GHOSTWATCH
Despite the lure of sun, sea and sand, ALAN MURDIE finds time for a spot of exotic ghost hunting Walls, locked doors and barred windows offer no protection against Popobawa
With the summer holiday season well upon us, I pause to reflect upon some ghost stories I collected during a holiday of my own taken earlier this year. Never having believed myself that ghost hunting should only be conducted in temperate climes and preferably restricted to the colder months (note the Borley ghosts were most active May-September and largely quiet in wintertime, a tribute to the lost potency of long-gone English summers) I duly headed off to the islands of Zanzibar, 30 miles (48km) from the coast of Tanzania, East Africa.
For centuries these exotic islands were a focal meeting point between black Africa and the Islamic world, creating a fabled society based around spices and the slave trade, until British pressure suppressed the latter. Ruled by Sultans from Oman, Zanzibar became a British Protectorate in the 19th century and was later the scene of the Anglo-Zanzibar War of 1896, the shortest armed conflict in history, a mere 32 minutes being taken to quell a rebellious anti-British ruler. The last Omani Sultan was deposed in a revolution by African revolutionaries in January 1964 and the country became a semi-autonomous region of the Republic of Tanzania.
Naturally, I will spare the reader descriptions of my days relaxing on the crystal sand beaches, swimming in sapphire blue seas, inhaling the scents of fragrant forests, and enjoying the delicious meals of lobsters, sea food and tropical fruits. What is important for us here is that come the swift fall of the tropical night on Zanzibar – as in Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner ‘with one stride comes the dark’ – many spots dotted around these beautiful islands are considered badly haunted. Locals I spoke to proved keen to share their stories of supernatural and fortean phenomena of every sort, interpreted through a prism of Islamic, Christian and traditional African beliefs. The most notorious spots were identified as the small islands of Pemba and Unguja, off the main island. All stories mentioned here should be understood as “alleged”.
On mention of ghosts in Zanzibar almost everyone I spoke to immediately exclaimed “Popobawa!” this being the name of the most dreaded of all entities on Zanzibar. [Editor’s note: see FT86:11 and Benjamin Radford’s feature, FT241:34-39. An alternative spelling is popo ubawa.] Having the solidity of an early mediæval European phantom rather than the ethereality of the typical Western ghost today, his name is known by all in the 20-45 age group. Many of these were growing up in the mid1990s when stories about him came to prominence, first in the Tanzanian capital of Dar es Salaam and then spreading out to Zanzibar and its islands. Popobawa is conceived as a sexually rapacious, semihuman male entity, sometimes glimpsed but often cloaked in invisibility, who invades homes and communities to molest and violate his victims. Scarily, walls, locked doors and barred windows offer no protection against him. Indiscriminately attacking men, women and children, who are paralysed in his presence and unable to resist his assaults, he is notoriously indifferent to age, gender, disability and selected point of penetration.
My youngest informants, who would have been scarcely more than infants at the time of this bisexual spectral rampage, tended to laugh at mention of his name. They viewed popobawa as a bogeyman figure who scared them as children but whom they now view as an example of quirky Zanzibar humour – some even jokingly linking him with Queen star Freddy Mercury, born on Zanzibar in 1946 but who left as a child and never returned. Not so the older generation. Whilst