LMS in Bembaland I

Reading this week:

  • Tribal Cohesion in a Money Economy by William Watson
  • Ancient Light by Dr. Melanie King

Our series on “things I found in the SOAS archives” continues. These will be some rather lengthy letters and reports, so I will split it up into a few posts. This series of letters (almost) all have to do with the missionaries “opening up” Bemba country, or as they called it Awemba country. Driven by missionary zeal, they of course wanted to get as many converts as possible, and maybe more importantly prevent other denominations from getting converts.

When the London Missionary Society had first arrived on the southern shores of Lake Tanganyika and worked among the Lungu and Mambwe people, the Bemba were considered warlike and unapproachable. The Bemba had apparently softened a bit over the years, I think not least in the face of encroaching British colonial expansion (I wrote that sentence, and then read Tribal Cohesion in a Money Economy which tells me “in 1898 the British pacified the Bemba” so there you go). The LMS in turn had attempted to make approaches into Bemba territory, and in 1894 Reverend William Thomas and Alexander Carson went on an expedition down to Bemba country alongside Kalulu and Pondella, the headman of I think Niamkolo village. That trip is reported on in the January 1895 edition of the Chronicle. They were able to see Chief Ponde, though the messages coming from the Chitimukulu (they spell it Kitimkuru) were not welcoming.

Flash forward a bit to 1900 and the picture had changed. It now seemed possible to go and settle and set up missions in Bemba country, and various missionary societies were banging on the door to be let in. Long time readers will recall that I visited Chilubula Mission near Kasama, founded in 1899 by the White Fathers. This is in Bemba territory. The British colonial authorities, I gather, were much more sympathetic to the LMS because we can’t forget that the White Fathers were not only papists, but also French (I want to be clear I have no horse in this race but I am trying to convey what I think were the attitudes of the local authorities). So around this time they were preventing the White Fathers from extending their mission much farther into Bemba territory in order to allow British protestant missionaries to get a foothold first. But there would be only so long they could hold the White Fathers back.

Hence, this letter from James Hemans to the LMS Foreign Secretary Rev. R. Wardlaw Thompson:

Niamkolo

Jan 6 1900

Dear Mr. Thompson,

After a conversation with the Resident Magistrate, a day or two ago, I am constrained, so take on myself, to write to you without delay, re Kazembe’s village – the one to which the late A. Carson went in 1894 in view of opening up work there. The whole country is now opened; Kazembe’s village alone has a population of 7,000; & there are other smaller villages near.

It is felt that should a station be not opened there at once, the Society will be losing an opportunity never to be regained.

If I were to wait to bring the matter before the Committee, it would take some time before anything would be decided; & the opportunity may then be lost when you hear of it; thus I write. There is no other village in Central Africa with even half that population. When the late Mr. Carson went to see Kazembe, he was greatly adversed to missionaries or any white man coming to his place, but he is now changed – he is submissive to law & authority. It is, from all accounts, a very populous country, & is expected to be the country of the future.

It is believed that should the coming dry season be passed over, the opportunity will be lost.

With united kindest regards, Believe me, Yours faithfully,

J.H.E. Hemans

LMS Land Swap Letter

A mea culpa: just two posts ago I talked about how I didn’t really have an explanation for the above map (and an accompanying letter), which was illustrating land that the London Missionary Society was swapping with the British South Africa Company (BSAC) around their Niamkolo station. That post was part of this ongoing series where I put online things I found in the SOAS archives, and this post continues that because if I had scrolled a little bit farther down in my file I would have found the answer. I didn’t fail to do that just to stretch two posts out of it, I was just silly. I had speculated in the previous post that maybe the answer was trains; much more excitingly, it was boats!

The letter transcribed:

Tanganyika Concessions Co. Abercorn

Dec 4th 1900

Dear Sir,

                Mr. Irwin, our Traffic Manager, who is about to put together our steamer “Cecil Rhodes” on the lake, has carefully examined the two sites that I had chosen, namely Niamkolo and Kasakalawe. Mr. Irwin has decided to build his steamer at Kasakalawe because he is in hopes of getting there erected houses and sheds of the Flotilla Company. Also there is a good road to the place and no uncertainty about freehold possession. However, there is no anchorage there and Niamkolo is the only possible place where we could with safety erect our patent slipway, being an ideal anchorage. In the future we shall have to find some good anchorage for the repairing & docking of our steamer & other companies’ steamers. The other Cos will probably gladly avail themselves of our slipway.

                I therefore shall ask your Committee to consider whether you would let us have permanently one half square mile at the mouth of the straight opposite the island by the shore, about 2 ½ (or 2) miles from the Mission house, & out of sight of it. A road would be made to it from Abercorn, which would skirt the [?] village at some distance – we should be glad to pay for this land, to give you a site in the new Abercorn, which will be begun next year, and which is absolutely the property of our Company, and to grant you special rates in steamer passage & transport on Tanganyika – the B.S.A. Co. have the right to ground enough in our new town to build there their offices, but they will not encourage anybody to build outside our township, except at very large prices as they wish our Company to succeed. I have no doubt that Mr. Codrington will grant us the 2 square miles that I have applied for at Kasakalawe to make an official port, but we would far prefer to be at Niamkolo, as a better anchorage. If there is a possibility of a mile square being sold to us at Niamkolo, we would let Kasakalawe lapse & make the official port at the former place, but if only half or quarter mile is allowed us we shall only be able to put a few [?] and our slipway there – A half-mile would possibly be ample – a quarter mile is rather cramping.

                Kindly let me know the Committee’s views on the subject. I hope that if you consult your Directors at home you will be good enough to forward them a copy of this letter. This would be more direct than if I sent a copy through my Directors to yours.

Believe me, yours faithfully,

M.J. Holland, Lake Tanganyika Concession Co Ltd

And photos of the letter itself:

“M.J. Holland” I assume must be Michael James Holland. He worked for Tanganyika Concessions Limited, which was nicknamed “Tanks,” an appropriate moniker for an inherently dispossessive colonialist enterprise. Though still different, it seems to have been closely related to the BSAC. But for our purposes, as you can see from the letter the important bit is that they were putting together the Cecil Rhodes. Loyal readers will recall that I visited the boat’s boiler, which still lies in the village of Kasakalawe right to the west of Mpulungu. I didn’t find it last time I looked, but this page and this page contains more information on the Cecil Rhodes, including pictures of the hulk as it rests on the Tanganyika lakebed.

According to the letter, Tanganyika Concessions was looking for a place to build and anchor the Cecil Rhodes. The LMS was sitting on the best anchorage around so they asked to do a land swap. If my assumption in the previous post that the letter dated July 12, 1900 had something to do with this land swap, then something must have been discussed prior to the above letter, dated five months later. But everything must have worked out between the LMS missionaries and Tanks because according to The Great Plateau of Northern Rhodesia the Cecil Rhodes was launched in October 1901. The above-linked Mr. Codrington described Lake Tanganyika’s merchant marine in a May 1902 article in The Geographical Journal:

The vessels now plying on Tanganyika are – the “Tanganyika Concessions” steamer Cecil Rhodes (twin screw), with a carrying capacity of from thirty to forty tons; the German Hedwig von Wissmann, with about an equal capacity; the African Lakes Corporation’s steamer Good News, with a carrying capacity of twenty tons; and the Congo Free State schooner, carrying about one hundred tons. Some five or six dhows, the property of Arab and Greek traders, compete in a small way with the European-built vessels. The lake, though said to be more stormy than Nyasa, is considered a safe waterway by the skippers of the vessels, no dangerous rocks being reported. The level of the lake in June, 1901, was 4 or 5 feet higher than in the corresponding month of 1900, the Lukuga outlet having again silted up.

A couple points of the above: by this time the LMS had sold the Good News to the African Lakes Corporation, explaining the ownership status. I did notice the conflicting dates with the fact Mr. Codrington’s journey started in June 1901, before The Great Plateau says the Cecil Rhodes was launched. And finally, before looking into this again I had never heard of the “African International Flotilla and Transportation Company” and so I will have to research more. Nor do I have any idea what the 100-ton Congo Free State schooner could be. So many more questions than answers out of one short paragraph.

But again back to land swaps. Not only did it all work out for the Cecil Rhodes and Tanks but that land is still where the Mpulungu Harbor Corporation is today. It is not immediately clear to me what the exact corporate lineage is between the Tanganyika Concessions Company and the MHC but I am sure it is interesting. Also very interesting is this cool video about the Mpulungu Harbor Corporation from four years back:

Tanganyika Sailing Directions

We return to our series on “things I took pictures of in the SOAS LMS archives” with two more maps, these ones drawn by Ed Hore:

Sailing directions for the middle of Lake Tanganyika
Close up of Plymouth Rock (Bendela) and Kavala Island

Reviewing my notes I don’t think I noted when these are dated, if indeed they came with dates. I think it might be around 1881. I included transcriptions of some letters from Hore in this post, and in the 1881 letter he is discussing the prevailing winds and some of the different port conditions around the lake as an argument for a sailing ship with steam auxiliary for the Good News. Since the maps are of sailing conditions and have bits marked as “dangerous,” they might be in support of the themes of the letter. Plus, Plymouth Rock/Mtowa is marked on both maps. This station was established by Rev. William Griffith and Walter Hutley in October 1879 (that story is covered here and also in the March 1880 edition of the Chronicle). What is not particularly marked on the map though is Kavala Island (the second map marks it but the first map only has a couple dots).

The lack of Kavala is significant because that is where Hore established the headquarters of the LMS marine station, from 1884 (Chronicle, November 1884) until I think Hore’s departure from the mission in 1888. So if the map was drawn after 1884 I think Kavala would have been much more prominently marked. Now the rest of this post will be sharing some relevant links and thoughts about Kavala Island. Hore had established the Marine Station up there when the mission thought the north end of the lake was going to be much more important to them, with iterant missionaries doing lacustrine preaching. Instead they wound up settling on the south end of the lake and into modern-day Zambia.

I’m not sure exactly where on Kavala the Marine Department was, though I think it was maybe right about here. This is based on trying to recreate the woodcut of the station in Google Earth. This technique has led us astray before but for now it’s all I got. First, the woodcut. The picture at the very top of the post comes from Tanganyika: Eleven Years in Central Africa, Hore’s book about his experience with the mission. When I was looking at the fold-out picture of Ujiji, I found out it was based on an earlier illustration. Turns out the picture of Kavala is too, though in this case it is still referencing Hore’s experience, being from a write-up of his missionary work in The Graphic in June 1890 (two years before Hore’s book). The book’s picture is a little different from the The Graphic, showing a more permanent house and road, but the background showing the mainland from across the strait looks the same, and in Google Earth you can get pretty close to the same picture.

Of course the dream would be to go to Kavala and tromp around and see if I could see it in real life. That would be difficult given visas and language and location, and anyway there probably wouldn’t be anything left to find without significant archeological work, but a boy can dream. There is also not a lot of documentary evidence online about what Kavala Island looks like on the ground as far as I can find. I linked to it for Plymouth Rock above but this website about cichlids (Tanganyika’s most famous export) has some photos of Kavala aka Bilila Island (like Zanzibar, apparently Kavala refers to the group of islands). Then besides that, this man visited the island, though the YouTube video of the trip doesn’t show much of the island at all (start right at the 13-minute mark):

And that are some maps of sailing directions and some more bits about Kavala Island. Lake Tanganyika’s long and interesting history continues.

Map of LMS Niamkolo Station

As you all will recall I went to visit the London Missionary Society archives at SOAS back when we visited the UK. I am trying to put the stuff I dug up online. I already did some of this, putting the real exciting photos and things up already. I already put one map up, but now here are two more maps, these of the Society’s stations at what is now Mpulungu:

Map dated June 28, 1901
Map dated June 2, 1902

I say “what is now Mpulungu” because according to the Wikipedia page for Mpulungu, the harbor was only built in 1930 and presumably the town grew up around that. The LMS referred to the location and Niamkolo. The maps above still map pretty closely onto a more modern-day map of Mpulungu. Niamkolo church is marked on Google Maps which provides a reference point. The Lunzua River is marked on both maps though it is not plotted as accurately. By the time of the maps though the stone Niamkolo church had been abandoned for healthier climes at a more elevated spot, labelled in the first map as “Present Station” and in the second map as “L.M.S. Station.” I think the newer spot must be the location where the photo at the top of this page was taken, which was covered in this post.

In the first map there is red and blue shading referring to a land swap arrangement between the LMS and the British South Africa Company (BSAC). I am not quite sure what is going on there. If the Wikipedia is right, no one would have been too interested in what is now Mpulungu harbor for another couple decades (outside of missionary work). By chance I took photos of another letter (transcribed below with photos at the bottom) from John May, answering a question from headquarters about the LMS’ landholdings in Niamkolo, Kawimbe, and Kambole. So clearly something was being contemplated but as for what that was is still buried in the archives. Though they are still discussing extending a railway to Mpulungu; maybe BSAC was contemplating it even then?

Kawimbe

July 12th, 1900

Dear Sir,

                In reply to your letter of March 2nd, 1900, I am sending you the following information trusting it is what you require:-

I. (1) The property belonging to the Society in the Central African Mission is –

Land at Kawimbe and Niamkolo.

A brick dwelling-house, and wattle-and-daub buildings at Kambole.

(2) The property at Kawimbe is held in the name of the Rev. D.P. Jones of this Mission, on behalf of the Society.

That at Niamkolo in the name of Alfred James Swann, Esquire, formerly in this Mission; on behalf of the Society. Mr. Swann agreed to the conditions attached to the deeds, on behalf of the Society.

(3) With regard to Registration, Certificates were granted by H.M. Vice-Consul and Deputy Commissioner, on May 25th 1893, recognizing the claims to the above property as legal and valid.

I believe the property is registered at Zomba, B.C.A. Protectorate.

(4) No quit rent, no other payment, has to be made for the said property.

II. The following information, abstracted and quoted from copies of the Certificates of Claim for the estates at Kawimbe and Niamkolo, may help to make the above points clearer; – as the wording is almost identical in the two certificates, I quote the common words once only, inserting K and N with the variations, standing for Kawimbe and Niamkolo respectively:-

“I, Alfred Sharpe, —- do hereby certify that I have enquired into the claim of (K) David Picton Jones of Fwambo, (N) Alfred James Swann of Niamkolo; in the Tanganyika District of the British sphere north of the Zambezi, on behalf of the London Missionary Society, to have purchased an estate in fee simple at (K) Fwambo, (N) Niamkolo, aforesaid from the Chief (K) Mukangwa, (N) Kitimbwa, on (K) November 13th 1891, (N) September 25th 1891; and having ascertained that there are no valid counter-claims to the possession, and that the vendor above-cited was the sole and only rightful owner of the land on which the said Estate was situated and of which it formed an integral part, I declare the above mentioned claim of (K) David Picton Jones, (N) Alfred James Swann, as representing the London Missionary Society to be established and to be recognized as legal and valid by the Government of her Britannic Majesty under the following conditions:”-

(1) Boundaries.

(2) Society to pay cost of surveying Estates.

(3) Official consent to be given to removal of existing villages, etc. on the Estates.

(4) Royalty of 5% to be paid to the Government on minerals found on the Estates.

(5) Government has the right to make public roads, railways, or canals, across the Estates.

(6) Government has the right of control over water not wholly included in the bounds of the Estates.

“And in witness to the validity of the above mentioned claim of the said (K) David Picton Jones, (N) Alfred James Swann, as representing the London Missionary Society, subject to the foregoing six conditions, I have hereunto set my hand and seal this Twenty Fifth day of May Eighteen hundred and Ninety three at Blantyre, British Central Africa Protectorate.

(signed) Alfred Sharpe, H.M. Vice Consul and Deputy Commissioner

“I, Alfred James Swann on behalf of the said London Missionary Society, do hereby agree to the foregoing six conditions which are attached to this recognition of the claim of the said London Missionary Society.

(signed) Alfred James Swann.”

III. We have applied again for an extension of the Niamkolo Estate, and for a grant of land at Kambole. We understand there will be no difficulty in getting a secure title to this extra land. The draft deeds would be made out in the name of the London Missionary Society Corporation, and would of course be submitted to the Board for approval before completion.

I am, dear Sir, Yours very faithfully,

John May

Secretary, Tanganyika D.C. [District Committee]

And the original letter:

Zanzibar IV: Seaside Rendezvous

Well folks here we are at the grand finale of our Tanzania adventure. We awoke for our last morning in Stone Town and asked the hotel to hold our bags as we wandered around one more time. Here for the first time in our entire end-of-the-rainy-season safari did we see rain and for a while there it came down in absolute buckets. That was a lovely time though as we spent it in a café looking out through the open windows at the downpour, warmed by Zanzibar tea and coffee. It lightened up just in time for us to try to get Lanzhou noodles again, only to be thwarted by a lack of electricity. Instead we lunched at a different Chinese place I had been to before, my last full circle moment before we left Stone Town for the beach.

Going to the beach is of course inevitable in Zanzibar and we embraced it as a last few days of calm and tranquility before making the long journey back home and back to work. We stayed at Sharazad in Jambiani, and after a serpentine car ride around various road constructions we arrived in the midst of another torrential downpour. It was at the beach that we saw the most rain but even then it was mostly sunshine. The hotel was very nice. There were I think four pools if I counted correctly, including a secluded one conveniently right outside our room.

Besides lounging poolside we could also lounge next to a forest which came with monkeys. They had the run of the place though they mostly kept to themselves. The waiters never had to shoo them away from breakfast. Now that I am thinking of all the hotels we stayed at monkeys were only a slightly less standard accoutrement than juice. Very fun to see though mostly we only heard them as they rustled through the treetops.

When not lounging there were yoga classes my super amazing wife took advantage of. When she was doing that I instead took advantage of the hammocks to do some reading. We both got a lot of reading it, making this vacation one of the rare instances of me successfully reading all the books I had brought along. Usually my eyes are too big for my stomach.

Who can say what those azure waves will do?

We barely left the hotel. We had meant to and were very much looking forward to a seaweed tour we had pre-booked. But after our arrival and much conversation with the hotel desk we mutually discovered that the tides would not support a seaweed tour. Tragic but I was very understanding as tides are notoriously unpredictable. As far as we got were some long walks up and down the beach. The entertainment these provided were several fold. One, we could admire the menus of nearby hotels and imagine that we might eat there instead of our own hotel what with the subtle menu changes we could have experienced. Another were the Maasai warriors with their mobile souvenir stands offering to show us their wares. And then third were the kite surfers. I think most of the ones we saw were the guys who worked at the resorts and tried to sell you kitesurfing lessons and by golly they were very good and very impressive.

When not out and about we did manage to get lunch and a show when some kids put on their best acrobatic acts in order to draw us to their wares, a smaller pile than those of the Maasai warriors but the warriors never gave us a show. No matter, we bought from neither. Also, charmingly, a family of elephant shrews was promised to be living next to the dining area, though I wasn’t honored with the presence as far as I ever noticed. And yeah. It was the beach. Lounging, relaxing, bliss. Eventually though it did have to end. We left in the wee hours of the morning to make the drive back to the airport. The Zanzibar airport was much more polished when heading out via the international terminal than when arriving via the domestic terminal. We spent the last of our shillings and looked forward to lunch in Nairobi. I may chase some of the same experiences these British travelers did a century and a half ago but even I admit air conditioning can be nice sometimes. I can’t wait to come back.

Zanzibar III: We Will We Will Cook You

Darajani Bazaar

I went with a Queen song title for the first Zanzibar post and it has become much harder to keep it up than I thought so I am sorry. After a glorious night of sleep in a hotel we actually wanted to be at we woke up the next day to the sun streaming into our window. We enjoyed yet another marvelous breakfast on the room of the Emerson Spice Hotel and just hung out until it was time for the day’s adventure, a spice tour and cooking class.

Our guide picked us up in the hotel lobby and after an in-briefing when we picked the meal we were going to cook he led us on foot over to the Darajani Bazaar to do some shopping. That was a lot of fun going through the bazaar with someone who knew what they were doing and also knew what they needed to get. To give us the full experience he went through a routine where he chatted with the sellers and then told us the word in Swahili to say and then gave us the money to pay for the vegetable or spice we were buying. It was all very thrilling.

This wasn’t our taxi but might have been cool if it was

Then we found a taxi and we were off to the spice farm. In a throwback we were first served passionfruit juice but then it was time to cook.  They were in the midst of rebuilding the kitchen so we were under a pavilion on a mat which was a much cozier experience anyway. Our teachers were Hariun and Hazilah, two lovely women with tons of cooking experience. We sliced us some vegetables and started making the sauce, which unsurprisingly involved a lot of spices. We also made rice and a fish “soupu,” where they pre-boiled the fish and then used the fishy soup for other bits of the recipe. I say rice but it was a pilaf; we fried up some onions and other vegetables and then eventually put the fish in the middle of it and the whole thing was baked with coals on top of the pot.

For dessert we made a banana and coconut milk dish with cardamom and cinnamon. The most interesting part of this was making the coconut milk ourselves. I had never quite considered how coconut milk was actually made, I always figured it was maybe condensed coconut water or something? Clearly though that was wrong because what we did was spend time scraping out the coconut meat. During this process you are supposed to sing, they told us, though Hairun and Hazilah were generally too shy to sing in front of us. We all eventually did do some singing as we worked, that was fun. Then the coconut milk was made by adding some water to the meat shreds and then squeezing out the milk. The first squeeze gave “strong milk” for one part of the recipe and the second pressing a lighter milk. With lunch merrily boiling away we went out on the spice tour.

I dunno man I am a little disappointed by both spice tours I have been on. Very cool to see the different plants and stuff. But deep down maybe I am an infrastructure guy and what I want to see if the mass growing and harvesting of spices. Or maybe they don’t do it that way, maybe both the spice farms I have been to have in fact been intensive examples. We did both enjoy the tour for what it was but it was early afternoon and we were fading a bit. So, too, were the spice tour guys I guess. The guy that normally would have gone up the coconut tree, singing all the way, told us that the clouds were wrong and he couldn’t do it. I think he had just done it for some other guests 10 minutes before and didn’t want to do it again. We didn’t really want him to do it either so good thing about the clouds. We also got hats made for us out of leaves but mine was taken away because apparently I got the design for women; gender essentialism much? I thought I rocked it.

Anyways then we sat down to our lunch which was phenomenal if I do say so myself. I mean we couldn’t have done it without Hairun and Hazilah but still I did some good vegetable slicing and coconut squeezing there. After this we took the ride back to Stone Town. After relaxing a bit in the room we head out to get some shopping in for gifts for various relatives. Our big plans for the evening were also food-based, going to the Forodhani Night Market. With all the people hustling us to come to their stands the one we picked was the least hassle-y one. Our goal was a Zanzibar pizza and we went with the most classic option available. While we were waiting I got some fresh-squeezed sugar cane juice which was way better than I was expecting; it was great and I regret not getting more. As we sat down we gathered a small crowd of feline admirers which we very much enjoyed. For dessert we got a Nutella pizza, also very good, and then decided to go someplace quieter. We eventually concluded we could use a second dessert and had some drinks and sweets at The Secret Garden. It did in fact feel secret and garden-y and was a great way to wrap up the night.

Forodhani Gardens by night
Our fan club

Zanzibar II: Princess of the Universe

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.

Slave memorial
Inside of the church
Cross from the tree under which Livingstone’s heart was buried

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.

Interior of the Princess Salme Museum
Bit of the art exhibit; I also liked the ceiling

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.

In the streets of Stone Town

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.

Tippu Tip’s house, finally

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.

Zanzibar I: Don’t Stop Me Now

Forodhani Gardens by day

Reading this week:

  • Back to the Future: the Ultimate Visual History by Michael Klastorin with Randal Atamaniuk

A strange sensation, going back to a place. When I return to a spot I always think in physics terms. I imagine the paths I have taken in the intervening moments, winding across continents and over oceans and through grad school and marriage and career changes, and that in physics terms if I have wound up in the same spot then in net terms nothing has changed. I know a man cannot step in the same river twice, but we weren’t visiting a river, we were visiting Zanzibar.

To shift from melancholy into despair, I am now two for two having trouble getting to Zanzibar and arriving a day late. After a lovely morning hanging out in Kigoma we had arrived at the airport only to watch our departure time slip farther and farther away. The airport itself though (as discussed) is not much more than a shack with a metal detector in it does also feature a gift shop (more of a gift counter) of sorts selling jars of local honey and bags of dagaa, which is charming, along with a snack bar on the inside. But our boarding time came and went with no communication, no airplane landing on the tarmac, and conflicting information via our phones. Eventually though we did board only to sit there waiting, the flight attendant said, on “paperwork” as I slowly failed to come to terms that we would miss our connecting flight to Zanzibar. The final blow to my hopes and dreams was the announcement that instead of flying direct to Dar we would be going through Burundi which would have sounded fun except that I didn’t want to go to Burundi. So we arrived in Dar late at night, quickly gave up on the very lackadaisical (in our opinion) customer service guy on the ground, and got a taxi to the nearest hotel where we got maybe four hours of sleep.

Zanzibar at sunrise

Four hours of sleep because we were taking the first available flight the next day, which we had booked for surprisingly cheap. We had pondered taking the ferry, which I had enjoyed last time, but logistically it was easier to fly which is fairly wild. As we shuffled into the airport at five in the morning we thought maybe we could have taken a later flight, but it all worked out in the end when we arrived at our hotel still in time for the breakfast that came with the room we hadn’t gotten to use the night before.

Zanzibar at breakfast

And what a breakfast. Last time I visited Zanzibar I only wrote the one blog post about it because honestly I didn’t enjoy it all that much. It was interesting, and it was pretty, but for reasons I could never quite put my finger on it wasn’t that enjoyable. Now I think the reason was money, which we had more of this time around. That meant things like we could stay at the Emerson Spice Hotel, which was gorgeous and you got to eat a breakfast of fresh fruits and new Zanzibari pastries daily up on the rooftop overlooking the dense streets in the medina leading to the ever-beautiful Zanzibar Channel. Fortified, and with the trials of travel shedding from our shoulders, we were off to the races.

The races being the streets of Stone Town. It was a much more pleasant experience than I remember. As we poked around the shops and the Old Fort I felt less hassled. It very quickly got very hot though. Coming from the highlands of Tanzania we hadn’t expected such a significant temperature increase. Fortunately though there were places you could duck into with air conditioning, like the Freddie Mercury Museum. That was a fun visit. I hadn’t gone last time and it is very well done. It is like all namesake museums hagiography in that I question the scholarship, but it does have a whole bunch of artifacts and some very interesting stuff on Zanzibar. It is smaller than I expected and they really missed an opportunity for a gift shop but it was very fun to listen to his music and see his handwritten lyrics and find out about the history of Zoroastrianism on Zanzibar.

Young Freddie on his 5th birthday
Handwritten lyrics
Outfit from the Magic Tour 1986

And um I will leave it at that for the first blog post. It was good to be in Zanzibar and it was good to be back in Zanzibar. It was fun to be in the shops and it was fun to be with the love of my life and it was fun to be in a medina again after our trip to Morocco. More adventures await.

They fixed the sign

Kigoma VIII: Loose Ends

Reading this week:

  • Sultan to Sultan by M. French-Sheldon
  • Journey to the Source of the Nile by Christopher Ondaatje

After our very adventurous day going all around Kigoma and Ujiji, our next day and a half in Kigoma were pretty quiet. We mostly just hung out at the Kigoma Hilltop Hotel, enjoying the views and restaurant and pool. More exciting entertainment was provided by the waiters in the restaurant chasing away the monkeys that congregated to take advantage of the morning breakfast buffet. We also took a very lovely stroll down to the hotel’s beach. It is a rocky beach but we weren’t actually planning to swim anyways, and there are some lovely little beach huts down there and a very attentive attendant. And not to mention the views are pretty:

You can see the Hilltop Hotel atop the middle hill.

Before we travelled to Kigoma I had looked up various old pictures of Kigoma on the ole’ internet there and wanted to recreate some of them. I didn’t mention it but yet another spot we went on during our tour was of course the railway station. There is a police station around the front so you’re not particularly supposed to take pictures of that side, but on the tour I got a photo of the back. The old photo (a Flickr embed you can click on) is from 1954:

Africa Railways - Tanganyika Railway - TR Class ML 2-8-2 steam locomotive Nr. 600 (Bagnall 2832 / 1947) at Kigoma station (real photo postcard)

And just so you can really picture the scene below is looking the other direction; follow those tracks and you’ll get to Dar:

Who doesn’t love trains.

In the morning of the day we departed I took a long walk from the hotel into town to try to recreate a few more pictures, and left to my own devices I could get a photo of the front of the train station. In addition to the train station, the building behind it is also still there. As I was approaching the perspective for the shot the two “Cheetah” trucks pulled up blocking much of the view, but upon reflection I think they better illustrate the hustle and bustle of Kigoma these days compared to when you could apparently have a rather large lawn in the middle of what is now downtown (the below photo is from 1926):

Africa Railways - Tanganyika Railway - Scenes along the line at Kigoma (1926) - Kigoma station and the British HQ

One more photo I wanted to recreate is the one right here. That photo is actually from the Gordon-Gallien Expedition, but the only source I can find for it is via Getty and so I am afraid to embed it. But if you scroll to the top photo you can judge for yourself how I did.

As I was researching Kigoma you can some info about many different sites but they usually lack any sort of indication as to where they are in Kigoma. So I present you the below photo of of the Kaiser House. If you want to take a look at it yourself (or a look at the wall surrounding it anyway), it is here. Purportedly, it was built as a hunting lodge for Kaiser Wilhelm II when he was planning a trip to Kigoma in the summer of 1914. That trip got cancelled but the building remains. The same Wikimedia page I just linked to says it is used by the Tanzanian police but Lonely Planet says the regional commissioner lives there; perhaps these mean the same thing. I couldn’t get a much closer look than what is pictured here.

There are a couple mysteries I wasn’t able to solve while in Ujiji. The first is what and where the Cine-Atlas is. The second and more involved one is the location of the graves of Rev. John Thomson and Rev. Arthur Dodgshun. Each had died in Ujiji but what I learned reading The Central Africa Diaries of Walter Hutley is that they had been buried in Kigoma. The London Missionary Society thought they would be able to procure and build on land in Kigoma (where the harbor is better, important for the Good News), and so the two were buried closer to that area than the rented house in Ujiji. In his diary Hutley describes visiting the grave:

(May 24 [1880]) Since I went there before there has been the addition of another, viz. that of L’abbe Debaize, and at the head of each Hore has placed a stone which states the name and date of death of the deceased. Visiting these it brought up in my mind many recollections of each. I would have liked to have seen them alone, as that little spot seems almost hallowed with the remains of such dear friends. But we could not stay long to ruminate. Passing along the ridge of the hill we soon came to the brow which overlooks the market at Gungu…

Going off that I spent some time while we were lounging trying to figure out where this spot could have been; it would have been astounding to find the graves. While there I wondered if the graves could in fact be somewhere on the grounds of the Kigoma Hilltop Hotel as it is on a hill overlooking the harbor. But it was as I was writing these blog posts I finally spotted that on Ed Hore’s map of Ujiji (previously seen here) there are two different spots marked with graves; Thomson, Dodgshun, and Debaize must be the farther north one closer to the area marked “Mission Estate”:

If I had realized that earlier it would have narrowed the search, but perhaps it is for the best. We were visiting on the tail end of the rainy season, so if the graves were undisturbed they were probably overgrown with grass, and given the nearly 150 years the graves have been there, what are the chances they are undisturbed? So it would probably have been a long hot day tramping around people’s back yards for nothing. But then again as my dad said when we couldn’t do everything we wanted to do in Disneyworld when we visited as kids, you gotta save something for next time.

So at the end of all that, just a couple final pictures for you below. Unbeknownst to me as I was walking around Kigoma having a grand ole’ time seeing the sights was that the next step, getting ourselves to Zanzibar, was going to be dreadful. But until then, it was a beautiful day.

A view across Kigoma harbor.
Zebra from the hotel room patio.
One last sight of Ujiji from the plane.

Kigoma VII: Embroidery

The view before the descent into the fishing village.

Reading this week:

  • American Serengeti by Dan Flores

Our final formal event of our very fun day with Kigoma Eco-Cultural Tourism was the one nearest and dearest to Elizabeth’s (the owner’s) heart: learning to embroider traditional mashuka ya Kigoma. But first, lunch. This was very exciting because I finally got some ugali on this trip. It’s called nsima in Mambwe, and I ate it every day in Zambia, and I had been missing it. All the places we had been to so far catered a little too much to tourists to serve any ugali with dinner but now here we were at the very nice Juke Fast Food where they will serve you your goat stew with ugali and it was very good.

My super amazing wife and I did not know about mashuka ya Kigoma until we came to Kigoma, though the artform is purportedly known throughout Tanzania. What they are is bedsheets embroidered with fancy designs (“mashuka” being “sheets”). My super amazing wife and I had initially thought they might be something like taatit rugs, special sorta newlywed gifts, but they do not seem to be so narrowly employed. Instead, as far as well could tell, they are just fancy “good” sheets.

Examples of sheets embroidered by the co-op women being inspected by a co-op chick.

Although we were going to embroider some ourselves, first we did some market research by stopping by the market and researching the wares. This was extremely impressive. The women all unfolded the many, many examples they had. Some of the designs were very complex and very wild. A number had embroidered animals, like large zebras or peacocks. Others took more inspiration from pop culture, like one that had a swirling repeated Coca-Cola logo motif. Others were more geometric.

At the back of the market we saw some of the division of labor in the mashuka economy. Although Elizabeth assured me that there are women that do the same, we saw a setup where men were first creating the bedsheets themselves by sewing together two strips of fabric to create a single bedsheet (hey, again like taatit). I was tempted to think that meant the craft started with ‘merikani but that would be some irresponsible speculation. Neither Elizabeth nor Peter (our guide) could report when mashuka ya Kigoma started, except that it was apparently long ago. After the men create the bedsheet they then also draw the designs (again Elizabeth says some women do their own patterns). From these the women do the embroidery to decorate the sheet.

I do not know how they do it, it was so hard.

For most women who do this work it is a supplemental income method. When we visited the market on our walking tour all the women who were selling vegetables were also embroidering sheets as they waited for customers. The women we were going to be learning from do it in the afternoons. They are part of a co-op that Elizabeth helped organize. In the mornings the women work in their gardens and then after lunch all gather to hang out and embroider sheets. When we arrived they had already gotten started, so we all said our hellos and settled down to do some needlework.

Instead of starting in on a whole sheet my super amazing wife and I both had basically samplers. Elizabeth’s co-op focuses on more traditional geometric designs, executed with some basic stitches. By “basic” here I mean there is a set of standard ones they use and not “simple,” because the women tried to teach me and I just did not get it. Having tried my hand at it the most stunning thing about these sheets is how cheap they are. Each of these women fully embroiders a whole sheet in about two weeks and despite all that work we bought a sheet and pillowcase set (our samplers were really meant to be half a pillowcase each) from them for I think about $30. Having tried it this is bonkers to me. After a very short amount of time (it can’t have been an hour) sitting on a mat trying to embroider I was a broken man. My back ached and my legs were falling asleep and I just got progressively worse and worse at this M design this woman tutoring me tried to impart upon me. Quite the learning experience and a valuable and concrete lesson on the value of women’s work; I think those sheets should really be like $1000 each.

The fruits of my painful labor.

Eventually our backs and our egos were taken pity upon and Peter took us on a walk to “show us the environment.” This meant going down the hill to the little fishing village nestled in a cove. This was very pretty but also hot and long and in the end we had to walk back uphill which finished us off. But the village was very interesting to see. Of all the spots where we witnessed the rising lake levels this was the starkest. Out in the water was standing by itself the minaret of a former mosque. I guess the tower was made of concrete but the rest of the mosque had been made of mud brick so with the lake washing away the foundations the bricks had returned to just mud. The most fun part of it all was when one of the fishermen who were bringing in their boats greeted us with a “Bonjour!” I trawled up every ounce of high school French I could in an exercise of us mostly not understanding each other, but in the end I learned he was Congolese (if the French didn’t give it away) and lived in the village. He invited us (as a joke) to go fishing with him which I deferred until “maybe tomorrow.”

Minaret turned mooring.

Environment seen, we then hiked back up the hill which finally did in my super amazing wife and I. Elizabeth rescued us in the car and brought us, after our very long and very interesting day, back to our hotel. Just to put a point on how great Elizbeth and Kigoma Eco-Cultural Tourism is, she finished overnight our samplers and brought them to the hotel the next day so we could take the finished product home. So one last time, if you are in Kigoma you have got to hit them up. Meanwhile though we pulled ourselves to the hotel restaurant where we watched another amazing Tanganyika sunset go down over Congo while enjoying the company of each other and some cold Stoney Tangawizis.