Zanzibar makes no demands on the visitor, and that is a major attraction. There are no casinos or tattoo parlours or noisy bars or tall hotels ruining the beachfront. Paradise, in short. You are free to do what you came to do–laze by the sea.
Zanzibar makes no demands on the visitor, and that is a major attraction. You are free to do what you came to do–laze by the sea.
Zanzibar makes no demands on the visitor, and that is a major attraction. There are no casinos or tattoo parlours or noisy bars or tall hotels ruining the beachfront. Paradise, in short. You are free to do what you came to do–laze by the sea.
Zanzibar라이브 바카라 capital Stone Town saw the Anglo-Zanzibar War of 1896. It lasted about 38 minutes, and is the shortest in history. That is incredibly fast action in a place where leisureliness is the key to happiness.
The sand is white, the sea turquoise, and if you booked into the Xanadu Resort, even Kubla Khan would envy you, for it is a stately pleasure-dome. We were wined and dined and spa-ed and buttled beyond embarrassment. For the adventurous there were a slew of activities; for the chronically inert, sheer inactivity.
Is there a Sunil Gavaskar Stadium in Zanzibar? I remember reading about the foundation stone being laid a couple of years ago, but couldn’t find anyone who knew of its existence there. Perhaps next time…
“The land is semi-African in aspect; the city is but semi-Arabian,” wrote the British explorer Henry Stanley who met up with the missionary David Livingstone a few miles from where I remained inactive. Stanley, in his book How I Found Livingstone, says: “Zanzibar is the Bagdad, the Istanbul, if you like, of East Africa. It is the great mart which invites the ivory traders from the African interior. To this market come the hides, the timber, and the black slaves from Africa…” It is a book of colonial entitlement and racist condescension—“Arabs should marvel at the speed with which the white man라이브 바카라 caravan travelled to Zanzibar.”
Livingstone, who in his 32 years in Africa managed to convert just one person (who then reconverted), stayed in what is now the Livingstone House, the office of the Zanzibar Tourist Corporation. Many explorers set out from here. The old slave market is now a cathedral built to signify the end of one of the largest and open slave markets, and Livingstone라이브 바카라 role in its abolition.
Our voluble taxi-driver and guide may not have heard of Stanley but he was familiar with rock star Freddie Mercury, who was born in Stone Town. Some of his stories were even true. Born Farrokh Bulsara to a Parsi family, Mercury라이브 바카라 first name came from schoolfriends, and the second from either the Roman god or the lyrics of ‘My Fairy King’. Lead guitarist of Queen Brian May thought it was the latter.
The Freddie Mercury Museum is a tourist attraction; you can’t avoid it. The Bulsara family home located on one of Stone Town라이브 바카라 narrow, winding streets is now the Museum, inspired partly by a visit Brian May made there five years ago. Photographs, posters, handwritten notes all attempt to recreate the Mercury magic, staying strictly within his music and avoiding his lifestyle altogether in a place where 98 per cent of the population is Muslim.
There is no museum for Zanzibar라이브 바카라 other famous son, the Nobel Laureate Abdulrazak Gurnah. Reading him is an antidote to Stanley. In Paradise, a young boy, sold by his father into indentured labour, goes unwittingly on a slave-trading expedition into Africa라이브 바카라 interior. Paradise is a good description of Zanzibar, but what Gurnah writes about is the destruction of a tradition by colonialism.
“I grew up under British colonialism,” Gurnah wrote later. “Our rulers flashed past us in the streets or appeared in the feathery regalia they liked to wear on ceremonial occasions. In a sense, they were a fact of no significance in the life of a young person, just the source of dictates and regulations from a distance.”
At 18, Gurnah left Zanzibar, as a revolution raged after the departure of the British, saying, “I just thought, something better than this is possible.” He flew to England with false documents to pass off as a tourist. “I remember waking up and thinking, ‘What am I doing here?’” he said of his first night in Britain, where he now lives.
He put colonialism in perspective in an interview, “The intervention of Europe into all these places doesn’t just stop. It continues in various ways. It continues with the havoc left behind, but it also continues with those who have been carried away by it, or seduced by it.”
In Zanzibar, T-shirts, that repository of accumulated local wisdom, say–gently, for no one screams here—Hakuna Matata. It seems appropriate.
Suresh Menon is an author, most recently of Why Don’t You Write Something I Might Read?
(This appeared in the Print as 'Zanzibar Diary')