It is interesting, curious and instructive that our first stop on arrival on the actual island of Zanzibar was a bar/restaurant called “Mercury’s”. This is a Euro-American establishment named after one of the island’s most famous sons — Freddie Mercury, lead singer and inspiration of the wildly successful British band Queen.
The restaurant sits on the beachfront on the edge of the legendary Swahili commercial centre of Stone Town, overlooking the spectacular turquoise waters of the Indian Ocean. It speaks to Zanzibar’s post-modernist incarnation as a tourist paradise, its long, turbulent, fascinating history temporarily put aside in the interest of the quick and easy bucks of tourism.
As a tourist myself, I am in the uneasy position of both enjoying the luxury of the venue and desiring a more real experience of a lost chunk of an African reality. Zanzibar, when you get into it, is just that.
In spite of a series of upheavals and revolutions, Zanzibar wears its history and its reality on its sleeve. It is remarkable and beautiful for that. The legendary Spice Island has a personality all its own, sitting on the edge of an ocean that reflects the ebb and flow of a vital part of human civilisation.
Mercury, born Farrokh Bulsara, spent the first eight years of his life on the winding, Arab-influenced streets of Stone Town. He returned there after a period of exile in India and England, and hung out there for a few years before returning to England and launching a spectacular musical career. His recorded history hardly gives credit to the heady, winding highways and byways of the island at the crossroads of world culture that undoubtedly gave him his inspiration.
Mercury’s parents were Persians. Zanzibar, at the time he was born there in 1946, was home to a polyglot community made up of native Swahilis from the East African coast, Persian and Indian merchants and administrators from the Asian mainland and the Omani royalty who had spotted its potential as a trading hub and plantation paradise centuries before, and made it a home-from-home for their empire, based on trade in African slaves and African ivory, culled from the tusks of slaughtered elephants deep in the central African interior.
Apart from the bar/restaurant that profits from his name, little is made of Mercury’s Zanzibari roots. But listening to what has become of the indigenous culture of the island, it is impossible to imagine that its mixture of Egyptian, Indian and African influences, with their soaring descants and soulful exploration of the insoluble worlds of love, politics and history, could not have influenced the inner ear of a man who was to become an enigma and an icon in the world of contemporary music.
In our increasingly globalised world, Zanzibar stands out as a similar enigma and icon of a fast disappearing human environment. It remains steadfastly itself. Its culture has survived Arab, Portuguese, German and British colonisation, adapting to each imposition as it arrived.
In 1964 the island went through a major upheaval when Abeid Karume, an almost illiterate Swahili seaman and trade unionist, led a revolution that produced spectacular bloodletting against the long resented Omani domination. This catapulted Mercury, among many other Zanzibaris of Asian ancestry, out of the country for good — although their heirs were in subsequent years to re-insinuate themselves into the island paradise and make it a trading and business haven once more. Life, trade and human intercourse go on.
Zanzibar today, is like no place on Earth. The massive tourist developments funded by European, American and Asian enterprises sit in their ugly, exclusive splendour on the most attractive coasts. But the life of the ordinary people continues in equally splendid isolation in the fishing villages of the north, east, west and south coasts.
People are living there and continue to live there. The sea-going dhows and small fishing vessels are still constructed with excrutiating patience, day by day, plank by labouriously carved plank, along the coast and sail out under the power of no more than God’s changeable winds into the wide, placid Indian Ocean to trawl for fish all through the middle of the night.
The fish, all colours and flavours, including octopus, lobsters and crabs, are landed in the cold light of the fast, heat-bearing morning on the beaches of Zanzibar, to be haggled over by women in colourful kangas and men in faded T-shirts and loin cloths, trading the sea animals’ flaky, rapidly deteriorating flesh for cash and selling it on as soon as possible: just like it ever was.
Mercury’s Zanzibar is a moving, changing, permanent testament to life on earth. David Livingstone passed through there and was infected by its culture. Henry Morton Stanley passed through there and used it as a springboard for his colonial adventures. Tippu Tip left his mark there, as did Karume with his short-lived Stalinist experiments and all the physical and psychological revolutions that attempted to leave their mark in the wake of the experiment of African independence.
The wonder of Zanzibar is that it remains a piece of Africa that can never be replaced and hopefully will never be entirely corrupted by the destructive movement of greedy time and inexplicably mercurial human emotions.