Zanzibar: “The Magic Island & its Ghosts “ by ANON

I was awakened very suddenly in the early hours of the morning. I sat up in bed and saw a tall figure standing nearby, looking eastward, dressed in a light brown burnoose with its hood up, concealing the face. I tried to call out but my tongue clove to the roof of my mouth and my limbs were paralysed with fear. The apparition slowly disappeared: but looking down the room, there it was again, standing in the same way looking to the east. Again it gave way to-nothing and vanished and only then was I able to move."

This experience was described to friends by Dr Spurrier, a respected British medical doctor who was staying at Dunga Palace in December 1895. Dunga has a strong reputation for being haunted. One apparition which has frequently been seen is that of an Arab lady walking through the long rooms at dead of night, followed by a black dog. Also, the sounds of rattling chains and of heavy objects being moved about are said to have been heard.

The Lord of Dunga, Mohammed bin Ahmed el Alawi, was descended from a line of rulers who may have begun with Hasan bin Abubakar, a Persian of the 13th century who is mentioned in the Kilwa Chronicles. His descendant, Queen Fatuma, married an Arab from the Hadramaut, called Alawi.
She had a palace on the site of the present day House of Wonders, next to the Old Fort, in the Stone Town. Her son Hasan became King around 1828 and when the Omani Sultan Said took control of Zanzibar, Hasan had to move to Bweni, near Dunga, where he was allowed to rule on condition that he gave half of the taxes he collected to Seyyid Said.

Mohammed inherited from his brother Hasan in 1845 and was made of stern stuff. He used the local people's unpaid labour to build the palace, which took about 10 years. He lived there until he died in 1865. His 15 year old son Ahmed was recognised as a ruler in his place and moved to live in the Stone Town of Zanzibar, where he shortly died of smallpox, in rather suspicious circumstances.

A friend of mine, Yoland Brown, was born and brought up in Zanzibar. She lived in the Mambo Msiige building, just to the south of the Serena Inn, when she was a child. Her father, William Frederick Waddington, was the Port Officer in Zanzibar from 1946 to 1958. The Mambo Msiige building was built around 1847 by a prominent Arab and its name means, "Don't copy me, friend"! In 1864 it was rented and later sold by Sultan Majid to the UMCA, the Universities' Mission to Central Africa. They sold it in turn to the British Foreign Office in 1874 when it became the residence of the British representative to Zanzibar, the first of whom was John Kirk. From 1918 to 1924, the building accommodated the European Hospital, which was set up to take care of casualties of the First World War.

After this, the house was occupied by Government Offices. Yoland's mother, Dorothy Betty Waddington, was Tourist Information Officer in Zanzibar because of her knowledge of Swahili and her tremendous interest and consequent knowledge of the people and customs. She never found any bones in the garden! However, she did see a ghost, twice, of an Arab gentleman who appeared at the side of the bed. The first time he looked quite benign and she woke her husband who said, "go back to sleep -he has been here before"!

The second time the man appeared at the bottom of the bed and had a very malevolent look - Betty did not wake her husband again, in case she got another flea in her ear. By coincidence, she happened to be visiting the palace a few days later and told the Sultana about her experience. The Royal Personage was not the least bit surprised and said there was a little girl who walked down a particular passage in the palace and everyone had seen her. The Sultana said Yoland's mother should speak to the ghost and not be frightened, but he never appeared again.

At Mbweni Ruins, just five miles south of the Stone Town, the ghost of Caroline Thackeray, a spinster lady who lived in Zanzibar for 49 years, is said to walk near the ruins of the school for freed slaves where she was headmistress. She retired to Sir John Kirk's house in the neighbourhood, and died there in 1926 at the age of 83. She is buried at St John's Church nearby. There is now a hotel in the grounds of the ruins and none of the staff will go near the ruins at night.

One night, my children and I were staying at Mbweni, before the hotel was opened. We saw a light shining in one of the windows of the Industrial Wing of the ruins. After a certain amount of daring and cajoling, we took a torch and made our way inside the tall walls and up the collapsing stairs, only to find that our "ghost" was just the full moon, shining with amazing brightness, right through two windows opposite each other.

Recently, an askari reported seeing the figure of a tall Arab man, standing under a large mango tree below this wing above the beach, gazing out to sea; he slowly dissolved into nothing. A few days later, the askari, an old man, died of a heart attack. The Arab man has also been seen by others. There was an Arab mansion on the site of the school when the Universities' Mission to Central Africa purchased Mbweni Point shamba, to build a village for freed slaves, in 1871. This mansion was incorporated into the school but became dilapidated with the rest. The ruins are being restored with a view to returning them to their former state. Hopefully then the ghosts may disappear!

In 1885, Seyyida Salme, a daughter of the founder of the Albusaid Sultans, Seyyid Said, who had eloped and married a German trader, Heinrich Ruete in 1866, returned to her homeland to try to force a reconciliation with her family. Her efforts were hopeless but while in Zanzibar she visited her birthplace, Mtoni Palace. She was deeply shocked by the ruin and decay into which the lovely old buildings had fallen.

As her children ran about, laughing and chattering with the accompanying German officers, Salme went into a kind of trance from which she could see the figures of the former inhabitants coming forward from every slanting door and collapsing heap of beams. For a while she was transported from the depressing present and her mind lived the beautiful years of her youth.

This kind of experience happens to all of us quite often in Zanzibar, where the past seems to melt into the present and the dead seem to move freely amongst the living, sometimes leaving a cool breath of air and a scent of spices as they pass.
Zanzibar is truly named "The Magic Islands".

The Dhows of the Monsoon

At Christmas time, in the harbour of Zanzibar in the early 1960s a great fleet of huge dhows would ride at anchor. They were the biggest wooden boats that I had ever seen. We would sail past them with our little fourteen foot dingy taking in their strangeness and gazing at their vast solidness in awe. These were real vessels of the sea. Festooned with ropes made of sisal, their masts slanted at an angle, they spoke of journeys by men who knew the sea like no others. Sometimes I would see lithe sailors shimming up the masts with their bare feet. We always complained about the smell of the dhow fleet. Later I learnt that they used fish oil to season the wood. Aging fish oil is not recommended for its smell.

Off the stern of the boat hung a large box, big enough for a person to sit in. It had a hole in the bottom. It was the toilet, called the thunder-box. Strange inscriptions and twirling designs were carved as decorations along the hull and over the stern hung the red flag of the Sultans of Zanzibar. On their prow would hang an oculus or talisman. The oculus is the ‘eye’ of the boat and was often in the form of a large painted eye, rather like a Cyclops eye from Greece. No human or animal replications were portrayed - as the Koran dictates.

I knew that this dhow fleet plied an ancient triangular route, from India to the Arabian Gulf and then on to the East African coast. India was the connection to those trading countries even further east. From ancient times the monsoon winds had made this route feasible and as boats become more sophisticated its importance grew. The monsoon winds were not reliable a little further south than Zanzibar and our harbour, tucked into the western coast of the island, was very protected when the northern monsoon was blowing.

The Arab dhow captains were superb seamen. In 1939, Australian adventurer, Alan Vickers, travelled on a dhow from Aden to Zanzibar and back. In his book, ‘Sons of Sinbad’ he recounts how he found a nakhoda or captain of a boum dhow and arranged his passage south with the north-east monsoon on a boat called The Triumph of Righteousness. Alan believed he was living through the last days of sail. He tells of the journey and it is a window into the past. With western eyes he found the filth the accumulated on the overcrowded main deck rather horrible but recognised that these sailors were tough men, ‘the constantly cramped quarters, the crowds, the wretched food, the exposure to the elements, the daylong burning sun, the nightlong heavy dews, if they continued to be disadvantages, were far offset by the interest of being there….’

You were always aware of the monsoon in Zanzibar. There was no summer and winter on the islands. It was one monsoon or the other or the time in-between when the rains came. The northern monsoon blows from late November to February and the long rains, or masika, come in March as the winds become variable. If you were a girl child born during the rains, you could be called Masika – born in the time of the rains.

April is the start of the south-west monsoon. This wind is more violent during the months of June and July so the boats leave with the first winds or stay to the last weeks of the monsoon. It was hard to get insurance for your boat if you left during June and July when many seasoned dhow captains would stay put in a safe harbour. By late September the winds become variable again and Zanzibar experiences the short rains or vuli. Monsoon is a word that English has copied from Arabic.

They were not called the ‘trade winds’ for nothing. Zanzibar was a trading nation, perfectly positioned and blessed with the richness of its spices and the produce of the African hinterland. In the 1800s when Zanzibar was the centre of a maritime commercial empire, the cargo used to be gold, gum copal, ivory and slaves. In my days it was spices, predominantly cloves, mangrove poles, Persian carpets, dates and dried fish that plied its way to and from Arabia. In the narrow streets of Zanzibar’s Stonetown could be found a cornucopia of riches. Small open fronted shops or dukas were filled with wares from east and west. The shopkeeper sat cross legged at the shop front on the elevated concrete ledge talking to his neighbours. On the main street were the gold and silver merchants with worked semi-precious stones from Ceylon and India.

My father wanted to buy some Persian carpets directly from a dhow captain so he put out the word and a little while after the dhow fleet arrived from the Gulf my mother and he went on board to look at the cargo of Persian carpets. Carpets were not discussed until much strong sweet coffee or kahawa was imbibed and general pleasantries had been exhausted. ‘The red dust of the desert was still in the carpets’, my father said, ‘each one that they brought up from the hold seemed more beautiful than the one before. It was impossible to choose!’

The dhow fleet were part and parcel of what Zanzibar was in its hey day, when the Omani Sultans ruled and controlled the east African shores. When Sultan Said bin Sultan of Oman and Muscat had moved his capital to Zanzibar in 1840, he travelled with his fleet of dhows to take possession. His family would rule Zanzibar till 1963 and the revolution that ousted the newly independent Zanzibar. Sultan Jamshid escaped by sea in a steamship while many other Arab Zanzibaris did not. The story goes that some other Arab people were forced to embark on overloaded and under provisioned dhows and sent to sea. The revolutionaries wanted them to go back to Arabia. Some of those dhows did not survive the trip.

Recently someone told me of a story he had heard while travelling down the East African coast 50 years ago. The first mate of a large cargo boat woke the captain early one morning and asked him to get to the bridge urgently. ‘Look,’ he said, ‘look at our bow!’ There over the bow was draped a huge sail. Both realised what it was: the tremendous triangular sail of a dhow. ‘Get if off,’ the captain replied,’ throw it away’. The cargo boat had ploughed down a dhow in the night. They did not turn around to see if they could find any survivors clinging to bits of wooden hull. It was just one more hazard of the open sea.

Some dhows have been converted to motor and still trade along East Africa. Still trading and still involved in smuggling. But the ancient stories of the dhow captains’ bravery are mostly lost to us. The great dhow fleet under sail travels no more. The beauty of the lateen sails on the horizon is now a mirage from history.