And Home Was Kariakoo (36 page)

In the following century, however, Portuguese power waned and in 1650 the Omanis expelled them from their territory. Omani naval prowess was considerable and they continued their offensive south until finally by 1698 they had wrested control of the entire East African coast as far as Kilwa. They failed to take Mozambique, according to a story related by Burton, only due to the treachery of the local “Banyans” (Indians). The last ruler of Zanzibar under
Portuguese hegemony was Queen Fatuma, whose palace is believed to be in Shangani on the site of Bait al Ajaib.

The Omanis belonged to the Ibadi sect of Islam, a minority distinct from the Sunnis and Shias, holding the belief that any person could be the rightful head of the Muslims. The Omani leader had thus a religious authority by tradition and was called the Imam. With greater global ambitions, however, the imams adopted the secular title of sultan. In 1827–28 Sultan Seyyid Said moved his capital from Oman to Zanzibar. The emergence of Zanzibar from a minor polity into the major Indian Ocean entrepot that it became has been attributed to his liberal trade policies and friendly relations with foreign businesses.

Almost all of the precolonial observations of Zanzibar come to us from foreign visitors—the explorers, tourists, businessmen, and government representatives who were charmed by it, but limited by their prejudices. However, one of the most fascinating accounts of the island comes from a native, Seyyid Said’s daughter Princess Salamah bint Said (b. 1844), who caused a major scandal by eloping with a German merchant; soon becoming a widow, she went on to write her memoir under the name Emily Ruete.

Memoirs of an Arabian Princess from Zanzibar
, published in Germany in 1886, gives us an intimate portrait of palace life as well as glimpses into island custom. Seyyid Said is remembered as a white-bearded kindly father and a devout and just sultan. (Burton considers him friendly, liberal, extremely superstitious, and not a good military general.) He had a number of wives of various nationalities, the principal among them a fearsome lady from the royal house of Oman, and a multitude of concubines. There were thirty-six children. Salamah’s mother was a Circassian. The language of the
court was Arabic, though in the sultan’s absence Swahili, Persian, Circassian, Turkish, Nubian, and Abyssinian might all be spoken at once. There was an abundance of food, similarly eclectic, and “every day thirty or forty or even fifty men brought loads of fruit on their backs.” The expensive and fair Circassian wives refused to sit with the dusky Ethiopians, and their offspring were called “cats” because of their blue eyes. The girls of the palace were educated in reading (from the Quran), the boys learned to write as well. And although Oman was the “motherland,” there was no desire by the young people to visit it, a remarkable, nineteenth-century instance of generational differences among immigrants and their growing alienation from the homeland:

Oman was ruled in the sultan’s stead by his eldest son Tueni, and every few years the sultan visited Oman. Salamah recalls his departure in 1853, when “a hush seemed to fall on the house.” He stayed away two long years, but ships plied regularly between Oman and Zanzibar and brought news and gifts from him. Finally one day a ship brought the glad tidings that the sultan was returning, and there was much anticipation. Weeks passed but he failed to arrive. His son Majid took a ship and went to look for him. One morning at prayer time, the fleet was sighted, but the ships all flew mourning
flags, and the islanders knew that their sultan had died. The year was 1856. Contrary to Islamic custom, the body had not been buried immediately at sea but brought to Zanzibar by his son Barghash, who had accompanied him.

A problem of succession arose. Should the Omani empire fall to the eldest son, Tueni, in Muscat, or Majid, in Zanzibar? It was decided, through British intercession, that Oman and other northern territories went to Tueni, while the East African coast (some 960 miles of it) and Zanzibar went to the fourth son, Seyyid Majid. Majid cuts a dashing figure in his full-length portrait at the Palace Museum. According to his sister Salamah, he was afflicted by seizures. He liked animals and kept fighting-cocks, and like his father he was friendly to foreigners; it was in his frigate that Burton and Speke left for the mainland to begin their East African Expedition. Majid is also credited with the founding of Dar es Salaam, which he named and began to construct but did not finish. And it was during his reign that Salamah eloped with the German Rudolph Ruete, escaping in the British warship appropriately called the
Highflyer
. He died in 1870.

Majid was followed by the heavy-set Barghash, who had twice in the past attempted to seize the throne from his brother. After the second attempt was foiled with the aid of British marines, he was sent into exile in Bombay, escorted by the redoubtable Indian merchant Tharia Topan. European colonial intentions were now overt, and British protection was becoming essential to Zanzibar.

In 1885, Princess Salamah, now Emily Ruete and a widow with three children, arrived in Zanzibar to claim her inheritance and reconcile with her family. There were four German men-of-war in the harbour, in addition to the
Bismarck
. Emily Ruete was a German subject. Her brother refused to see her, and the British consul-general apparently made no efforts to help. As she puts it, “Everyone familiar
with Zanzibar is fully aware that the Sultan rules but in small things, whereas the British consul-general manages the rest.”

The
Memoir
is a spirited account, feminist in tone and well ahead of Salamah’s times, and while critical of some Zanzibari ways, especially superstitions, she stalwartly defends Islam with a keen understanding of the faith and does not hesitate to challenge western customs. She had become a Christian in Germany, but we wonder if, with the spiritual knowledge she shows of her native faith, she did not remember Allah in private. At the end, expressing intense disappointment in her visit to Zanzibar, she sounds sad and even shrill. While saying how the islanders welcomed her, often in secret, she cannot help displaying her prejudices. Indians, whom she calls “blackfeet,” are despised: they are crafty “spies,” always devious and untrustworthy. “Negroes are very lazy” and she doubts if slavery would be completely abolished. (She is astute enough to inform us that many westerners did keep slaves in Zanzibar, often using them for more difficult labour.)

We might dismiss her prejudices simply as the attitudes of her times, were we not to recall the ignominous and timely escape from the island of her royal house only seventy-eight years later and the bloodbath of the revolution.

Kassam, a Zanzibari Asian, now lives in Toronto. He is a quiet and thoughtful man, a successful business consultant, with a large family. His wife is Goan, from Dar. In that considered, distant gaze he has, he often sees, I suspect, memories of Zanzibar. He grew up in Ngambo, the poorer and more bustling, and mainly African section on the other side of Creek Road; nevertheless he attended the prestigious King George VI Secondary School, with high-achievers of all races. Among his classmates was the novelist Abdulrazak Gurnah.
He shows me a senior class photograph on his smartphone. Arab, Asian, and African boys stare out intently at the camera. A youth member of the left-wing Umma Party, Kassam was at an ASP (Afro-Shirazi Party) fete on the eve of the revolution, when someone whispered to him that there might be trouble in the town later that night and he should go home early. Revolution was announced early next morning by crowds mobbing outside on the Asian street of Ngambo. People barricaded themselves inside their houses. He remembers a bullet zinging past him as he made a dash for the police station to get help. It was useless. The next day he was outside the Raha Leo Community Centre, where all the Asians had been commanded to gather, perhaps to receive a hectoring from John Okello. There he was recognized by someone as an Umma Party cadre and handed a rifle—which he surrendered when everyone else did, a few days later.

After the revolution, Kassam stayed on in Zanzibar and did his National Service by teaching at a school. Upon completion he asked permission—there was now a tightly controlled totalitarian state in place—to go to the U.K. to study medicine. He was refused. When he complained of favouritism, he soon found himself under surveillance, and his principal at school was questioned about him. He was warned against shooting off his mouth. At this time his father, running a shop in Dar es Salaam, died and Kassam found himself on the mainland supporting his siblings. He met his future wife, and they moved to Toronto. For many people from Dar or Nairobi, that would be the end of their African story. But Kassam is a Zanzibari. Once when I visited him at his house in Toronto, he called up his aunt in London to ask for a recipe for lamb chops; they spoke in Swahili. He returns frequently to Zanzibar and has had the primary school where he taught repaired and extended. He sends books there.

When I next visit Zanzibar, Kassam is there too, arranging for the opening of his renovated school by the vice-president of the country, and he proudly takes me there to show it. It is in the Unguja Ukuu area, to the southeast of the island, a lovely small school shaped like an open rectangle with classrooms all around, freshly painted, water pipes installed, the old desks back in place. It needs to be cleaned up to be occupied. On our way back we go to see the ruins of the ancient town of Unguja Ukuu. All that remains are a few brick stumps. A businessman has had the area cleared for construction. The following day Kassam takes me on a tour.

Starting from Shangani we walk towards Soko Muhogo—the former people’s market, now with modest shops and residences—and pass by the old Kutchi Bhatia community centre, a ramshackle house with a compound, now closed off; squatters have recently been removed from the site. Here the likes of the businessman Ladha Damji, custom collector to the sultan and facilitator to European travellers, would have attended for prayer and community gatherings. Next, Kassam shows me a large, gated apartment complex, consisting of twenty-seven flats on its three floors. This was where once the Golaranas lived. Their name literally means “slaves (or servants) to the king,” and they were low-caste Indians who did lowly jobs. The complex is a slum now, with a cluttered compound, and it’s variously occupied. From here we go to an Ithnasheri community mosque—a two-storey stone building, elaborately laid out with a prayer hall, a hall for community feasts, a kitchen, a place for shoes and to wash feet. Outside the prayer hall are pietistic sayings and prayers, and photos of holy men, including those of the ayatollahs Khomeini and Khamanei. This was the second Ithnasheri mosque on the island, and it was the one Kassam used to attend. He shows me the wall where his father once sat. The Ithnasheris proselytize
actively, and this mosque now happens to be the prayer house of the African Ithnasheris. We reach the Portuguese Gate, and sit down under a tree across from it and ask for a couple of coconuts to be cut. It’s March and sweltering.

Proceeding to Mnazi Mmoja ground, past the Hamamni (Persian Baths) area, we turn into Benjamin Mkapa—formerly Creek—Road, to reach Kassam’s old primary school. It looks old but solid, a two-storey affair with an open square courtyard where we come to stand with an attendant; familiar-sounding choruses come buzzing out in all directions from the classrooms—the sound inside any school. There’s an impressive assembly hall with a stage. This is now a high school, running two sessions of 1,500 kids, in the morning and afternoon.

We go to Ngambo, crossing at Darajani, an endlessly long street of shops, with residences on top, and thick with shoppers and mere idlers. The shops are owned by Arabs and a few Asians. Most Asians of course left after the revolution. People greet my friend warmly, calling out across the narrow street, “Weh, Tunda!” using the old family nickname, by which everybody still knows him. These are people he has known, or their children; people who never went away. This was the street, these the gulleys leading out, where he played as a child. He pokes his head everywhere. As I watch him in his typical island casuals, striding here and striding there, greeting this fellow and then that one, cheerful and loud, I can’t help wondering, Is this the same man—so formal in Toronto, speaking English, consulting his calendar, receiving business proposals on his smartphone, driving a sleek black Audi? Which one is real?

This street is also where all the Khojas lived, he tells me; and this street, I realize, is where my mother was born. There were lots of rapes here, he tells me with a nod. Nothing more need be said.

An old fellow in kanzu and kofia stops him for a chat. Kassam recently gave him a smartphone. It apparently does not work. I’ll give you another one, Kassam says. Does it have Bluetooth? the mzee asks.

We cross the old Creek Road again and tour the fish and meat market, stop for sodas once more, and there meet the veteran muhogo-seller Mamedi. His claim to fame is that he knows about all the old Hindi films, their stories, and the stories behind their making. As he tends to the muhogo on the grill, turning and picking out pieces for customers, he talks about the classics
Boot Polish
and
Awara
. How the fire in
Mother India
was real, after which Nargis, the star, married Sunil Dutt; how she later financed the films of the legendary Raj Kapoor, with whom she had an affair.

One person who did not leave after the revolution is Mr. Chagpar, my friend Habib’s father. “You ask me why I stayed,” he tells me. “I stayed in order to recoup what I lost.” I don’t quite believe this, because he seems so completely a Zanzibari, and I cannot see him surviving in the stiff formality of Nairobi, where his wife went away with the kids and later divorced him. He is a tall and dark well-built man wearing a cotton jacket and a red fez. His office, next to the Khoja khano, is a medium-sized cluttered shopfront, in which he sits behind a large desk. The ceiling is high and he has built a loft, to which he can repair for his privacy. So completely a man of the place, who’s stayed here through thick and thin and on familiar terms with everybody, he is also a raconteur of a somewhat cynical bent, with many stories to tell, most of which he says are so sensitive that he will leave them for posterity.