Dodging showers on the
IF MY circumstances had not been so dire – or rather, if my circumstances had been drier – I might never have found myself at the Zanzibar Curio Shop.
At first glance, the store did little to distinguish itself from other trinket purveyors besieging the tangled lanes of Stone Town, the historic quarter on the coast of Unguja, Zanzibar’s main island: “Hakuna Matata” T-shirts obscured the facade and tourists browsed souvenirs. In any other city, I’d breeze past. But sodden from the fury of a downpour, feigning interest in refrigerator magnets seemed a small price to pay for shelter.
“If you want to see the real history of Zanzibar, you have to come upstairs,” said Murtaza Akberali, who, with his brother, runs the store their father opened in 1968. And so I followed him through a portal to Zanzibar of yore: hand-carved wood-and-brass trunks teetered against one wall; vintage cigarette ads from India, and political posters from Tanzania formed a retro pastiche on another. The ceiling was an inverted necropolis of timeworn lanterns and teapots, suspended from the rafters.
Cameras and African tribal busts were jumbled in some nooks; others were orderly archives of domestic ephemera: a wall of grandfather clocks; a cluster of rusting keys, likely belonging to earlier iterations of the brass-studded doors I’d been compulsively Instagramming all over Stone Town. I flipped through bundles of black-and-white Indian matrimonial headshots, the subjects’ bouffants, curlicues of eyeliner and flared pants suggesting a 1960s provenance. In one room, I paused before a glass cabinet of daggers, glinting with bejeweled and motherof-pearl hilts.
You have to be careful, when writing about a place like Zanzibar, to not reduce it to a series of prosaic meditations on brilliantly sunny skies, blindingly white beaches and beguilingly azure waters. Even British explorer Sir Richard Francis Burton wasn’t immune: “Truly prepossessing was our first view of the then mysterious island of Zanzibar,” he wrote in Zanzibar: City, Island, and Coast in 1872. “The sea of purest sapphire… under a blaze of sunshine which touched every object with a dull burnish of gold.”
To prevent such exaltations from finding their way into my own notebook, Zanzibar made sure I encountered nothing of the sort.
I’d landed on the first day of a delayed rainy season. While I’d been ready for showers, nothing, short of packing an ark, could have prepared me for the apocalyptic tempest that descended with my flight. Swimming in sapphire seas might have been out of the question, but I hadn’t considered swimming down streets that had been transformed into gushing canals. These were not silvery, romantic mists slinking through latticed rooftops; this was a miasma of damp and despair.
Undeterred, I brandished my umbrella like a shield and waded through the waterlogged streets of Stone Town.
While I certainly wouldn’t have minded them, beaches and sunshine weren’t what had lured me, anyhow. As someone who’s lived in the Middle East, India and Africa,
I’ve long been curious about the confluence of the three cultures on an archipelago that could, on a map, be mistaken for ink splotches in the Indian Ocean, just off the coast of Tanzania. The Swahili language spoken here is a composite of Bantu and Arabic, with tributes to Persian, Portuguese, English and Hindi.
The architectural dialect is also complex: a dulcet dialogue between African, Arab, Indian and European influences.