Zanzibar Spice Tour Part 1:Vanilla and Cloves and All Yummy Plants

Thursday, September 8, 2005

Our next stop in the Zanzibar countryside was down a rutted dirt road to a farm where many different delicious crops were planted.

Simple wooden fences and gates separated plots from one another and it was often hard for my botanically-untrained eyes to tell the undergrowth from a valuable plant or the regular grass from the sweet-tasting lemon-grass until I nibbled it. It was shady and cool underneath the canopy of trees upon which many of the viny plants grew.

We walked among stands of banana trees, sampled a piece of cinnamon bark right from the tree, and marvelled at the strong bite of a fresh ginger root.

There were so many plants to taste and smell: bright orange turmeric and a pepper-corn right off the vine, yummy caramom seeds, long hanging vanilla vines, the exquisite and tiny flowers of cloves, and arabica coffee beans green on the tree. A young boy climbed into a tree and brought down a sample of mace (nutmeg) for us.

One of the farm workers sliced up a jack-fruit for us. They hung precariously pendulous in fat groups from low trees. The fibrous flesh was slightly sweet and somewhat bland but pleasant enough.

What did it taste like? "It tastes like jackfruit", shrugged Jeff later when I asked him to describe it.

We were also introduced to a "lipstick" plant whose pulpy seeds could stain lips and fingers a bright orange. Jeff's mom modelled it for us.

As we sampled and smelled, a man carrying a basket with tiny jars of perfume for sale appeared and I bought a vial of jasmine scent.

A Tree Named Kodak

Thursday, September 8, 2005
After leaving the Marhubi Palace (such as it was) behind, we drove further out from Stonetown into a very poor-looking rural area. We passed many old wooden shacks and small banana plantations.

We also saw many women walking along the side of the road dressed in very brightly coloured dresses and scarves--yellow, orange, green, red!

Back in Stonetown, the majority of women seemed to mostly dress in black robes with only a coloured head-veil, but the women in the country here could be seen as vivid exclamations of colour from a long ways away.

We stopped at one point to photograph a distinctive palm tree: its trunk had a pronounced squiggle to it. Ali laughed and said that this particular tree gets photographed so much that its nickname is "Kodak".

Some curious children watched as we took pictures.

Boat-Building Pictures

Thursday, September 8, 2005

These are some pictures from the beach right by the Marhubi Palace ruins where there were all sorts of wooden boats in various states of disrepair dragged up on the beach.

Several men were working among the enormous wooden ribs of one of the larger boats, but whether they were building or taking the boat apart further we couldn't stay long enough to tell.

Marhubi Palace Ruins

Thursday, September 8, 2005

Back in our mini-vans, we all headed out of Stonetown toward the Marhubi ruins.

On the way, we passed the Livingstone House , of "Dr. Livingstone-I-Presume" fame. It's a tall red-roofed building with rows of shuttered windows that now serves as a tourist office but was first the house of a Sultan back around 1860, and then the starting point of the adventures of many missionaries and explorers. Dr. David Livingstone lived here before beginning his famous last trip into Africa's mainland.

Later on we briefly explore the Marhubi Palace ruins, which are the crumbled remains of where a sultan had "many com-fort-able times with the ladies", Ali informs us with a wink.

It burned down accidentally in 1899 and was used by the sultan's secondary wives. It was so ruined that it was hard to imagine what the palace might actually have been like, but one thing is for certain: it did not suffer from lack of bathrooms. Everywhere you looked, there were the remains of enormous stone pools and sunken tubs.

"Oh yes", said Ali, "And all the bathrooms were...ensuite". (nudge nudge, wink wink )

The Marhubi ruins were also notable for a rather pretty lily pond, a nearby nest of ginger and white kittens, an abundance of palm trees on the grounds, and a domed roof in one section of the building where sunlight poured magnificently through the circular holes in the roof onto...a dead bat being eaten by ants.

Stonetown Preschool and Soap Berries

Thursday, September 8, 2005

Across the street from the monument to the slaves was a preschool bearing a Catholic name.

As a Canadian preschool teacher, I was very curious to see what an African school might be like. The front door was open and I could see the children sitting on the floor and hear voices as they repeated the teacher's words in singsong. Of course, they were not speaking in English.

Ali said that he thought that in this school Christian lessons were taught in the morning and Muslim lessons in the afternoon.

The playground was in sadly neglected condition. Broken swings and dangerous-looking broken metal things peeking out of the long grass appeared to the only equipment there. Back home, the licensing authorities are quibbling over the least silly infraction in our own wonderfully-equipped play-yard. They would have a bird if they could see the condition of this playground in comparison. It puts things in perspective certainly.

Another thing that made me pause was the list of children's rights painted on the side of the building, between the metal-barred windows without glass. Among others, it included the rights:

* To be Loved
* To be Educated
* To Not Be Beaten....

Yes, you know you're in a different culture when that last right is not just taken for granted.

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As we continued to walk through this neighbourhood in Zanzibar, our guide Ali plucked some berries from a tree at the side of a street and demonstrated at a little water-tap how soap berries were used.


They foamed up very nicely as shampoo does and smelled quite nice on my hands.

It was around this time of the morning that Jo rejoined our group. She had gone off to a nearby pharmacy to find antibiotics to treat her infected finger. (Somewhere along the way, she cut herself and her finger was now starting to look very sore indeed.)

She returned with a package of "Canesten" that they'd given her. Our Dr. Sarah was quite certain that a treatment for a yeast infection was going to be of little help and returned with Jo to the shop. This time they returned with penicillin. Ah, much better!

Zanzibar Slave Trade

Thursday, September 8, 2005

(More to be added to this post later..)

We visited a Christian church built on the site of a former slave market. The chrch's altar was once the location of the whipping post. Zanzibar was once the awful hub of slavers selling people into captivity.
Nearby, at the art gallery where I purchased the tinga tinga paintings, steps in that building led down to a dank basement with low-ceilinged stone rooms hung with chains where slaves were kept in horrible crowded conditions before being sold. Up to seventy or so were jammed into a room where twenty could not stand comfortably.

It was not thought important if some of the captured people died because it was believed that the surviviors would be the fittest and most valuable for sale anyway.

Near the church on a small lawn was a sculture set into the ground to commemorate the memory of the slaves: five human figures carved in stone and chained at the neck.

Following is a very brief history of the ending of the slave trade in Zanzibar, borrowed from a website:

In 1822, the Omani Arabs signed the Moresby treaty which amongst other things, made it illegal for them to sell slaves to Christian powers. So that this agreement could be monitored, the United States and Great Britain established diplomatic relations with Zanzibar, and sent Consuls to the islands. However, the slaving restrictions were largely ignored, and the trade continued to kill and imprison countless Africans.

Caravans started out from Bagamoyo on the mainland coast, travelling as much as 1,000 miles on foot as far as Lake Tanganyika, buying slaves from local rulers on the way, or, more cheaply, simply capturing them. The slaves were chained together and used to carried ivory back to Bagamoyo. The name Bagamoyo means 'lay down your heart;' because it was here that slaves would abandon hope of freedom.

Slaves who survived the long trek from the interior were crammed into dhows bound for Zanzibar, and paraded for sale like cattle in the Slave Market.

All of the main racial groups were involved in the slave trade in some way or other. Europeans used slaves in their plantations in the Indian Ocean islands, Arabs were the main traders, and African rulers sold prisoners taken in battle. Being sold into slavery was not a prisoner's worst fate - if a prolonged conflict led to a glut, the Doe tribe north of Bagamoyo had the rather gruesome habit of eating 'excess supplies'.

Sultan Barghash was forced in 1873, under the threat of a British naval bombardment, to sign an edict which made the sea-borne slave trade illegal, and the slave market in Zanzibar was closed, with the Cathedral Church of Christ erected on the site. But the trade continued, particularly on the mainland. Slaving was illegal, but it existed openly until Britain took over the mainland following their defeat of the Germans in the First World War. Many former slaves found that their conditions had hardly changed - they were now simply employed as labourers at very low wage rates in the spice plantations.

Tinga Tinga at St. Monica's Gallery

Thursday, September 8, 2005
The next stop was an art studio and gallery in Stonetown, housed in an old stone building run as St. Monica's Hostel on the grounds of an Anglican cathedral.

We were soon to find that this building housed a bleak dungeon that was once used during the time of the slave trade on Zanzibar, but more on that later.

Most of the artwork here were paintings in the Tinga Tinga style, a stylized and very whimsical form of painting, a sort of African impressionism first popularized by an artist named Edward Said Tinga tinga (1937-1972).

The subject of the paintings were usually African animals, painted with enamel bicycle paint on muslin fabric or masonite boards. The animals were bright and colourful and fantastical, almost resembling cartoons.

It's a very cheerful art form and I was happy to find one I liked for ten dollars. Rolled up into a tight cylinder and wrapped in newspaper, the painting wouln't take up very much room in my backpack.

I took some photos of others that I liked and Jeff's mom bought several pieces as Christmas gifts.

The alleyways and beaches here in Zanzibar are filled with tinga tinga paintings, leaning against walls and propped up in rows on the sand. I bought two others later on, including one similar to the paint-speckled zebras I took a photo of here.

I noticed after a while that although the paintings varied a little from place to place, there were great similarities of theme too. The pictures of the stylized Maasai people in red seemd particularly ubiquitous.

House of Wonders

Thursday, September 8, 2005

Right next to the Arab fort was a very large blocky white building, several stories high and with a long row of columns out front.

This building is known as the House of Wonders or Beit el Ajaib, and was built in 1883 as a ceremonial palace for the Sultan Barghash.

What were the wonders it contained?

Well, it was the first building in Zanzibar, and indeed perhaps all of East Africa, to have electric lights and an electric elevator. I think it had running water too. Very exciting stuff for the time and place.

Nowadays there are plans for it to open it as the National Museum.

Today I didn't go inside but watched as the ornate front door with spiky brass studs was polished and petted the multitude of underfed cats brushing against us in the parking-lot out front.

There is a huge cat over-population problem here and I suspect the cost of spaying and neutering is simply not feasible in Zanazibar (or probably the rest of Africa either).

Stonetown Fort

Thursday, September 8, 2005

We met our tour guide this morning out in front of the hotel. He was a local man named Ali, as cheerful and chatty as a bird. a little hat perched on his head and he used his hands as he talked.

His voice had a soft and beautiful African accent that stretched the vowels to the limit. When he said 'water' it came out as oooo-otter. But to the amusement of all the folk from the U.K. amusement, he was very good at mimicking different British accents and had a crack at an Irish accent too.

"Top ah the morning!", he said to us. He'd heard it first on a foreign newscast and had to puzzle out the meaning for a while.

Ali walks us down our street to a well-known building, the house of Queen's Freddy Mercury, who was born in Zanzibar.

Then down the narrow streets to the nearby waterfront, past brightly-painted wall murals and a multitude of roaming cats. Fishing boats bob in the bay and an open-sided bus full of white-veiled Muslim school-girls shout and wave.

Our first destination is an old Arab fort which is now a public building housing a restaurant and art gallery. It is right across the street from the market-place we wandered in last night and dates back to the late 1600's.

We climbed steep stairs to the top of the walls which were topped by castellated battlements. It had that big, empty, bleak feeling that many old stone buildings seem to have but it had a good view of the town from up high.

I preferred looking at the paintings in the art studio within the main building. Two brightly dressed women lounged by a window-sill chatting and I asked their permission to take their picture because they looked so beautiful.

They leapt up and posed, standing up straight and stiff. I told them I loved their original pose even better and so they gracefully re-arranged themselves again and tried to pose candidly without giggling.

Stonetown Breakfast

Thursday, September 8, 2005

Here is a picture of the Muslim minaret just down the street from our hotel. Let's just say it's a mixed blessing to have a spiritual and musical start to the day.

But it was a beautiful day today, so why not start early?

We were one of the first one's up to the Shangani's rooftop restaurant this morning. Gorgeous fresh air, the waiter pointing out faraway dolphins leaping, and a glass of passionfruit juice with breakfast.
I think this day on Zanzibar was one of my favourite memories of the whole trip--I think it was all the delicious tastes and smells on the Spice Tour today. The lions and elephants were more exciting of course, but it is funny how scents and tastes can bring back travel memories.

Anyway, this is how my day started.