“Felix, can you walk me through Stone Town today? It’s been 30 years since my last visit.” Felix was my go-to guide in Zanzibar.
We crossed the square in front of my hotel Serena to enter a warren of runaway, intertwining, meandering streets.
I had expected to find the old town destroyed and masses of newly transplanted people overrunning it. To my surprise, Stone Town still possessed its age-old tranquility. Oddly, unlike anywhere else, its populace had shrunk.
As we continued our tour, something weighed uneasily on my mind. Yes, at first glance, Stone Town was in better shape now than before. The exteriors of the homes were spotless. There was no garbage on the street—unheard of in Africa. But for the tourists roaming the streets in twos and threes, there was no bustle. On my last visit, I had landed in a dhow at the harbour, a few streets away. Then, it had taken my party of a dozen men over an hour to negotiate these streets filled with traders, beggars and wandering coffee sellers. Arab women, dressed to their eyes in impenetrable black abayas, led their children by the hand through the multitude of locals. The aroma of strong coffee, pungent spices, noise of children, men bargaining in loud voices overwhelmed you.
The black abayas and the men’s white thobes had disappeared, replaced by tourists in dazzling Hawaiian shirts, sunglasses, and large Nikon cameras—all in an awed hush as though visiting the sights of the long dead. But the beautiful, now sparkling white, identical stone homes remained… or at least their renovated facades.
Marauding blackbirds hung in the air above them waiting to swoop off with whatever scraps the tourists discarded.
Around the corner from St. Joseph’s Cathedral stood a solemn five-year-old boy, still as a statue. He guarded the steps to the Abe id Curio Shop. His mother, all in black, sat within, tending an Aladdin’s cave of Zanzibari chests.
Nailed against one wall stood framed photos of past customers—the Clintons, the Blairs, and several Hollywood stars. One in particular drew my eye—a signed still of Yul Brynner in full cowboy attire from Westworld, a movie about an ordinary Western town in the US that had been turned into a theme park run by robots indistinguishable from their human counterparts. A frisson trembled through me.
“Felix, where are the natives of Stone Town? Where are they living?”
“Follow me,” Felix directed.
Abandoning the store, I noticed there were no children playing in the streets, no cry of babies. An entrance door to a home stood wide open. I peered in. It was a shell, within which stood a five-star boutique hotel. We hurried on.
As we approached the edge of Stone Town, it was like the olden days. I could hear the noise and hubbub several streets away. I could smell it. A far cry from the current antiseptic old town. It was exactly as I had left it—old men in dirty white thobes, bidis (inch-long cigarettes) dangling between browned, broken teeth; the market overcrowded with patrons; trash everywhere. I got a flashback of once-white ceramic tiled cubicles reddened with the gore of gutted fish, the floor silver-grey with fish scales. It hadn’t changed.
“Where do these people live?” I asked in bewilderment.
Through the haze, across the road I saw block after block of five-storey apartment buildings, the same as I had seen in Iron Curtain countries, but on a smaller scale.
“Stone Town has been designated a UNESCO World Heritage Site. We are given twenty million US a year to keep it the way it is. Too many hotels wish to locate in Stone Town, so our beloved Sheik Karume built us these new homes.” Felix smiled weakly and looked away, gesturing vaguely in the direction of the apartment blocks.
