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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.”

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.

Reading this week:

• From Zanzibar to Ujiji edited by Norman Robert Bennett

Alright! Now we have arrived at the seminal moment of the whole vacation, wherein we went on the walking tour of historic Ujiji! Fresh off the Liemba we piled on in to the car and drove to our first stop: the Nyerere House.

The Nyerere House is actually how I found out about Kigoma Eco-Cultural Tourism, from whence we met our tour guide Peter who was showing us around and the owner Elizabeth who was driving us around. I was doing a reverse image search to try to find out where the heck this Nyerere House is. I will solve the mystery for future travelers: it is right here. It is actually just up the street from the Livingstone Memorial Museum, which we will get to (both literally and figuratively) later. But what is the Nyerere House? It seems that Julius Nyerere stayed in the house twice, once in 1954 and 1958. For this claim however I have not been able to find a lot of documentary evidence. I suppose in retrospect it is not too surprising that there isn’t a detailed itinerary of every single place that Julius Nyerere ever slept easily available online, but originally I was even more confused because I thought the claim was that Julius Nyerere lived in the house in those years but that is definitely not true. Still, the fact that I can’t just conjure up an intricately detailed biography of the man at will hurts me a bit.

But for the sake of putting it all in one spot, here is what I have found. There is the inscription on the monument outside the house (here’s a close-up picture) which if I just plug it into Google Translate the machine mind tells me Nyerere died there which I think is a wrong choice of idioms. If only I spoke Swahili. There is also this Facebook post that Google Translate tells me claims he only slept there. As for what exactly Mwalimu there was doing in Kigoma, he was campaigning I guess. This niche wiki page says that Nyerere visited Kigoma on his TANU campaign (this less niche wiki page informs me Nyerere transformed the TAA into TANU in 1954) as so would have needed someplace to sleep. As for the 1958 visit, presumably that was during the campaign for the elections that year. So that is very cool I suppose.

However I did not really set the scene here before diving into the obscure links I found to try to determine the truth behind a particular historical claim. It was a lovely day in Ujiji and it was extremely cool to be there. I know I have tried to wax and wane poetic in the previous several posts about walking in the footsteps of these historical figures I have been reading about but it is so true dude, like so true. It is one thing to read about the hills they traversed and the waterfront they frequented but another thing to be there and understand the very landscape they were talking about. Things have changed a little bit. Dr. Beverly Brown in her dissertation and authoritative history of Ujiji titled appropriately Ujiji: The History of a Lakeside Town (which you can definitely download from somewhere because I have a copy but now I can’t figure out where from), she describes it around the time the various Victorians would have visited (pg 90):

“In Ujiji, houses were sheltered from view by the luxuriant growth of gardens and fruit trees, and courtyard enclosures protected the Arabs’ domesticity from prying eyes. As a result, the settlement pattern was porous: green spaces separated family from family. The narrow roadways followed the houses, rather than vice versa, twisting and turning with the unique sprawl of each homestead…”

These days the roads are paved and much straighter but still the place has a charm. As we walked along various kids said hello which was nice. I had thought we would proceed directly to the waterfront at the Livingstone Museum, but instead we took a left and came upon a house that Peter told us used to be where Tippu Tip (or as Peter pronounced it, Mr. Tip Tip) lived. He clarified the house itself (which is here) was new but the foundation was the same. Across the street was a very large and very gnarled old mango tree purportedly planted by enslaved persons to provide shade, which seems to be a common claim around Ujiji. The two most famous people associated with Ujiji I think I can say are Tippu Tip and Livingstone (Nyerere notwithstanding), so various spots wind up associated with them. This includes the mosque we passed on the tour which claims to have been founded in 1840 and was supposedly where Tippu Tip conducted his prayers. To throw some cold water on this, both claims seem very unlikely; according to Ujiji no mosques were built in Ujiji until the 1890s (pg 110, which also notes prayers would have been conducted on followers’ verandas), by which point Tippu Tip would have been back in Zanzibar. There is perhaps nuance to the claim I am not understanding, but the 1840s has to be rather early for a formal mosque anyways, as the first caravans would have arrived in Ujiji only about a decade before and the “Arab” population of the town would have been under a couple dozen (again according to Ujiji).

I am going to pause this narrative here because it has already gotten a little convoluted and long, but we will return in the next post with more Ujiji historical sites, don’t you worry.