STONE TOWN – The Cautionary Tale of Princess Salme

Among the many displays in the questionably named House of Wonders museum in Stone Town, there’s a stamp dated from the 1960s entitled ‘Religious Tolerance.’ The stamp has images of several of Stone Town’s major places of worship, including both the Anglican and Catholic Cathedrals as well as several mosques, all closely packed together on the same street. It’s a stylized representation of how life in Stone Town seems to operate. This is a tiny piece of land, filled with buildings from several centuries and different cultures (particularly Arabian and Portuguese) built within a few feet of each other. With the differing colonial influences also came different faith groups; so as you wander around the Anglican Cathedral you can quite clearly hear the midday prayers being broadcast from the mosque across the square.


The Zanzibar religious tolerance stamp. Postage should always make good statements.

And it works. It has to; there just isn’t any room for anyone in Stone Town to get territorial about their religion or anything else for that matter. That’s especially true during Ramadan; when many of the city’s eateries close for most of the day and the usual East African occupation of relentless selling seems oddly muted. That may either be because the island’s mostly Sunni Muslim population is spending all their time in prayer, or possibly because even in the cooler season in which I visit, it’s still warm enough to make twelve hours of fasting a day a rather tiring thing to do. And relentless selling is rather hard work. That means I’m relatively unhassled as I wander around the narrow rocky streets (and it is wandering; using a map sort of misses the point of the possibilities for discovery in the maze of Stone Town) The only thing I end up buying is a battered copy of “All Creatures Great and Small”, and the seller simply *insists* on giving me a discount which I hadn’t even bargained for.

So, what to do in a slightly sleepy East African version of Morocco? Well, there are two cathedrals in town… The Anglican Church arrived in Zanzibar in the middle of the nineteenth century, just as slavery was being abolished. So much so that the Anglican Cathedral is built on the site of the old slave market; with the altar being on the very spot where slaves would be whipped and beaten. That might seem rather distasteful, but then I could tell you a thing or two about some of the more gruesome pagan sites on which English churches got built… Also, it’s fairly clear to me that the choice of location for the Cathedral was intended as an act of healing rather than an expression of colonial power. That’s a response which fits right in on an island of outstanding natural beauty which religious tolerance is a way of life. Here, figures like David Livingstone are regarded with a great deal of affection (his campaign against the slave trade and time of residence in Zanzibar make him much revered) What’s left of the slave markets themselves are two small holding cells across Cathedral Square underneath St. Hilda’s Youth Hostel. They’re just two dark rooms with iron chains still in place. But it’s enough to make the point.


Anglican Cathedral with mosque just around the corner.


One of the sobering holding cells underneath St. Hilda's hostel.

After signing the Anglican Cathedral guestbook on behalf of the Anglican Church of Canada, I headed over to the much more gothic looking Catholic Cathedral. After reading a tip in the Lonely Planet which mentioned a perennially open back door, I headed inside to be greeted with a garish pink and yellow paint job, and a local resident playing extremely slow praise music on an electric keyboard. The whole atmosphere was too surreal; I had to leave before anything weirder happened. I ducked into a local Internet café for the first e-mail of the trip and found a rather large selection of pirated DVDs for sale whilst I was waiting. If you had any doubts about the influence of tolerance weighing against the local conservatism, it all fades away when you find a copy of “John Tucker Must Die” on the crowded shelves. E-mails away, I then continued on the British-tourist-abroad trail and hit up the local museums.


The Palace Museum viewed from the balcony of the House of Wonders. Top marks for museum naming!

Of all the local heroes, none seems more revered in Zanzibar’s public history than Princess Salme. Born to the life of a Sultan’s daughter in Zanzibar, she left to Europe to marry a German merchant. After his death, she seems to have made some attempt to return to Zanzibar but (to the obvious regret of whoever wrote the displays in the Palace Museum) was never quite accepted back. I wonder if it’s because, by that point, she was neither one thing or the other. Not quite Arabian, not quite European. Zanzibar’s tolerance, perhaps, requires a little loyalty to go along with it… Neither the Palace Museum or the House of Wonders are quite as exciting as they should be. The former has a number of rooms decorated in the style of the former Sultans over the course of their rule. By the time Zanzibar was approaching the end of its independence, the palace living room was looking suspiciously like a middle class British sitting room. It was probably best they unified with Tanzania before the eighties fashions arrived.


The Sultan's sitting room. Where I can imagine the Sultan and family gathered around to open Christmas presents and listen to the Queen's Speech.

The best thing about the museums is their top floors, which open out onto large balconies with views across the crowded town. You can see where buildings are almost falling into one another because of their proximity, and where power and clothes lines weave in and out of multiple residences high across the streets below. For a confusingly designed cityscape, Stone Town really does make much more sense than it lets on.


Painter on a balcony in front of the towers of the Catholic Cathedral.


Old Fort ampitheatre and the rooftops of Zanzibar.