Day 4 – Zanzibar: Outside the Frame

The clip cost thirty dollars. It happened on the sandbank at Nakupenda, in the middle of the day, but it is where I have to begin. A young man had approached us while Lorena and I were walking on the sand before lunch, and offered to film the two of us strolling along the last strip of it, romantic and apparently alone. Lorena was against it. I pushed, and I won, which I regretted almost at once, because to make us look alone he began shouting at the other tourists to clear off, chasing them off their patch of sandbank so that our fake solitude could be recorded. It was excruciating for both of us. By the end we were laughing, which did not entirely cancel out the shame of it.

We had booked the Prison Island & Nakupenda Sandbank boat tour through the hotel. The boat was a dhow, and the small group turned out to be good company: a Ugandan couple on honeymoon, a Portuguese photographer, an American family, a pair of Canadians, and Colin, an Irishman from Dublin fresh off climbing Kilimanjaro, with whom I got into a proper argument about whether Dublin 4, where he lives, or Dublin 6, where we do, is the more posh. Half an hour out from Stone Town, the water changed under us, deep blue giving way to turquoise and then to something almost clear as we came up on Prison Island.

The American family was a mixed one: he American, she Tanzanian, and at some point he told me, cheerfully, that “for an American it takes thirty cows” to marry a Tanzanian woman, the traditional bridewealth he had had to pay for her.

The Prison Island’s real name is Changuu. The British built a prison here at the end of the nineteenth century and never used it for the prisoners it was meant for; before that, the island had held enslaved people, and afterwards the prison buildings became a quarantine station for travellers suspected of carrying yellow fever. You walk through the ruins now with the sun coming through the gaps and the vegetation grown back over everything, and the sea outside is so absurdly beautiful that the history refuses to sit still in your mind.

Then you meet the tortoises. The Aldabra giants move under the trees, enormous and unbothered, some of them well over a century old, the first few brought from the Seychelles in 1919. We could touch them and feed them. Everyone around us was doing the same thing, phones out, looking for the photograph, while the tortoises kept walking at their own pace, as if we were the ones who had got the speed of things wrong.

From there the boat went on to the Nakupenda sandbank, a strip of white sand in the open sea that vanishes at high tide. A seafood barbecue was laid out with tropical fruit, there were a lot of other people, and the sand was as white as anything I have seen. It was here, walking on it before lunch, that the video happened. And it was here that the American decided to start snorkelling just as we were due to leave. We waited on the boat over twenty minutes, his Tanzanian wife growing more furious and more frightened as he failed to reappear, because at high tide the sandbank goes almost completely under, and if he had not come back when he did, he would have been stranded alone in the middle of the sea.

We came back to Stone Town in the afternoon.

Below and beside the Anglican Cathedral, which was built on the site of the last slave market, is the memorial and the old holding cells. We went down into them. Low, dark, airless rooms where people were kept before sale. Our guide told us his own ancestors had been enslaved people, brought from further south and left on the island. After that, I listened to him differently. The underground cells and that man are what I carried out of Stone Town more than anything I bought or photographed.

In the evening, we watched the sun go down from the guest house terrace over the whole city, then went to a taarab concert at the Dhow Countries Music Academy near the seafront. Taarab is Zanzibar’s traditional music, sung in Swahili and drawing on Arab, Indian, and African elements, played on oud, violin, qanun, and percussion. Afterwards, one of the performers, Zuwena, a singer and teacher there, stayed and talked with me and a few others from the audience. “Taarab is Zanzibar when it stops describing itself and starts to sing,” she said.

Practical Notes

Where I stayed

Second night at Treasures of Zanzibar House, Tharia Street, Stone Town (details in Day 3).

What I visited

Islands boat excursion (Prison Island, Nakupenda sandbank), booked through the hotel, by dhow in a small group.
What it cost: $25 per person.
What happened: Prison Island has the Aldabra giant tortoises and the old prison and quarantine ruins; you can touch and feed the tortoises. Nakupenda is a sandbank that disappears at high tide, with a seafood barbecue lunch laid on. It is busy, and hawkers work the sand; a man filmed a “romantic” video clip of us for $30 and cleared other tourists out of shot to do it.

Anglican Cathedral, former slave market and memorial, Stone Town. Visited in the late afternoon after the boat trip.
What it cost: $5 per person.
My take: the underground holding cells were what stayed with me.

Taarab concert, Dhow Countries Music Academy (DCMA), near the seafront. Regular evening concerts, intimate room.
What it cost: $7 per person; concert starts at 20:00. Booked in person at the venue.

One thing I’d do differently

I would have skipped the paid video on the sandbank. Chasing other people off the sand to fake a moment alone was the least honest thing we did all day.