Sannyasi

“ Oriental in its appearance, Mohammedan in its religion, Arabian in its morals, this cesspool of wickedness is a fit capital for the Dark Continent. But Zanzibar is Zanzibar simply because it is the only apology for a town on the whole coast. An immense outfit is required to penetrate this shopless and foodless land, and here only can the traveller make up his caravan. The ivory and slave trades have made caravaning a profession, and everything the explorer wants is to be had in these bazaars, from a tin of sardines to a repeating rifle. ”

“ Goes [74] declares that da Gama, after touching at MakdishuMakdishu and Melinde, arrived at Zanzibar on February 28, and was supplied by its ruler with provisions, presents, and specimens of country produce. The island is described as large and fertile, with groves of fine trees, producing good fruit, two others, ‘Pomba’ (Pemba) and ‘Mofia’ (our Monfia and the Arab Mafiyah) , lying in its vicinity. These settlements were governed by Moorish princes ‘of the same caste as the King of Melinde’—doubtless hereditary Moslem Shaykhs and Sayyids. ”

“ The aspect of Zanzibar from the sea is that of coralline islands generally—a graceful, wavy outline of softly rounded ground, and a surface of ochre-coloured soil, thickly clothed with foliage alternating between the liveliest leek-green and the sombrest laurel, the only variety that vegetation knows in this land of eternal verdure. Everywhere the scenery is similar; each mile of it is a copy of its neighbour ”

“ Various legends of hair-oil rubbed upon the bulwarks have made many a tricked traveller a shallow infidel in the matter of smelling the land. But we soon learned that off Zanzibar, as off ‘Mozámbic,’ the fragrant vegetation makes old Ocean smile, pleased with the grateful smell, as of yore. The night breeze from the island is cool and heavy with clove perfume, and European residents carefully exclude the land-wind from their sleeping-rooms. ”

“ Zanzibar, a kingdom of East Africa, under British protection, consisting of the islands of Zanzibar (150) , with a capital (30) of the same name, and the island of Pemba (50) , and a strip of the coast extending 10 m. inland from Cape Delgado to Kipini; has a hot unhealthy climate, and a rich tropical vegetation; its products are cloves chiefly, coco-nuts, betel-nuts, and grain, and the exports ivory, india-rubber, gum, &c.; the natives are mostly Arab Mohammedans under a sultan. ”

“ Some of the men, perhaps, will return to their duties, but if such a large number deserts 3000 miles from their native land, what might have been expected had we taken the East Coast route. The Zanzibar headmen tell me with a cynical bitterness that the Expedition would have been dissolved. They say, "These people from the clove and cinnamon plantations of Zanzibar are no better than animals—they have no sense of feeling. They detest work, they don't know what silver is, and they have no parents or homes. The men who have homes never desert, if they did they would be so 1887. ”

“ For trifling gifts, the Zanzibaris obtained their most devoted service for building their huts, and carrying water and attending to their fires, grinding their millet grain into flour; while our men contentedly sat down, encouraging them to hard labour with a friendly nod and bland smile, some bit of iron-work, a pinch of beads, a cowrie or two, or a wristlet of brass wire. Every man picked up a warm-hearted, and ingenious brother; and, excepting in cooking, the natives were admitted into the privilege of fast friendship. ”

“ If Zanzibar may be said to possess main thoroughfares, that window of ours commanded as much of one as the tree and wall permitted; and music—even of a concertina—is the key to the heart of all people whose hair is crisp and kinky. Perhaps rather owing to the generosity of their slave law, and Koran teachings, more than to racial depravity, there are not very many Arabs left in that part of the world with true Semitic features and straight hair, nor many woolly-headed folk who are quite all-Bantu. ”

“ Their proper priests are the Pokarna, who, more scrupulous than others, refuse to cross the sea: the Sársat Brahmans, so common in Sind and Cutch, are the only high-caste drones who to collect money will visit Zanzibar and Maskat. With a characteristic tenderness, these Banyans cook grain at the landing-places for the wild slaves, half-starved by the ‘middle-passage,’ and inclination as well as policy everywhere induces them to give alms largely. ”

“ The Zanzibar Arab’s day is regular, varied only by a journey, a family festival, a debauch, or the yearly Ramazan fast. He rises at dawn for ablution and prayer, eats ‘Suwayk,’ a kind of vermicelli, wheaten bread, or even a little meat, drinks a cup of coffee, and chewing betel, repairs to the bazar for business or calls upon his friends. ”

“ In Zanzibar Island Kisawahili is most corrupted; the vocabulary, varying with every generation, has become a mere conglomerate which combines South African, Arabic, Persian, Hindi, and even Portuguese, an epitome of local history. On the coast it greatly varies, being constantly modified by the migration and mixture of tribes. Like the Malay of the Indian Islands, it has become the Lingua Franca, the Lingoa Geral of commerce from Ra’as Hafun to the Mozambique and throughout Central Intertropical Africa. ”

“ After the final withdrawal of the Portuguese in the early years of the 18th century, the coast towns north of Cape Delgado fell under the sway of the Muscat Arabs, passing from them to the sultan of Zanzibar. From about 1830, or a little earlier, the Zanzibar Arabs began to penetrate inland, and by 1850 had established themselves at Ujiji on the eastern shore of Lake Tanganyika. The Arabs also made their way south to Nyasa. This extension of Arab influence was accompanied by vague claims on the part of the sultan of Zanzibar to include all these newly opened countries in his empire. ”

“ We steam onwards, and across the Equator, passing [46] by the coastline of Italian Somaliland and British East Africa, to where, nearly two thousand miles from Aden, and close in to the mainland, are two other islands coloured red on the map, Pemba and Zanzibar. We are a long way off our course to India, yet Zanzibar and the narrow strip of coast behind it belong by history and development to India and Arabia rather than to the neighbouring continent. ”

“ The isle of Zanzibar with its groves of cocoa-nut, mango, clove, and cinnamon, and its sentinel islets of Chumbi and French, with its whitewashed city and jack-fruit odor, with its harbor and ships that tread the deep, faded slowly from view, and looking westward, the African continent rose, a similar bank of green verdure to that which had just receded till it was a mere sinuous line above the horizon, looming in a northerly direction to the sublimity of a mountain chain. ”

“ Beastly unhealthy place that Zanzibar—all fevers and agues and malaria in the wet season, and as hot as a place you’ve heard of, sir, when the sou’-west monsoon blows off the African shore. I was there when Sir Bartle Frere came to interview the old sultan to try and make him sign a treaty to put down the slave-trade; but it was all no go—the old sultan was too wide-awake for that, and, indeed, treaty or no treaty, we can never quite stop the dealing in slaves between the Arabs on the one hand and the clove-growers on the other. ”

“ Without taking into consideration the climate, it is evident that few Englishmen are prepared to settle for long years at remote Zanzibar, and Arabs do not care to trust new men. Yet it would be the acme of short-sightedness to neglect this part of East Africa. Our Anglo-Indian subjects, numbering about 4000 [85] in the dominions of Zanzibar, some of them wealthy men, are entitled to protection from the Arab, and more especially from the Christian merchants. ”

“ The more extensive Zang (Zenj) empire, of which the name Zanzibar (Zanguebar) is a lasting memorial, extending along the sea-board from Somaliland to the Zambezi, was also extinct. The Arabs had established themselves firmly on the coast, and thence made continual slave-raids into the interior, penetrating later to the Congo. The Swahili, inhabiting the coast-line from the equator to about 16° S., are a somewhat heterogeneous mixture of Bantu with a tinge of Arab blood. ”

“ In fact, it confounded 353Zanzibar Island with the whole coast of Eastern Africa, whose ports, especially those about Kilwa, were supported almost wholly by the slave trade. Lieut.-Colonel Coghlan had been long enough at Aden to know that Berberah, Zayla, and Tajurrah are slave-exporting as well as importing markets, and that every native craft sailing up coast always declares itself to be from ‘the Sawáhil,’ or, if that word be not understood, from Zanzibar. ”

“ The Zanzibar slave-depôt is so situated that its market was limited only by the extent of Western Asia. From Ra’as Hafun to the Kilima-ni river was gathered the supply for the Red Sea, for the Persian Gulf, for the Peninsula of Hindostan, and for the extensive regions to the East. ”

“ The well-remembered undulating ridges, and the gentle slopes clad with palms and mango-trees bathed in warm vapor, seemed in that tranquil, drowsy state which at all times any portion of tropical Africa presents at first appearance. A pale-blue sky covered the hazy land and sleeping sea as we steamed through the strait that separates Zanzibar from the continent. Every stranger, at first view of the shores, proclaims his pleasure. ”

“ Zanzibar, however, must be seen on one of her own fine days: like Fernando Po and Rio de Janeiro, the beauty can look ‘ugly’ enough when she pleases.
As we drew nearer and vision became more distinct, we found as many questions for the pilot as did Vasco da Gama of old. Those prim plantations which, from the offing, resembled Italian avenues of oranges, the tea-gardens of China, the vines of romantic Provence, the coffee plantations of the Brazil, or the orange-yards of Paraguay, were the celebrated clove-grounds, and the largest, streaking the central uplands, were crown property. ”

“ The present ruler of Zanzibar—that is, of the coastline, with all the islands which lie between the equator on the southern confines of the Somali country and the Portuguese possessions in Mozambique—is Sultan Majid, the second son of the old Imaum; for it must be remembered that the Imaum, at his death, divided his territories, then comprising Muscat in Arabia, and Zanzibar in Africa, into two separate states, giving the former, or Muscat, to his eldest son, Sayyid (Prince) Suwéni, whilst the latter was bequeathed to his favourite, the second son, Sayyid Majid, now styled Sultan. ”

“ For the most part Zanzibar consists of a labyrinth of narrow and dirty streets, in which live the Banyans, Singalese, the negro porters, fishermen and half-castes. There are numerous markets. In Shangani are the houses of the European merchants and the chief Arabs, and the headquarters of various Protestant and Roman Catholic missions. Characteristic of the streets are the carved and massive wooden doors, whose blackness contrasts with the white stone of the houses, and the bright red of the acacias in the garden enclosures. ”

“ Zanzibar ignores 146the exhilaration of pure desert air, and the exaltation produced by the stern aspect of mountain regions or by a boundless expanse of Pampa and Sahara. Without a single element of sublimity, soft and smiling, its sensuous and sequestered scenery has no power to spur the thought, to breed an idea within the brain. ”

“ All kinds of ‘Chilis,’ from the small wild ‘bird-pepper’ to the large variety of which the Spaniards are so fond, thrive in Zanzibar, which appears to be their home. There are extensive plantations of betel-pepper on the Eastern coast of the Island.
Wheat, barley, and oats here run to straw. Rice is the favourite cereal. The humid low-lands are cleared of weeds by burning, and the seed is sown when the first showers fall. To judge from the bazar-price, the home-grown article is of a superior quality; but nowhere in East Africa did I find the grain so nutritious as that of the Western Coast. ”

“ Zanzibar according to our observations stands in lat. 6° 6′ S., and long. 39° 15′ E. [124] (Note 19.) It is the only assemblage of habitations on the island that deserves the name of town or even village; for the principal part of the inhabitants without the town being slaves of landholders, are scattered over their respective owners’ estates. The sovereignty of the island belongs to the Imaum of Muscat, [125] who appoints the Hakim or governor, and to whom the revenue derived from its commerce and land-tenures devolves. ”

“ The ways that lead out of the town are always full of women going and coming with their water jars, round red earthen jars which hold two or three gallons, and their Katas, which are cocoanut shells at the end of a long stick, to scoop up the water out of the pits, which serve as wells.
There is a work of vast importance to be done amongst the women of Zanzibar, which only English women can do. They need instruction in every way, few only can read at all, or have any idea beyond the narrow limits of their own idle gossiping customs, the slave women being their great purveyors of news. ”

“ Listen, ye children of the Arabs, sons of the great chiefs, Khamis bin Abdullah, Amer bin Osman, Sultan bin Ali, the Sheikhs Mussoud, Abdullah, Bashid, Hamdan, Thani, and Nasib! Open your ears, ye people of Zanzibar! Ye are among the Wahehe. Ye are in the land of thieves, and night-prowlers. Be wary and alert, my friends; sleep with one eye open; let not your hands forget your guns. When ye meet the prowling Wahehe in your camps at night, shoot and kill all such. ”