Stone Town

Stone Town is not an old city by the standards of the Swahili coast — Kilwa and Bagamoyo were trading long before it — but it is the one that ended up holding the region's power. What made it was the monsoon. For roughly half the year the northeast winds carried dhows down from Oman, Gujarat and the Persian Gulf; for the other half the southwest winds carried them home. Zanzibar sat at the point where that rhythm met the African mainland, and a town grew at the hinge.

The Portuguese held the island loosely from the early sixteenth century, and left little beyond a chapel whose foundations sit under the Old Fort. Omani forces displaced them around 1700. The decisive moment came in 1840, when Sultan Said bin Sultan moved the seat of the Omani sultanate from Muscat to Zanzibar — an Arabian dynasty relocating its capital to an African island because that was where the money had gone.

The money was cloves. Introduced to the islands in the early nineteenth century, they took to the soil so well that Zanzibar and Pemba between them came to supply the greater part of the world's crop. Clove plantations demanded labour, and the labour was taken: Zanzibar became the largest slave market in East Africa, with captives marched to the coast from as far inland as Lake Tanganyika. The market was closed in 1873 under treaty pressure from Britain, and the Anglican cathedral was deliberately built on its site — the altar is said to stand where the whipping post stood.

The buildings that give the town its name went up in that same century of clove wealth: coral rag and lime, three and four storeys, flat roofs, deep shaded verandas. The Sultan's palace, the Old Dispensary with its fretwork balconies, and the House of Wonders — Beit al-Ajaib, built for Sultan Barghash in 1883 and the first building in East Africa to have electric light and an electric lift — all belong to it. In 1896 the same waterfront saw the Anglo-Zanzibar War, which lasted somewhere under forty-five minutes and remains the shortest war on record.

British protectorate rule ran from 1890 to 1963. Independence lasted a month. In January 1964 the Zanzibar Revolution overthrew the sultanate, and in April the islands entered a union with mainland Tanganyika that produced the United Republic of Tanzania. Zanzibar kept its own president, its own legislature and a good deal of its own temper. The old town was left largely intact through those decades, in part because there was no money to redevelop it — a neglect that turned out to be a form of preservation, and the reason UNESCO listed it in 2000.

The doors are the first thing visitors photograph and the last thing they understand. There are broadly two traditions. The older Omani or Arab door is rectangular, with a heavy carved frame and an inscribed lintel — often a verse from the Qur'an, sometimes a date. The Indian door, brought by Gujarati merchants, has a rounded arch and rows of brass studs. The studs are decorative here; they descend from a north Indian defence against war elephants, an animal that has never had any business on Zanzibar. A door was a statement of the owner's standing, and it was frequently built before the house behind it.

The town is overwhelmingly Muslim and its calendar runs on that. During Ramadan most cafés close through the day, the pace slows, and the streets fill sharply after sunset; Forodhani Gardens becomes a night market of grilled fish, cassava and sugar-cane juice. Visitors are welcome throughout, but shoulders and knees covered is the expected courtesy in the old town at any time of year, and it is noticed.

Taarab is the island's own music — sung Kiswahili poetry over an orchestra that owes as much to Cairo as to the mainland, with an oud, a violin section and a great deal of coded innuendo. Bi Kidude, who performed into her nineties and died in 2013, remains its presiding figure. The Dhow Countries Music Academy in the old town teaches it, and is a straightforward place to hear it played properly rather than for a hotel audience.

Kiswahili itself is the coast's great synthesis: a Bantu language, structurally African, that absorbed Arabic, Persian, Portuguese and Hindustani vocabulary the way the town absorbed architecture. Zanzibari Swahili — Kiunguja — is the dialect on which the modern standard language was built, which is why islanders will tell you, not entirely as a joke, that the rest of the country is speaking their language with an accent.

One footnote the town has learned to live with: Farrokh Bulsara was born here in 1946, in a house on Shangani, and left as a boy. The world knows him as Freddie Mercury.