To our right, in rear of the fronting ‘dicky,’ and at both flanks of the city, is the native town,—a filthy labyrinth, a capricious arabesque of disorderly lanes, and alleys, and impasses, here broad, there narrow; now heaped with offal, then choked with ruins. It would be the work of weeks to learn the threading of this planless maze, and what white man would have the heart to learn it? Curiosity may lead us to it in earliest morning, before the black world returns to life. During the day sun or rain, mud or dust, with the certain effluvia of carrion and negro, make it impossible to flâner through the foul mass of densely crowded dwelling-places where the slaves and the poor ‘pig’ together. The pauper classes are contented with mere sheds, and only the mildness of the climate keeps them from starving. The meanest hovels are of palm-matting, blackened by wind or sun, thatched with cajan or grass, and with or without walls of wattle-and-dab. They are hardly less wretched than the west Ireland shanty. Internally the huts are cut up into a ‘but’ and a ‘ben,’ and are furnished with pots, gourds, cocoa rasps, low stools hewn out of a single block, a mortar similarly cut, trays, pots, and troughs for food, foul mats, and kitandahs or cartels of palm-fibre rope twisted round a frame of the rudest carpenter’s work. The better abodes are enlarged boxes of stone, mostly surrounded by deep, projecting eaves, forming a kind of verandah on poles, and shading benches of masonry or tamped earth, where articles are exposed for sale. The windows are loop-holes, and the doors are miracles of rudeness. Lastly, there are the wretched shops, which supply the few wants of the population.
We are now at the mouth of the Lagoon, which, at high tides, almost encircles the city. I am told that of late years the natives have built all round this backwater. In 1857 the Eastern or landward side was hush and plantation. As the waters retired they left behind them a rich legacy of fevers and terrible diseases; especially in the inner town, a dead flat, excluded from the sea breeze, and exposed to the pestiferous breath of the maremma.
Ships anchoring off this inlet soon stock French Islet. The whalers and American and Hamburg vessels, that prefer Changáni Point and the west end of the city, often escape without a single case of sickness. Similarly at Havannah, crews exposed to breezes from the Mangrove swamps have lost half their numbers by yellow fever; and the history of our West Indian settlements proves, if proof be required, how fatal is night exposure.
Zanzibar, city and island, is plentifully supplied with bad drinking water. Below the old sea-beach, and near the shore, it is necessary only to scrape a hole in the soft ground. Throughout the interior the wells, though deep, are dry during the hot season, and the people flock to the surface-draining rivulets. West Africans generally will not drink rain-water for fear of dysentery; and so with us—when showers fell in large drops men avoided it, or were careful to consume it soon lest it should putrefy. The purest element is found at Kokotoni, a settlement on the N. W. coast of the island, and in the Bububu, a settlement some five miles north of the city, where Sayyid Suleyman bin Hamid, once governor of Zanzibar, had a small establishment, and where Hasan bin Ibrahim built a large house called Chuweni or Leopard’s Place. So at São Paulo de Loanda the drinking water must be brought from the Bengo river. The best near the city is from a spring which rises behind the royal Cascine, Mto-ni. Here the late Sayyid built a stone tank and an aqueduct 2000 yards long, which, passing through his establishment, came out upon the beach. Casks could then be filled by the hose, but soon the masonry channel got out of repair, and sailors will not willingly drink water flowing through a dwelling-house.
The produce of the town greatly varies. Some wells are hard with sulphate and carbonate of lime, whilst others are salt as the sea itself; and often, as in Sind and Cutch, of two near together one supplies potable and the other undrinkable water. A few to the south of the city are tolerably sweet. The pits are numerous, and a square shaft, usually from 12 to 15 feet deep, may be found at every 40 or 50 yards. There are no casings; the edges are flush with the filthy ground about them, and the sites must frequently be changed, as the porosity of the coral rock and the regular seaward slope direct the drainage into them. Similarly, nearer home the bright sparkling element is not unfrequently charged with all the seeds of disease. When rain has not fallen for some time the water becomes thick as that of a horsepond, and when allowed to stand it readily taints. I could hardly bear to look at the women as they filled with cocoa-shells the jars to be carried off upon their heads.
Formerly Europeans were not allowed, for religious reasons, to ship water from the wells near the town. Also, cask-filling was carried on at low tide, to prevent the supply of the Mto-ni being brackish, and the exhalations of the black mud were of course extra-dangerous. It is no wonder that dysentery and fever resulted from the use of such a ‘necessary.’ The French frigate Le Berceau, after watering here, was visited by the local pest, and lost 90 men on her way home. Even in January, the most wholesome month, Lieut. Christopher had 16 deaths amongst his scanty crew. In this case, however, the lancet, so fatal near the Line, and the deadly Zerámbo, or toddy-brandy, were partly to blame. As early as 1824 Captain Owen condemned the supply of Zanzibar, as liable to cause dysentery. It has this effect during and after heavy rains, unless allowed to deposit its animal and vegetable matter. During the second visit of H. M. S. Andromache, in August, 1824, Commander Nourse and several of his officers spent one night in a country house, after which the former and the greater number of the latter died. The water, as well as the air, doubtless tended to cause the catastrophe. In the dry season the element sometimes produces, according to natives and strangers, obstinate costiveness. Between Zanzibar and the Cape, five brigs lost collectively 125 men from fever, dysentery, and inflammation of the neck of the vesica; whilst others were compelled to start their casks, and to touch at different ‘aguadas’ en route. Hence skippers learned to fear and shun Zanzibar. During her 14 months’ exploration of the island and the coast the Ducouëdic lost 16 men; and to keep up a crew of 122 to 128, no less than 226 hands were transferred to her from the naval division of Bourbon and Madagascar. Each visit to Unguja was followed by an epidemic attack. Formerly as many as seven whalers lay in harbour at one time; now (1857) they prefer to water and refresh at Nossi-beh, Mayotta, and especially at the Seychelles, a free port, with a comparatively cool and healthy climate, where supplies are cheap and plentiful.
Besides the lagoon and the water nuisances there is yet another. The drainage of the Zanzibar water-front is good, owing to the slope of the site seaward. But at low tides, and after dark, when the sulphuretted hydrogen is not raised from the sands by solar heat, a veil of noxious gas overhangs the shore, whose whole length becomes exceedingly offensive. This is caused by the shironi (latrinæ) opening upon the water edge. ‘Intermural sepulture’ is also here common, though not after the fashion of West African Yoruba; and the city contains sundry unenclosed plots of ground, in which dwarf lime-plastered walls, four to five feet long, fancifully terminated above, and showing, instead of epitaph, a china saucer or bits of porcelain set in the stone, denote tombs.
Drainage and cleanliness are panaceas for the evils of malaria where tropical suns shine. Drainage of swamps and lagoons can improve S’a Leone, and can take away the stink from South African barracks. Zanzibar city, I contend, owes much of its fatality to want of drainage, and it might readily be drained into comparative healthiness. But the East African Arab holds the possibility of pestilence and the probability of fever to be less real evils than those of cutting a ditch, of digging a drain, or of opening a line for ventilation. The Dollar-hunters from Europe are a mere floating population, ever looking to the deluge in prospect, and of course unwilling to do every man’s business, that is—to drain.
Such was Zanzibar city when I first walked through it. Though dating beyond the days of Arab history, and made, by its insular and central situation, the depôt of the richest trade in Eastern Africa, its present buildings are almost all modern. At the beginning of this our nineteenth century it consisted of a fort and a ragged line of huts, where the ‘Suk Muhogo’ now stands. Dr Ruschenberger (1835) satisfied himself that ‘the town of Zanzibar and its inhabitants possess as few attractions for a Christian stranger as any place and people in the wide world.’ As late as 1842 this chief emporium of a most wealthy coast boasted but five store-houses of the humblest description, and the east end was a palm plantation. Since my departure the city, as the trade returns show, has, despite unfavourable political circumstances, progressed. A Catholic mission, sent by France, has established an hospital, and two schools for boys and girls, and the English Central African Mission has followed suit. These establishments must differ strangely from the normal thing—the white-bearded pedagogue, hugging his bones or rocking himself before a large chintz-covered copy of the Koran, placed upon a stand two feet high, so as to be above man’s girdle, and, when done with, swathed in cloth and stowed away. A change, too, there must be in the pupils; formerly half a dozen ragged boys, some reciting with nasal monotonous voices sentences to be afterwards understood by instinct, others scraping the primitive writing-board with a pointed stick.
We will now return to the centre of attraction, the Salt Bazar, and prospect the people. The staple material is a double line of black youth and negresses sitting on the ground, with legs outstretched like compasses. At each apex of the angle is a little heap of fruit, salt, sugar, sun-dried manioc, greasy fritters, redolent fish, or square ‘fids’ of shark-flesh,[[24]] the favourite ‘kitchen’ with Wasawahíli and slaves; it brings from Maskat and the Benadir a goût so high that it takes away the breath. These vendors vary the tedium of inaction by mat-making, plaiting leaves, ‘palavers,’ and ‘pow-wows,’ which argue an admirable conformation of the articulating organs and a mighty lax morality. Sellers, indeed, seem here to double the number of buyers, and yet somehow buying and selling goes on.