she was rebellious and taught herself to read and write. She had a very royal upbringing. Slaves attended to her all day, they ran beside her when she was riding carrying a parasol to protect her from the sun, and throughout the night when she was massaged to sleep and fanned during her sleep.
As a teenager she sided with one of her brothers when he unsuccessfully attempted to overthrow an older. brother. She helped the younger brother escape and although was not physically punished , she was ostracized by many others in her family. Perhaps as a result she began to socialize secretly with foreigners and at age 22 she became pregnant by a German merchant. In the words of Said El-Gheithy she "left for Germany without saying good-bye". At a stop in Aden she renounced Islam and converted to the Anglican Church, where she also married. In Germany she had three children, but her husband died in 1871 in a trolley accident. She was not welcome in Zanzibar and her efforts at reconciliation with her family were unsuccessful. She died in Germany in 1924. Among the possessions found after her death was a bag of sand from a Zanzibar beach that we saw at the museum.
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On the way back we got out of the maze of streets and walked toward the seashore. It became apparent how ridiculously close the ferry terminal is to our hotel. We walked along the shore into the Forodhani Gardens. This is between the Old Fort and the sea, overlooked by the House of Wonders. This was the site of the customs house and import offices for many years which are shown on old pictures of the site. Indeed Forodhani means "customs". The gardens were laid out in 1936 to commemorate the Silver Jubilee of Sultan Khalifa and were known as Jubilee Gardens until the Revolution in 1964. It was renovated in 2009 and now is a very inviting open space. I liked the dhow-shaped adventure playground. There were several sites where people were diving into the ocean.However the highlight was the Night Food Market. It was just getting started as we passed through. There were many food stalls, many of which had chef hatted vendors who were preparing grilled seafood and Zanzibar pizza, seemed to be a filled pancake. Prices were reasonable and we ate off paper plates.
On the walk back to the hotel we changed some money and after a swim in the pool we finished the day and into the evening with some snacks and drinks on the patio overlooking the sea while watching the passing boats and ferries.
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| Sunset swim |
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| Sunset at the beach |
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| Evening at hotel |
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