Reading this week:

• Status and Identity in West Africa edited by David C. Conrad and Barbara E. Frank

It only occurred to me after posting the last one that this should really be Zanzibar III. But alas. I left you off last time after we had finally made to Zanzibar and wandered both into and out of the Freddie Mercury Museum. My whole thing with Stone Town is that it is not very big. You can, if you are determined, and don’t get caught up in too many shops, see pretty much everything in a day I think. It was easy to go directly from museum to museum. So off we were to the slavery exhibition at the Christ Church Anglican Cathedral.

I went to the same exhibition last time I was in Zanzibar and found it very impressive. This time a tour guide took us around the church which is an experience I don’t remember from before. We must not have gone in. It was indeed pretty interesting to see the inside of the church and in there our guide gave us a history of the east African slave trade. My most significant takeaway is the particular way the guide said Bagamoyo (“bwaaaga, bwaga moyyy-yo”) to emphasize the etymology which apparently means “to lay down your heart” in Swahili. Inside the church there is also a cross made from the wood of the tree under which Livingstone’s heart was buried. I don’t actually think the list of objects made from that tree is too long, but here is a chunk of it and here is another chunk of it (different from the chunk of a the tree under which he met Stanley) and I reminded of all the pieces of George Washington’s house that I’ve seen in various museums and things and you wonder how any of it could be left. To be clear none of the original Livingstone tree is left but you get my point.

After the interior of the church we visited the holding cell/dungeon where the enslaved persons were imprisoned to await being sold. Then we were left on our own to visit the exhibit itself. Here the lack of sleep from the night before was starting to hit us, so we did not have the wherewithal to read every portion of all the signs. As I have done much more reading on the slave trade in the years between my visits I now understand there is more nuance than I had thought in the story that is displayed, but I still think the exhibit is very good. My super amazing wife and I learned most significantly that Connecticut was a major center of the ivory industry. Next time we are up there we will have to figure out a way to explore that subject more deeply.

From here we were drawn closer to the orbit of our hotel, Emerson Spice. We managed to run into a new Zanzibari museum for me, the Princess Salme Museum. A slightly surreal experience; we thought it was closed, but someone was in there and took our fee, and then promptly disappeared. Later the museum’s proprietor showed up, also surprised about the lack of his colleague. One of the two mentioned that it was “the smallest museum in the world” though having been to the Freddie Mercury museum I’m not sure it’s the smallest museum in Stone Town. There is quite a bit of scholarship in there and we learned a lot about Princess Salme, aka Emily Ruete. She had quite the life and certainly had to scrap for herself. We both fought the urge to buy a copy of her memoirs, each thinking about our large stacks of unread books at home. Before we departed the museum the proprietor took our pictures at the museum for us and put rose water on our hands as he wished us on our way. Then, if I am recalling the series of events correctly, we ducked into an art exhibit being put on by Emerson themselves, which was fairly moving.

Three-ish museums and we hadn’t even had lunch yet, which we rectified by going to a Lanzhou noodle place. This is noteworthy because my super amazing wife had the eponymous noodles in Lanzhou and really enjoys them and now here we were in Zanzibar of all places having the noodles. We tried to go back the next day but they did not have electricity so we were glad we got to go at least once. It also fueled us up adequately to do some Tanzanite shopping, which we were doing at the behest of some relatives. This was less intimidating than anticipated; all the salespeople were very nice and not pushy. But this was after visiting Tippu Tip’s house. I had thought I had done this the first time I was in Zanzibar because back in those days I only had a paper map to go off of and misinterpreted the building, but now I could be sure. Plus the sign was a good indication I was in the right spot this time.

From there the day wound down until we were enjoying cocktails and then an astounding multi-course meal on the room of the Emerson Spice Hotel. The courses were all creative and delicious and produced somehow in the tiny open-air kitchen, also on the roof. In my last post I commented how it was nice to be in a medina and linked to our trip to Fez, but over dinner that night my super amazing wife pointed out that Stone Town was more like Tangier, both in seaside color scheme and in being an international entrepôt. Wherever it is I was glad we were there.