When we are already close to the ground, we see armed men positioned on both sides of the runway. A feeling of relief, because they are not taking aim at us, are not shooting. There are several dozen of them, and one notices immediately that they are poorly, carelessly dressed—half-naked, in fact. The pilot taxis the plane to the main building. Karume is not there, but there are some people who introduce themselves as his aides. They will take us to the hotel, they say, and request that the plane take off again at once.
We drive to town in two police vans. The road is empty, there are hardly any people visible. We pass some ruined houses, a destroyed, disemboweled shop. One enters the city through a magnificent, massive gate, beyond which immediately begin narrow streets, so narrow that a car can barely fit through. If someone were walking toward us, he would have to duck into a doorway and wait until we passed.
But at this time the city is silent; doors are either shut or torn out of their frames, windows tightly shuttered. A torn-off signboard on which is written “Maganlal Yejchand Shah”; a broken window in the shop Noorbhai Aladin and Sons; a similarly gaping and empty store next door, M. M. Bhagat and Sons, Agents for Favre Leuba, Geneva.
Several barefoot boys are walking by, one of them holding a gun.
“This is our problem,” says one of our guides. His name is Ali. He worked on a clove plantation. “We had only several dozen old guns, confiscated from the police. Very few automatic weapons. The principal arms are machetes, knives, clubs, sticks, axes, hammers. But you’ll see for yourselves.”
We got rooms in the deserted Arab neighborhood, in the Zanzibar Hotel. The building was constructed in such a way that it always provided coolness and shade. We sat down at the bar, to catch our breath. Every now and then some people we didn’t know would come up to see and greet us. At one point, a slight, energetic old woman came in. She began questioning us: What are we doing here? what for? where from? When she got to me and I told her where I was from, she seized me by the hand, paused, and began reciting in flawless Polish:
Pogodą rana lśni polana,
Cisza opieszcza smukłość drzew,
Dygotem liści rozszeptana,
Źdźbla trawy kłoni lekki wiew.
Naggar, Arnold, our escort, all those barefoot warriors now congregating in the hotel’s reception area, were frozen in astonishment.
Tak cicho jest i slodko wszędy,
I tak przedziwny wkoło świat,
Jakbyś przed chwilą przeszła tędy,
Musnąwszy trawy skrajem szat.
“Staff?” I asked, hesitatingly.
“Of course it’s Staff. Leopold Staff!” she said triumphantly. “My name is Helena Tręmbecka. From Podole. I have a hotel right next door. It’s called Pigalle. Please come. You will find Karume there and all his people, because I am serving them free beer!”
What happened on Zanzibar? Why are we here, in a hotel guarded by a troop of barefoot zealots with machetes? (If truth be told, their leader has a rifle, but there’s no telling whether it’s loaded.)
If someone looks carefully at a detailed map of Africa, he will notice that the continent is surrounded by numerous islands. Some are so small they are registered only on highly specialized navigational maps, but others are large enough to appear on ordinary atlases. On the northern side of the continent lie Dzalita and Kerkenna, Lampione and Lampedusa; on the western side of the Canary and Cape Verde Islands, Gorée and Fernando Po, Príncipe and São Tomé, Tristan da Cunha and Annobón; and on the eastern side Shaduan and Gifatun, Suakin and Dahlak, Socotra, Pemba, and Zanzibar, Mafia Island and the Amirante Islands, the Comoros, Madagascar, and the Mascarene Islands. In reality, there are many, many more; one can count dozens, if not hundreds of them, for some branch out into whole archipelagos, while others are encircled by mysterious worlds of coral beds and sandy shoals, which emerge only at low tide to display their dazzle of colors and shapes. The abundance of these islands and promontories suggests the act of creation being as it were interrupted, never completed, so that the continent which is visible and palpable today is merely that part of geologic Africa that has managed to emerge from the oceans, while the rest remains at the bottom, and these islands are just those of its peaks that have broken the surface.
One can imagine this geological phenomenon had historical consequences. Africa had long been at once a place of terror and of temptation. On the one hand, it struck fear into foreigners, and remained unexplored and unconquered. For centuries, its interior was successfully defended by a difficult tropical climate, long incurable diseases (malaria, smallpox, sleeping illness, leprosy, and the like), the lack of roads and means of transport, and, also, the frequently fierce resistance of its inhabitants. This inaccessibility of Africa gave birth to the myth of its mystery: Conrad’s “Heart of Darkness” began at the continent’s sunny coasts, as one disembarked from the ship onto solid ground.
But at the same time Africa seduced, beckoning with its dream of rich spoils, lavish booty.
Whoever set out for its shores embraced a most risky undertaking, an endgame of life and death. As late as the first half of the nineteenth century, more than half the Europeans who made it here died of malaria—but many of those who survived returned with sudden and great fortunes: loads of gold, ivory, and, first and foremost, black slaves.
And it is in this connection that the dozens of islands scattered along the continent’s shores come into the picture, aided by a multinational band of sailors, merchants, and robbers. The islands become for them toeholds, mainstays, havens, and factories. They are, first of all, safe: too far from the mainland for Africans to reach in their unstable boats carved from tree trunks, yet close enough for the Europeans to establish and maintain contact.
The role of these islands increases especially during the epoch of the slave trade: many of them are transformed into concentration camps, where slaves awaiting the ships that will carry them to America, Europe, and Asia are imprisoned.
The slave trade: it lasts approximately three hundred years. It begins in the middle of the fifteenth century, and ends—when? Officially, in the second half of the nineteenth, but in some instances significantly later. In northern Nigeria, for example, it ends only in 1936. The trade occupies a central position in African history. Millions (the estimates differ—fifteen to thirty million people) were captured and shipped under horrendous conditions across the Atlantic. It is thought that in the course of such a journey (which lasted two to three months) nearly half the slaves routinely died of hunger, asphyxiation, or thirst; sometimes all of them perished. Those who survived were later put to work on sugar and cotton plantations in Brazil, in the Caribbean, in the United States, building the riches of that hemisphere. The slave traders (mainly the Portuguese, the Dutch, English, French, Americans, Arabs, and their African partners) depopulated the continent and condemned it to a vegetative apathy: up to the present day, large stretches remain desolate, transformed into desert. To this day Africa has not recovered from this misfortune, from this nightmare.
The slave trade also had disastrous psychological consequences. It poisoned interpersonal relations among Africa’s inhabitants, propagated hatred, inflamed wars. The strong would try to overpower the weak and sell them in the marketplace, kings traded their subjects, conquerors their prisoners, courts of law those they had condemned.
On the psyche of the African this trade left the deepest and most painfully permanent scar: the inferiority complex. I, a black man or woman: i.e., the one whom the white merchant, occupier, torturer can abduct from house or field, put in irons, herd aboard ship, sell, then drive with a whip to ghastly toil.
The ideology of the slave traders was based on the belief that the black man is not human, that mankind is divided into humans and subhumans, and that with the latter one can do as one will—preferably, exploit their labor and then dispose of them. In the notes and records maintained by these traders is laid out (although in a primitive form) the entire later ideology of racism and totalitarianism, with its core thesis that the Other is the enemy; worse— subhuman. The philosophy that inspired the construction of Kolyma and Auschwitz, one of obsessive contempt and hatred, vileness and brutality, was formulated and set down centuries earlier by the captains of the
Martha
and the
Progresso,
the
Mary Ann
and the
Rainbow,
as they sat in their cabins gazing out the portholes at groves of palm trees and sun-warmed beaches, waiting aboard their ships anchored off the islands of Sherbro, or Zanzibar, for the next batch of black slaves to be loaded.
In this trade—a worldwide enterprise, really, for Europe, both Americas, and many countries of the Near East and Asia participated in it—Zanzibar is a sad, dark star, a grim address, a cursed isle. Toward it, for years—no, centuries—drew caravans of slaves freshly seized in the interior of the continent, in Congo and Malawi, in Zambia, Uganda, and the Sudan. Frequently tied together with ropes, to make escape more difficult, they served at the same time as porters, carrying to the harbor and onto ships valuable mechandise: tons of ivory, gallons of palm oil, the skins of wild animals, precious stones, ebony.
Transported on boats from the continent’s coast to the island, they were then exhibited for sale in the marketplace. It was called Mkunazini, and it occupied the square near my hotel upon which today stands the Anglican cathedral. The prices varied: from one dollar for a child, to twelve for a young, beautiful girl. Rather expensive, since in Senegambia for one horse the Portuguese could get twelve slaves.
The healthiest and strongest were then driven from Mkunazini to the port: it is close by, several hundred meters. From here, on ships specially designed for the transport of slaves, they would sail to America, or to the Near East. The seriously ill, for whom no one wanted to pay even a few cents, were thrown upon the rocky shore after the day’s activity in the marketplace ended; here they would be devoured by prowling bands of wild dogs. Those among the weak who managed in time to get better and regain their strength would remain on Zanzibar and work as slaves to the Arabs—the proprietors of the enormous plantations of clove trees and coconut palms. Many who took part in the revolution were the grandsons of these slaves.
In the early morning, when the breeze from the sea was still crisp and the temperatures relatively cool, I set out for town. Two young men with machetes follow me. Protectors? Guards? Police? I don’t try to engage them in conversation. Their simple, poorly made machetes clearly present a problem for them. How should they carry them? Proudly and fiercely, or shyly and discreetly? The machete has always been the tool of the laborer, of the pariah, a sign of low status; now, since a few days ago, it has become prestigious, a symbol of power. Whoever has one on him has to belong to the victorious class, for the conquered walk around empty-handed, weaponless.
Immediately upon leaving the hotel one enters the narrow streets typical of old Arab towns. I cannot say why these people built in such a cramped and crowded fashion, why they pressed together this way, practically one atop another. Was it so that they would never have far to walk? Or to be better able to defend the town? I don’t know. But one thing is certain: this mass of piled stone, this accretion of walls, this layering of balconies, recesses, eaves, and rooftops, somehow secured, as though in an icy treasury, a corner of shade, a tiny breeze, and a bit of coolness during the most terrifying noontime heat.
The streets were constructed with similar foresight and ingenuity. They are so situated and arranged that whichever one you take, and in whichever direction, you will ultimately arrive at the seashore, at a wide boulevard where it is more spacious and pleasant than in the congested center.
The city is now deserted and lifeless. What a contrast with how it looked just a few days ago! For Zanzibar was the place where you could meet half the world. Centuries ago, Muslim refugees from Shiraz, Iran, settled on this island already inhabited by indigenous people. With time, they mingled with the local population, nevertheless retaining a certain separateness: they did not come from Africa, after all, but from Asia. Later, Arabs from the Persian Gulf started to arrive. They conquered the island’s Portuguese rulers and seized power, which they then exercised for 260 years. They filled the leading positions in the most lucrative lines of business: the trade in slaves and ivory. They became the proprietors of the best stretches of land and the largest plantations. They commanded a great fleet of ships. With time, Indians and Europeans—mainly the British and the Germans—also came to play key roles in the trade.
Formally, the island was ruled by a sultan, the descendant of Arabs from Oman. In reality, it was a British colony (officially a protectorate).
The lush, fertile plantations of Zanzibar lured people from the continent. They found work here harvesting cloves and coconuts. With increasing frequency, they remained here and settled. In this climate and with the pervading poverty, moving from place to place is not difficult: in just a few hours, you can erect a shelter and stash all your possessions inside—a shirt, a pot, a water bottle, a piece of soap, and a mat. A man can quickly have a roof over his head and, most importantly, his own place on earth; he can now start looking around for something to eat. This presents more of a problem. In practice, he can get work only on an Arab plantation—everything is in their hands. For years, the newcomer from the continent treated this order of things as normal—until, that is, a leader and agitator showed up in the neighborhood and told him that this Arab was someone Other, and that there was something ominous, satanic, about this Other: he was not only a stranger, but a bloodsucker and an enemy. The universe that the immigrant had perceived as preordained once and for all by the gods and the ancestors, he now saw as an injurious and degrading order, which, if he was to continue living, must be changed.