IN ZANZIBAR
THERE is no name between the covers of the atlas more redolent of romance and adventure. Ever since Livingstone entered the African jungle on his mission of proselytism; ever since Stanley entered the same jungle on his quest of Livingstone; and ever since the railway-builders began to run their levels and lay their rails along the trail blazed by them both, Zanzibar has been the chief gateway through which Christianity, civilisation, and commerce have entered the Dark Continent. Though its area has been steadily lessened by spoliation, treaty, and purchase, until the sultanate, which once extended from Cape Guardafui to Delagoa Bay and inland to the Great Lakes, has dwindled to two coastwise islands in the Indian Ocean, Zanzibar the capital is still the most important place, politically and commercially, in all East Africa, and one of the most picturesque and interesting cities in the world.
It bears the impress of the many kinds of men of many nationalities—Arab sultans, slave-traders and pirates, Portuguese merchants, European explorers, and ivory-hunters—who have swaggered across the pages of its history. Four hundred years ago Vasco da Gama's exploring caravels dropped anchor in its harbour, and the architecture of the city is still Portuguese; a century later the dhows of the piratical sultans of Muskat swooped down, giving to Zanzibar an Arab dynasty, a lucrative slave trade and the Arabic tongue; then a British war-ship came, bringing with it British law and order and decency, and, under the mask of a “protectorate,” British rule. Though its golden age ended with the extermination of the trade in “black ivory,” it is still a place of considerable importance: the end of several submarine cables, a port of call for many steamship lines, a naval base within easy striking distance of the German and Portuguese colonies on the East Coast and guarding the lines of communication between the Cape and the Canal, and the place of export for the major portion of the world's supply of copra, cloves, and ivory.
Seen from the harbour, Zanzibar has little to commend it. So uninviting, indeed, is the face that it turns seaward, that the story is told of an American politician sent there as consul, who, after taking one look from the steamer's deck at the sun-baked town, with its treeless, yellow beach and its flat-roofed, whitewashed houses, refused to go ashore at all, from the next port at which the steamer called cabling his resignation to Washington. Though a city of something over one hundred thousand people, with the major portion of the trade of East Africa in its hands, Zanzibar has neither dock, jetty, nor wharf, passengers and packages alike being disembarked in small boats and carried through the surf on the shoulders of Swahili boatmen. There are no words in the language adequate to describe the scene which takes place on the beach bordering the harbour when a mail steamer comes in. The passengers—white-helmeted tourists; pompous, drill-clad officials; sallow-faced Parsee merchants; chattering Hindoo artisans; haughty, hawk-nosed Arabs; and cotton-clad Swahilis from the mainland—are unceremoniously dumped with their belongings on the sand, where they instantly become the centres of shouting, pleading, cursing, struggling, gesticulating, perspiring mobs of porters and hotel-runners, from whose rough importunities they are rescued only by the efforts of a dozen askaris, who lay their rhinoceros-hide whips about them indiscriminately.
When a poor imitation of order has been restored and the luggage has been rescued and sorted, you start for the hotel—there is only one deserving of the name—with a voluble hotel-runner clinging to your arm as though afraid you would break away, and followed by a miniature safari of porters balancing trunks, hat-boxes, kit-bags, gun-cases, bath-tubs, and the other impedimenta of an African traveller on their turbaned heads. Returning the ostentatious salute of the tan-coloured sentry at the head of the water-stairs, you follow your guide through a series of tortuous and narrow alleys, plunge into the darkness of an ill-smelling tunnel, and suddenly emerge, blinded with the sun-glare, into a thoroughfare lined on either side with tiny, fascinating, hole-in-the-wall shops, whose owners rush out and offer you their silver, ivory, and ostrich-feather wares vociferously.
Quite unexpectedly the procession halts under a swinging sign bearing the legend “Afrika Hotel.” The proprietor, a rotund, red-cheeked German who looks as if he had stepped straight out of a Munich beer-garden, escorts you pantingly up two—three—four flights of stone stairs, lined on either side with strange native weapons and East Coast curios, to a brick-floored cell under the roof, there being more likelihood of catching an occasional breeze, he explains, near the top. Wind in any form is as scarce in Zanzibar as rain is in the Sahara, and when they do get a breath of air strong enough to stir the window curtains it is as much of an event as a cyclone is in Kansas. The furniture of the room, monastic in its simplicity, consists of an iron bed, an iron table, an iron chair, and an iron washstand supporting a tin bowl and pitcher, for anything which is not of metal stands an excellent chance of destruction by the devastating swarms of red ants. The bed is draped with a double thickness of mosquito netting of so fine a mesh that the air within feels strained and unnourishing, like milk that has been skimmed and watered, and the heavy shutters are closed in a fruitless attempt to keep out some of the stifling mid-day heat, though the proprietor, after glancing at the thermometer, remarks that it isn't so hot after all, being only 120 in the shade.
