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Before starting graduate school, I worked for a short stint as a host at an Ann Arbor restaurant called Zanzibar Pan-Tropical Bistro. The place’s shtick was that the food was a global fusion representing the tropics from around the world, using spices from that rather broad swath of the world. There was little that was specific to the real Zanzibar, but the name was meant to evoke a sense of the exotic - a faraway land redolent of spices, bathed in salty air.
It was an easy choice of name for a “pan-tropical” bistro. Almost everyone has heard the name “Zanzibar”; almost everyone carries an image of what exotic Zanzibar is – or should be. It is an almost a mythic place. Sort of like “Timbuktu”.
Except that Zanzibar is a real island, just like Timbuktu is a real city.
And I finally got to see the real deal with my own eyes.
***
It was love at first sight.
Sometimes I know instinctively, before even starting my explorations, that I am going to love a place. This was the case with Istanbul, when I first arrived by train from Greece – just looking out
the train window as we pulled into Sirkeci Station was enough. I just knew.
And Zanzibar pulled the same trick. I was barely out of the plane before I was love-struck by this special island. By the time I arrived in Stone Town, the heart and soul of old Zanzibar, I was giddy with my infatuation.
As I noted in my recent entry on Mombasa, this part of my summer travel is meant, at least in part, to connect my experiences in Oman with the Swahili Coast. So it seemed only appropriate that my first moments in Zanzibar were spent jostling with the passengers of a recently arrived Air Oman flight – the men mostly dressed in the dishdashas and msarrs that I came to admire while traveling in Oman - for position in the visa line. I couldn’t help but smile. It was almost as if it had been planned, a greeting to show off, just for me, the Omani-Zanzibari relationship.
For the first part of my stay in Zanzibar, I decided to stay deep in Stone Town and to indulge in my other, older, love – coffee – all in one go. I bedded down
in the atmospheric Zanzibar Coffee House Hotel, with its coffee house on the ground floor and a handful of guestrooms above, all with coffee-inspired room names (e.g. Espresso). The hotel’s traditional island roof deck, open on all sides to catch the cooling breezes coming off the ocean, provided a first bird’s-eye overview of the town’s impossible tangle of streets. As I stood looking out over the rusting tin roofs, counting minarets, church spires, and temple points, and drinking my welcome coffee, I was practically vibrating with anticipation to lose myself in the city.
***
Due to Zanzibar’s increasing popularity as a real tourist destination – not just a mythic destination dreamed of by armchair travelers - I had feared that Stone Town might have become overly touristy. But as I wandered I was pleasantly surprised to find that it was very much a living place. Closet-sized shops line the narrow lanes, often spilling out of the elaborate doors for which Zanzibar is famous and into the streets themselves. Kids in school uniforms careen around corners, laughing and swinging backpacks. Men on wobbly bicycles attempt to navigate tight turns, carrying loads of bread or other items for market.
But
what intrigued me most was the evidence I found tucked into surprising corners of a continuing cosmopolitanism that echoes the island’s earlier Indian Ocean history. For one, there seems to be a dizzying array of Muslim communities packed into Stone Town. Sunni mosques stand alongside Twelver and Ismaili Shi’a mosques/jamatkhanas; there is even a Cutchi Memon Jamatkhana. But the island’s religious diversity isn’t just within Islam. There are Hindu and Buddhist temples; there’s an Anglican church (the site of the island’s old slave market) and a Catholic one. I am sure there are other places of worship that remain hidden by the anonymity of the narrow streets. There must, for example, be a Zoroastrian temple somewhere, even if most of the island’s Parsees have departed (like Freddie Mercury’s family). Most of the faiths from around the Indian Ocean have washed ashore on Zanzibar, it would seem.
***
Zanzibar’s raison d’etre was trade. At a strategic point in the monsoon-driven trade network that once crisscrossed the Indian Ocean, it was, from an early stage, an important point for the exchange of spices from Indonesia and India (and from its own plantations) with items brought from mainland Africa, including ivory and,
yes, slaves.
As in Mombasa, the island saw a succession of overlords, from the early Swahili sultans, to the Portuguese, to the Omanis, and lastly the British. However, of the Omanis left a particularly strong mark on Zanzibar, which is not surprising as it quickly became the crown jewel of the empire and eventually even became the empire’s capital in 1837 under Sultan Sa’id.
Even when the empire split into two, with Sultan Sa’id’s sons Thuwaini and Majid ruling Oman and Zanzibar, respectively, the Zanzibari branch of the dynasty remained Omani at heart. The Sultanate flourished under Majid’s successor, Sultan Barghash, who came to power in 1870. Actually, much of the urban fabric of Stone Town is from the time of Barghash’s reign, including the impressive Beit al-Ajaib, a huge ceremonial palace (now museum) overlooking the harbor. Despite this being a highpoint of the Omani era, it was also during this time that the British became more involved in Zanzibar. They even got Bargash to sign a treaty making Zanzibar a British protectorate and soon thereafter getting him to abolish the lucrative Indian Ocean slave trade.
After Sultan Bargash’s death in 1888, the Zanzibar-based empire lost most
of its holdings on the mainland in the European “Scramble for Africa” and became more and more subject to British control. Still, the sultanate continued its largely symbolic rule throughout the protectorate era until the last sultan was overthrown in a revolution in 1964.
Perhaps my favorite story of the Omani period is that of Sayyida Salme, a sister of Sultan Barghash. Although a princess of much privilege, growing up speaking Arabic and Swahili in the confines of a Zanzibari palace, she somehow managed to get herself involved with a German merchant and ran away to marry him. She became Emily Reute and converted to Christianity, becoming what seems to me to be a very Zanzibari style cultural chameleon. Her position, as a fallen princess of Zanzibar and the sister of its powerful ruler, allowed her to serve as a commentator on the Muslim world to a German audience. As an exile in Germany, who quickly learned German and English, she became a commentator on European culture for a Muslim audience. I always wanted to write a novel about her life – but someone beat me to the punch!
***
Following the ghosts of Sultan Barghash and Princess
Salme through the maze of Stone Town, watching the kaleidoscope of its current inhabitants whirl by, I am glad to have finally reached the real Zanzibar. A pan-tropical bistro in Ann Arbor just isn’t the same.
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