A different sort of spice girl on Freddie Mercury’s island
Big-bottomed dancers are a must at Zanzibar’s music festival, says Chris Jagger
THE two most famous people to come from Zanzibar both became exiles. One, the 19th Century Princess Salme Said, was the daughter of the Sultan of Oman who ruled the slavetrading island. She scandalously eloped to Hamburg with a German engineer who was subsequently run over by a horse-drawn tram.
The other was Farrokh Bulsara, or Freddie Mercury to you and me, who left when he was just nine and came to London via Bombay.
But his music was as far as you might get from that played when I visited the island off the African coast for the Sauti za Busara festival, held each February.
The action kicked off in the late afternoon at the old fort in Stone Town, the faded capital of the old Sultanate. The first acts were the more amateur – school groups and younger artists – and I enjoyed their more natural sound.
The audience at this time of day was sparse, and small children ran around as parents kept an eye out.
A slip of a lad twisted himself inside out, then danced and tumbled across the stage to energetic drumming from the Safi Theatre Group. They’d do well on a TV talent show.
Later on that Friday night, I caught N’Faly Kouyate, from Guinea, who played beautiful music on a kora – a West African harp made from a large gourd. The next evening I made a point of catching Sousou and Maher Cissoko. They are an unusual couple – she hails from a small village in Sweden and he from West Africa. Together they once drove from Sweden to Dakar in Senegal (it must have been in a Volvo), learning the music they had fallen in love with as much as each other.
The stars in African music are the drummers. A ten-minute rhythm break in the middle of a song is nothing. To enliven it further you need dancers, usually ladies with large bottoms – the bigger the better! The three women with Msafiri Zawose were a case in point. Playing djembe drums in a line, each took a turn to play a solo, backed up by the others keeping the rhythm. In between the smacking of the drum came the swinging of the arms and tossing of the head as though it might fall off.
The festival closed with Cheikh Lo, from West Africa, an amazing musician who learnt much at the feet of the master singer Youssou N’Dour. His band is as tight as James Brown’s in his day. Dressed like a flamboyant insect, Cheikh’s dreadlocks almost touch the floor. A compatriot plays the talking drum till it speaks volumes in tones like a wailing monkey. They have so much fun playing together that it’s a joy to watch.
By the end of the evening I was as tired as the waning moon falling into the sea. I chose to make my way along the beach, walking as far as the Mercury Bar. But you wonder how accepted Freddie would have been here, with his partying and openly gay stance. In Africa they have a closed mind when it comes to homosexuality.
Finally, a little shopping. The alleyways are crowded with tiny shops. There’s no packaging, no advertising, no middleman – how wonderful life once was. Under a covered area is the spice market, selling brown, orange and red cinnamon sticks, star anise, saffron and cloves. Spices were the source of the island’s great wealth, for which its forests were destroyed.
Later, away from Stone Town, I stopped at the Residence in the south of the island, run by the enthusiastic Yves Montel, where I relaxed in pampered luxury and attempted to recover. There I enjoyed the cuisine, sailing alone off the beach, and many hours of beachcombing.