The Congo and Coasts of Africa

by Richard Harding Davis

The Late Sultan of Zanzibar in His State Carriage.

You feel that it is an experiment, that it has been sent out like a box of children's building blocks, and set up carefully on this beautiful harbor. All that Dar Es Salaam needs now is trade and emigrants. At present it is a show place, and might be exhibited at a world's fair as an example of a model village.

In writing of Zanzibar I am embarrassed by the knowledge that I am not an unprejudiced witness. I fell in love with Zanzibar at first sight, and the more I saw of it the more I wanted to take my luggage out of the ship's hold and cable to my friends to try and have me made Vice-Consul to Zanzibar through all succeeding administrations.

Zanzibar runs back abruptly from a white beach in a succession of high white walls. It glistens and glares, and dazzles you; the sand at your feet is white, the city itself is white, the robes of the people are white. It has no public landing-pier. Your rowboat is run ashore on a white shelving beach, and you face an impenetrable mass of white walls. The blue waters are behind you, the lofty fortress-like façade before you, and a strip of white sand is at your feet.

And while you are wondering where this hidden city may be, a kind resident takes you by the hand and pilots you through a narrow crack in the rampart, along a twisting fissure between white-washed walls where the sun cannot reach, past great black doorways of carved oak, and out suddenly into the light and laughter and roar of Zanzibar.

In the narrow streets are all the colors of the Orient, gorgeous, unshaded, and violent; cobalt blue, greens, and reds on framework, windows, and doorways; red and yellow in the awnings and curtains of the bazaars, and orange and black, red and white, yellow, dark blue, and purple, in the long shawls of the women. It is the busiest, and the brightest and richest in color of all the ports along the East African coast. Were it not for its narrow streets and its towering walls it would be a place of perpetual sunshine. Everybody is either actively busy, or contentedly idle. It is all movement, noise, and glitter, everyone is telling everyone else to make way before him; the Indian merchants beseech you from the open bazaars; their children, swathed in gorgeous silks and hung with jewels and bangles, stumble under your feet, the Sultan's troops assail you with fife and drum, and the black women, wrapped below their bare shoulders in the colors of the butterfly, and with teeth and brows dyed purple, crowd you to the wall. Outside the city there are long and wonderful roads between groves of the bulky mango-tree of richest darkest green and the bending palm, shading deserted palaces of former Sultans, temples of the Indian worshippers, native huts, and the white-walled country residences and curtained verandas of the white exiles. It is absurd to write them down as exiles, for it is a Mohammedan Paradise to which they have been exiled.

The exiles themselves will tell you that the reason you think Zanzibar is a paradise, is because you have your steamer ticket in your pocket. But that retort shows their lack of imagination, and a vast ingratitude to those who have preceded them. For the charm of Zanzibar lies in the fact that while the white men have made it healthy and clean, have given it good roads, good laws, protection for the slaves, quick punishment for the slave-dealers, and a firm government under a benign and gentle Sultan, they have done all of this without destroying one flash of its local color, or one throb of its barbaric life, which is the showy, sunshiny, and sumptuous life of the Far East. The good things of civilization are there, but they are unobtrusive, and the evils of civilization appear not at all, the native does not wear a derby hat with a kimona, as he does in Japan, nor offer you souvenirs of Zanzibar manufactured in Birmingham; Reuter's telegrams at the club and occasional steamers alone connect his white masters with the outer world, and so infrequent is the visiting stranger that the local phrase-book for those who wish to converse in the native tongue is compiled chiefly for the convenience of midshipmen when searching a slave-dhow.

H.S.H. Hamud bin Muhamad bin Said, the Late Sultan of Zanzibar.