Black Star: Zanzibar

Arrival in Zanzibar

Strip yourself naked. Coat your entire body in syrup. Now put your clothes on. Next step into the kitchen, a white box with windows everywhere, filled with bright white sunlight. Look around at vats of rolling boiling steaming water. Bakers pull loaves of bread out of giant ovens, accompanied by invisible, puffy clouds of hot air. Relax - you cannot fight this. This is Zanzibar.

Now close your eyes and spin around in circles. Open your eyes and step into Stone Town. Before you can orient yourself, the papasi (Swahili for "ticks") are on you. In Zanzibar, you will be dining always with insects, licking their chops in anticipation of dining with and on you. But the papasi are not bugs - they are touts. They are not after your food and blood, but more benignly, your money. Futile though it may seem, you might as well start waving your arms and swatting now; it actually does help. Just as a waive of your arm will shoo a fly away from your beer, a firm "no thank you" ("la asante") along with a convincing recitation that you know exactly where you are, where you are going, how you plan to get there, and what you will do there, will persuade the papasi to disengage.

Realistically though, if you are disoriented from the hot sticky spinning, the papasi can be of service to you: they know where you are and can quickly figure out where you'd like to go. Within minutes, they can lead you through the crazed maze of asymmetric, crowded, crumbling streets and land you in a quiet, cool place with an enterprising Zanzibarian proprieter.

Whether through your own wits or with the help of papasi, the shock of arrival passes after you settle into your own space in a Muslim residential neighborhood, complete with mosquito net, fan, and bed. You learn quickly that Stone Town, the old Arab labyrinth of narrow streets, courtyards, ornate doors, and crumbling facades, is small, with the sea to the east and the Creek Road markets to the west. With this orientation it's easy to feign confidence and not get lost.

At sunset, you watch the Zanzibarian acrobats (kids) flipping and splashing into the hot sea. You dine on skewers of fresh seafood - so many kinds - and BBQ'd bananas; sip lime and sugar cane juice, and spice coffee. Watch the sun go down. Amble over to groove to the mesmerizing music of Sauti za Busara ("Sounds of Wisdom").

Sauti za Busara

Our intent in visiting Zanzibar was to fulfill Greg's long held dream of becoming fully saturated in the rhythmic arpeggios of African music. Sauti za Busara is a music festival held annually in Zanzibar showcasing music from around Africa. We learned of the festival while listening to the best radio show in Seattle, the joyful Best Ambiance, KEXP's African music show (6-9pm and you can stream it at kexp.org).

Mingling of cultures at the festival resulted in irony. Zanzibar is a conservative Muslim island and a booming tourist destination. Full burkas (eye-slits only) are about as common as bikinis. At the festival, the mingling of conservative Zanzibarians and tourists manifested as a rather subdued Zanzibarian majority, who were content to sit on the ground and listen politely to the music, and a Western minority who stood up and shook booty to epic African rhythms.

Another obvious mingling of cultures was the Arab influence on the native Zanzibarian music. The Arabian Kingdom of Oman took over Zanzibar for about 300 years, including the Sultan moving his palace to Zanzibar. The resultant Swahili culture is a fusion of Arab and African influences. The island, indeed, has a dark history of international influence, characterized by trade and colonization, including the famous spice trade and the infamous slave trade. It wasn't until the mid-20th Century that the Africans at last took control of Zanzibar.

Hence, another highlight of the festival was taarab music, an Arabic-styled music characterized by powerful singing, driving rhythm (bongos, tabla, hand drum), string instruments (qanun - many stringed instrument played on the lap, the guitar-like oud, violins, and double bass), and accordions. Men led the taarab singing and a chorus of women in head scarves sang high, nasal harmonies in refrain. All the taarab musicians sang in unison, resulting in overwhelming shear power.

Also outstanding at the festival were the powerful, dignified female musicians. This was particularly unexpected considering the pervasive sexism and overwhelming passivity of many women in Africa.

The Maasai singer, Carola Kinasha, commanded center stage. She appeared statuesque, calm, radiating peace, and dressed from head to toe in flowing gold robes. Like a goddess, Carola sang with a booming voice and appeared absolute and eternal, as if beyond the scope of any single life. Next to Carola was her youthful sidekick, wearing a tight fitting Western-style red dress. The joker, she danced crazy and hyperactive to every song, shaking it for all she was worth, showing off all that she had, then collapsing of exhaustion at the end of a song. The supporting cast, incidentally, was a large group of men wearing gray shirts, who sang, layed down fantastic rhythms, funky bass lines, and an occasionally well-placed solo.

The star of the festival was Bi Kidude, a 95 year old Zanzibarian woman. Bi Kidude sings in the taarab and unyago styles (Arabic influenced Swahili music). She appeared frail and was led on stage slowly, wearing a blue print head wrap and dress of the same fabric that hung loosely on her thin frame. It was impossible to see whether or not her eyes were open. Behind her, the taraab band played furiously, rhythmically, a long Arabic melody with little quanun flourishes over quarter tones. Bi Kidude stood perfectly still for what seemed like a very long time swaying slightly. Could she hear the music? Could she see the microphone in front of her? Did she know where she was? The musicians played on. A local kept reassuring us in broken English, "She can sing! She can sing!"

Finally, her face broke, she licked her lips a little, and her powerful voice burst into a traditional Swahili song. The crowd went wild. Bi Kidude finished her song, bowed several times, and was led off the stage. In addition to her singing, Bi Kidude is legendary for her fascinating life and the role she has played in educating young women.

The rest of the festival was a blur of guitars, drums, and harmonies. We saw everything from folk music to Swahili hip-hop to music documentaries. Every night, we returned exhausted to our Stone Town abode to await another day of music and being accosted by papasi.

East Coast Zanzibar

People are a lot more like folding chairs than the Western mind might imagine. They're a lot more rubbery, too, and rubberiness can be maintained well into old age. Men don't really need twenty-four inches between their knees to accommodate their manhood; manhood is squishy enough for knees and thighs to press fully together. Sitting on one's hands eases the piercing grind of the pelvic sit bones on wood. Disassociation from one's own legs, such that they become indistinguishable from the fifty or so other legs in the truck bed, is a normal coping mechanism. Twenty-five people and more can sit on benches in the back of a single pickup truck with seven big bundles of firewood, four buckets of fry fat, two oversized backpacks, two bicycles, bunches of bananas, bundles of metal strips, and a bucket of fish strapped on top. These are truths to be gleaned from a ride on a Zanzibarian daladala.

We rode a daladala from Stone Town to Bweju, a beach town on the eastern coast of Zanzibar. Here we found villages of limestone houses brimming with children. Ducks sipped from puddles. Straight-backed women clothed from head to toe in colorful wraps strode with perfect posture into the Indian Ocean, casting fishing nets. Cows plodded, ribs showing, across white sand beaches. Two men and thirty small children pulled a wooden dhow out of the sea. The pitiless sun bleached or burned everything; the merciful wind blew nonstop. A giant coconut thudded heavily in the sand narrowly missing one head.

In Bweju, we practiced our Swahili greetings:

Zanzibarian: Jambo! (Hello)

Mzungu (white person): Sijambo! (Hello)

Zanzibarian: Karibu! (Welcome)

Mzungu: Asante sana. (Thank you very much)

Zanzibarian: Habari. (How are things?)

Mzungu: Nzuri. (Good)

Zanzibarian: Mambo? (How's it going?)

Mzungu: Poa. (Fine)

Repeat two or more times, mixing in "sana" (very) for variation, and you have a rudimentary dance that will suffice as a Swahili greeting. Swahili greetings are extravagant. They repeat. They ramble. They know time to be slow and sprawling.

Our Zanzibarian proprietor, Ali, told us "karibu" fifty or more times. He prepared us each a whole fish fresh from the sea, complete with lips, jagged teeth, and eyes; eggs still hot from laying; lime-covered salads; roasted aubergine & potatoes; mounds of rice pilau. The villagers, Ali's big family, crossed through Ali's place freely, oftentimes stopping to charge a cell phone and exchange a lengthy greeting.

After a few days of exploring the east coast, we folded our rubbery selves into the daladala back to Stone Town. Wizened now, armed with a small cache of Swahili words, we wove through the papasi, to the ferry, back to Dar, and on to Kenya.