Zanzibar Pictures
Hah, and you thought I would never get around to posting pictures again. (Okay, I may be the only one who obsesses about my assorted pledges to update this website more frequently and my subsequent failures.) As I mentioned in an earlier update, I traveled to Zanzibar, Tanzania’s autonomous island region in the Indian Ocean, in early December to see the sites and visit my friend Colleen, a fellow Burke Scholar who will graduate from Marquette University in May. She spent last semester there through a U.S. government program (the Boren Fellowship) studying KiSwahili at the State University of Zanzibar and living with a host family. So it was great to stay with her host family and practice my own KiSwahili a lot.
Zanzibar has a long history of cross-cultural interaction, with many residents claiming Persian, Indian, and Arab ancestry. Beginning the 1840s, Omani sultans began to rule from Zanzibar Town, having shifted their capital there from Oman in the southeast of the Arabian Peninsula. The sultanate survived from the late 19th century until 1964 as a British protectorate, but Zanzibaris, predominantly of African ancestry, overthrew the last Arab sultan within weeks of independence. The new government and Tanganyika (the mainland territory between Mozambique and Kenya ruled first by the Germans and then British until its independence in 1961) formed a union in April, becoming the United Republic of Tanganyika and Zanzibar, Tanzania for short. The Zanzibar government today retains considerable autonomy in conducting the territory’s affairs and has its own president, who doubles as a vice president in the Union government.
Stone Town, the coastal portion of Zanzibar Town, has narrow, winding alleys and many old buildings reflecting Arab, Persian, and Indian architectural styles, perhaps most famously expressed in its ubiquitous ornately carved wooden doors. There are also several good museums, lots of tourist-geared shops and restaurants, and a wonderful nighttime market for lots of traditional and modern fried foods. Did I actually eat a chocolate and banana Zanzibar pizza (chocolate and banana slices fried inside of a tortilla-like chapati) at the Forodhani night market? Why, yes, I did.
First, here are some Dar-es-Salaam pictures I took the day I traveled to Zanzibar.
Dar’s Catholic cathedral dating from the 1890s, heavily influenced by the German colonizers and missionaries who directed its construction.
My ferry both to and from Zanzibar, the Kilimanjaro III.
A section of Dar as seen from the ferry.
Zanzibar Town from the ferry
The business end of Zanzibar’s port
Part of Zanzibar’s old fort, now hosting the offices of the Zanzibar Film Festival, open air concerts, and some craft vendors
Zanzibar’s roofline and the concert seating of the fort as seen from above
One of the ornate, heavy doors of a former palace of the Sultan, now a museum
Part of Zanzibar Town’s Anglican cathedral, built on the site of central slave market after the British pressured the Sultan into officially ending the slave trade. All my interior pictures turned out blurry, but the high altar was actually constructed on the site of the main whipping post of the slave market. The cathedral now offers tours related to the slave trade and serves a small local congregation as well as tourists. (Zanzibar is 99%, or some other high percentage, Muslim.)
I take the blurry statement back. This one actually came out okay. Yes, Dad, they do have a pipe organ.
Outside of Stone Town are a number of apartment buildings built by the East Germans to show their solidarity with the Zanzibar Revolution and its government, whose official KiSwahili title even today is translated as the Revolutionary Government of Zanzibar. Some of the apartments, such as that of Colleen’s host family, are very nice and well furnished.
An organic farm in rural Zanzibar where Colleen spent a lot of her free time with a leader in Zanzibar’s growing cooperative movement. I very much enjoyed my visit here.
A view of the upper stories of buildings along a narrow Stone Town alley
Your Honor, I submit the above picture as Exhibit A to prove that I have indeed been to a tropical island in the Indian Ocean.
Sorry this one’s so blurry. Colleen and I visited a cavern carved out for use by the Arab slave traders outside of Zanzibar Town to enable to continue the slave trade after the Sultan closed the central slave market and outlawed the slave trade. The British Royal Navy finally discovered and closed down these operations in 1890, if I remember correctly.
Unlike the simple combination vans used in South Africa and Tanzania mainland, including Moshi, many of the daladalas in Zanzibar are modified picnics with bench seats in the specially rearranged bed. We used vehicles like this to reach both the farm and slave cavern.
And you thought I wouldn’t post a picture of myself. Now that you’ve seen this disturbing image, you may wish I hadn’t. Anyway, we took a short trip through part of a natural cave near the slave cavern. Fear not, Liz has since cut my hair.
Wait, there’s a Holiday Inn in Zanzibar. No, it’s in Dar actually, but still surprising. There a few Subways around, but no Mickey D’s yet.
And these beauties are not Tanzanian traditional specialties, but homemade pineapple upside cakes I made using fresh pineapple in our modified Dutch oven of pots on our gas cooker for Beth’s farewell party in mid-December. For all the doubters out there, the cakes were pretty awesome. Even the Tanzanians said so.
Well, that’s all for now. It appears my ability to control the destinies of Wisconsin’s sports teams from abroad is waning, as both the Badgers and Packers went to down to defeat this month despite their great seasons. I’m sorry. I’ll work on my game for the Brewers in baseball.
God bless,
Andy
P.S. Here’s just one of the thousands of carved doors awaiting you on Zanzibar.
