Memories of the great Dhows of Zanzibar

A great fleet of dhows rode at anchor for 3-4 months of the year in the harbour of Zanzibar in the early 1960s. As a child, I marvelled at them, they were the biggest wooden boats that I had ever seen. We sailed past them with our dingy taking in their strangeness and gazing at their vast solidness in awe. These were vessels of the wild open 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 dark 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 and we knew it was the toilet also called the thunder-box. Strange inscriptions and twirling designs were carved as decorations along the hull and over the stern hung the plain 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 brightly 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 fabulous 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 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 difficult to stomach 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 might 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 view the cargo. They discussed the weather and the health of their families until much strong sweet coffee or kahawa had been 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 intrinsic to the old Zanzibar, 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 while many other Arab Zanzibaris did not. Survivors tell of how many 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, quickly,’ 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 and seamanship are lost to us. The great fleet under sail travels no more. The beauty of the lateen sails on the horizon with the monsoon behind them is now a mirage from history. 

The Arab Chests of the Peoples of the Monsoon

The image shows the chest in the entrance hall of the hotel: Africa House in Stonetown, Zanzibar This was the old 'English Club'.

They are known as ‘Arab’ Chests but that is only part of the story. There is no collective name for the communities of the Indian Ocean that created these amazing chests: chests to store peoples’ most precious possessions. I like to think of them as peoples of the monsoon - a community of coastal civilisations that relied on the powerful winds of the Indian Ocean. From China, through Asia, western India, to the Arabian Gulf and down to the East African coast the winds allowed trade to take place and these chests are their testament.

Our family owns an Arab chest. It was purchased over 60 years ago in Zanzibar. Nowadays Arab chests are collectors items, found in the museums of the African coast and old houses of the Arabian Peninsula, particularly of Oman. The diverse origins of the solid wooden, brass-studded and plated chests that are called ‘Arab’ chests are deep in history. Research by a collector, Sheila Unwin, has revealed some of these cultural roots. The chests were trade items that came from the West Indian coast, from Surat down past Bombay. Local craftsmen made the chests from teak, rosewood and shisham. They were exported to Arabia and some were transported onwards down the coast to Africa. The chests were often the prized possessions of the dhow captains, the nakhodas.

The Portuguese had brought their own sea chests with them when they sailed into the Indian Ocean in the 16Century. These invaders devastated the region, wiping out cities, overpowering local rulers and building their sea-facing forts from Kilwa in Africa, Muscat in Oman to Goa in India. Their chests were on fretted stands and local craftsmen admired and adopted this design into their chest making. There is a golden16^th Century Chinese screen painting depicting Portuguese traders arriving in China. The high backed caravel is filled with people offloading boxes of trading goods. Two sumptuously dressed Chinese officials are seated on the shore observing the activity. Clearly drawn at their feet is an ‘Arab’ chest.

The Dutch were the next conquerors and brought their camphorwood sea chests to India. From them the ‘Arab’ chest inherited the brass knobs and backplates. The Chinese gave the chest makers the idea of the ingenious three-ring-padlocks and the internal cash boxes or till boxes were probably copied English chests.

When the simple chests reached Oman brass decoration could be added according to the wishes of the owner. In the simple Arab houses of the Gulf, there was no furniture. Persian carpets decorated the floors and embossed niches held items of decorative value. Valuable possessions were kept in the prized chests and a bride would leave home with her valuables, her dowry, in a new chest – often painted red to symbolise fertility.

In the 19 century Zanzibar grew rich on the monsoonal trade. The winds also brought invaders to her shores. It was a safe port with rich fishing grounds, fertile soils and it facilitated the trade from the east and from the rich African interior. Zanzibar had many chests for sale in the old days. They arrived with the NE Monsoon that blows from October to March. It was where our family bought the chest that graced our home.

It came from a tiny Stonetown shop or dukka along Portuguese Alley, now called Gizenga Street. Recently I opened the chest’s lid to see if it had a secret drawer under the small till box. It did. Inside was a piece of paper, yellowed and insect eaten. The writing was in Arabic, beautifully scripted. A friend did the translation and explained that it was a prayer, a dua, a promise to Allah. I returned it in the drawer where the previous owner had put it for safekeeping. With the chest, it had travelled a long way.

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.