That night the consul gives a dinner for you at the Zanzibar Club, where you are served by bare-footed servants immaculate in crimson turbans and white linen, and eat with solid silver from irreproachable china, in a room made almost comfortable by many swinging punkahs. After dinner you sit on the terrace in the dark, somewhere between the ocean and the stars, and over the coffee and cigars you listen to strange stories of “the Coast,” told by men who themselves played a part in them. One man tells you what Stanley really said when, after months in the jungle without seeing a white man's face, he finally stumbled on the camp of Livingstone, and how, instead of rushing up and throwing his arms around him and crying, “Saved at last, old fellow; saved at last!” he lifted his helmet at sight of the gaunt, fever-stricken man sitting in front of the tent, and said very politely, just as he would if accosting a stranger on Fifth Avenue or Piccadilly, “Doctor Livingstone, I believe?” Another, a wiry, bright-eyed Frenchman, with a face tanned to the colour of mahogany, tells of the days when the route from Tanganyika to the coast was marked by the bleaching skeletons of slaves, and he points out to you, across the house-tops, the squalid dwelling in which Tippoo Tib, the greatest of all the slave-traders, died. A British commissioner, the glow of his cigar lighting up his ruddy face, his scarlet cummerbund, and his white mess jacket, relates in strictest confidence a chapter of secret diplomatic history, and you learn how the German Foreign Office shattered the British dream of an all-red Cape-to-Cairo railway, and why England is so desirous of the Congo being placed under international control. A captain of the King's African Rifles holds you spellbound with a recital of the amazing exploits of the American elephant poacher, Rogers, who, jeering at the attempts of three governments to capture him, made himself, single-handed, the uncrowned king of Equatoria. Then a Danish ivory-hunter breaks in, and you hear all sorts of wild tales of life on safari, of ivory-trading in the Lado Enclave, of brushes with the Uganda police south of Gondokoro, and of strange tribal customs practised in the hinterland. When the dawn begins to creep up out of the east, the Englishmen tell the drowsy steward to bring them Scotch and sodas and the Frenchmen order absinthes; then every one shakes hands with every one else and you make your way back to your hotel through the narrow, silent streets, returning the salute of the night constable sleepily.
No visitor leaves Zanzibar without going to the cemetery. Like the palace, and the stone ship built by a former sultan, it is one of the show places of the city. I saw it under the guidance of a gloomy English resident, who said that he always walked there every evening “so as to get accustomed to the place before staying in it permanently.” Leading me across the well-kept grass to two newly dug graves, he waved his hand in a “take-your-choice; they're-both-ready” gesture. “Two deaths to-day?” I queried. “Not yet,” said he, “but we always keep a couple of graves ready-dug for Europeans. In this climate, you know, we have to bury very quickly.” For in Zanzibar, as all along the East Coast, the white man's hardest fight is with a foe he can feel only as a poison in his burning veins, and can see only in the dreams of his delirium—the deadly black-water fever.
Though the streets in the outskirts of Zanzibar are wide, well shaded, and excellently macadamised with some kind of bright-red soil which recalls the roads outside of Colombo, in Ceylon, the business portion of the town, where the natives chiefly live, is a labyrinth of narrow streets and dim bazaars, hemmed in with tiny shops and wretched dwellings, with here and there an ancient house dating from the Portuguese occupation, impregnable as a feudal castle, its massive doorways of exquisitely carved teakwood in sharp contrast to the surrounding squalor. Every shop is open to the street, and half of them, it seemed to me, are devoted to the sale of ivory carvings, ostrich feathers, brassware, and silver-work, though the Arab workmanship is in all cases poorly executed and crude in design. The most typical things to be bought in Zanzibar are the quaint images of African animals which the natives carve from the coarser grades of ivory and which make charming, though costly, souvenirs. Nothing is cheap in Zanzibar, or, for that matter, anywhere else in Africa, and every purchase is a matter of prolonged and wearisome negotiation, the seller fixing a fantastic price and lowering it gradually, as he thinks discreet, his rock-bottom figure depending upon the behaviour and appearance of the customer.
Zanzibar is still the chief ivory market of the world, the supplies of both elephant and rhino ivory, so I was assured by British officials, steadily increasing rather than diminishing. A few years ago it was feared that the supply of ivory would soon run out, but the indiscriminate slaughter of elephants has been checked, at least in British territory, by strict game laws rigidly enforced. Whether from the laxity of its laws or the indifference of its officials, German East Africa is still the ivory-hunter's paradise, the extermination of elephants in that colony proceeding almost unchecked. When one remembers that African ivory brings all the way from fifty dollars to five hundred dollars per hundredweight in the open market, and that the tusks of a full-grown elephant weigh anywhere from one hundred to five hundred pounds, it will be seen that the ivory-hunter's trade is a profitable though a hazardous one. Other ivory-hunters, instead of going after the elephants themselves, spend their time in journeying from village to village and bartering with the natives for the stores of ivory—some of them the produce of centuries—which most of them possess. Unless the trader knows his business, however, the simple-minded natives will sell him the so-called “dead” ivory from the bottom of the pile rather than the “live” ivory of elephants recently killed, which, because of its greater elasticity and better colour, commands a much higher price, and, I might add, forms but a small part of the supply. Somewhere in the neighbourhood of half a million pounds of ivory are shipped from Zanzibar each year to make the toilet-articles and billiard-balls and piano-keys of the world.
The population of Zanzibar is pretty evenly divided between Arabs and Swahilis, with a considerable sprinkling of East Indians, who play the same rôles of peddlers, petty tradesmen, and money-lenders in the Orient that the Jews and Armenians do in the Occident. The dress of the Swahili is as simple as it is striking: two lengths of cotton cloth, called kanga, one draped about the waist and the other about the shoulders, with an extra remnant twisted into a turban, form the costume of men and women alike, though the Swahili women, in addition to the kanga proper, wear cotton pantalets resembling those in fashion in ante-bellum days, edged at the ankles with neat little frills, like those the chefs at fashionable restaurants put on lamb chops. These kangas are crudely stamped in an endless variety of startling patterns, some of the more elaborate designs looking, from a little distance, as though embroidered. The inventiveness of the British, Belgian, and German designers must be sorely taxed, for the fashions in East Africa change as rapidly as they do in Paris and with as little warning, the kangas stamped with card-pips—hearts, diamonds, clubs, and spades—which were all the rage among Zanzibar's dusky leaders of fashion for a time, suddenly giving place to those bearing crude pictures of sailing-ships or Arabic quotations from the Koran. One negro dandy whom I saw paraded the streets, the envied of all his fellows, wearing a kanga on which was printed, in endless repetition, the British coat of arms and the loyal motto “God Save the King!” while still another swaggered by in a garment sprinkled over with the legend in letters six inches high “Remember the Maine!” Though the important trade in cotton goods which we once had with East Africa has long since passed into British and German hands, there is a certain melancholy satisfaction in knowing that, so firmly does the reputation of our cottons endure, the natives of all this region still insist on the piece goods which they purchase, whether made in Manchester or Dresden, bearing the stamp “American,” and will take no other.
The costumes of the Arabs, on the other hand, recall all the stories of pirates and slave-traders which one associates with this romantic coast, for the men, ignoring the law which prohibits the carrying of arms, swagger insolently through the streets with dagger-filled sashes and trailing scimiters, their white jibbahs flapping about their sandalled feet and their snowy turbans cocked rakishly. The dress of the Arab women of Zanzibar resembles the costume of no other people, its characteristic features being the immense, doughnut-shaped turbans and the frilled, skin-tight trousers striped like barber-poles.
ARAB WOMEN OF ZANZIBAR.
“Their dress resembles the costume of no other people, its characteristic features being the immense, doughnut-shaped turbans and the frilled, skin-tight trousers striped like barber-poles.”
The universal medium of communication in Zanzibar and along the East Coast is Swahili, this lingua franca being generally used not only between Arabs and natives, and between natives and Europeans, but between Europeans themselves, the English, French, and Portuguese traders who do business in German East Africa depending entirely upon this mutually understood tongue for conversing with the Germans. I remember once, in Dar-es-Salam, listening to an Englishman who knew no French and a Frenchman who knew no English hold an animated political argument, and later on bargain with the German hotel-keeper for accommodations in the same outlandish tongue.