In Tanzania a dollar is worth 2,000 shillings. Shillings are the main currency. So to get 200 bucks you are going to have about 400,000 shillings. Enjoy it!
My one full day in Zanzibar was blocked out on two basic pillars: a trip to a spice farm, and a walk around Stone Town, the old city of Zanzibar City, and a World Heritage site. It concluded with a disturbing and thought-provoking tour of the old slave market, and a quick overview of that horrid history that would make your skin crawl.
Said Juma Dadi, a tour guide for the local Fernandes Tours and Safaris, picked up me and a colleague at the Maru Maru Hotel in Stone Town, and we drove through the crowded streets of Zanzibar City and beyond the outskirts to Kidichi to the Maganga Spice Farm. There we got a crash course in what used to be Zanzibar’s main export, before the spice industry was overtaken by tourism.
The Maganga Spice Farm has a special area for tourists where a variety of Zanzibar’s spices, herbs and fruits are grown in a small area. That makes it easy to walk around and see, smell or taste many of these amazing foods that you may know by name or in their refined form, but probably have not have seen in their natural state, fresh from the earth.
One after the other we were shown various fruits, leaves, roots and bark that we love when we see them in jars or taste them in our food and drinks. It was a bit of a guessing game as our guide and his colleague from the spice farm presented us with some crushed leaves and let us smell them and see if we could identify them:
• Pepper corns as tiny green balls
• cassava root
• soursop, a fruit said to have anti-cancer properties
• zingifuri, which produces a red lotion that can be used as lipstick
• ochre, which painters used to make yellow paint
• vanilla, which is a long green bean growing on a vine
• green chilis, which turn red and are used to make Tabasco sauce
• lemongrass, used for tea with healing properties and as mosquito repellant
• clove, the king of spices and formerly Zanzibar’s biggest export
• turmeric, which turns the skin yellow and has many health benefits
• iodine, which drips from the iodine tree when you cut the bark
• aloe vera, which is healthy for the skin
• henna, used for dye
• ginger, cut from a root and good for many things
• curry leaf
• cardamom
• cinnamon, which comes from the bark of the tree;
• nutmeg, which is a three-layer nut which can get you high
• ylangilani, which was one of the main scents in Chanel No. Five.
There were also fresh fruits we could taste fresh from their source: passionfruit, oranges, papayas, bananas and fruits I had never heard of, such as the jackfruit.
After the spice tour we had lunch at the Serena Hotel, a beautiful colonial-style building right on the shore of the Indian Ocean. As we ate and drank we could hear the waves lapping up on the shore only a few feet away.
Memorial statue at the Zanzibar Slave Market
After lunch was our walk through Stone Town, with its labyrinthine unmarked streets lined with shops and busy businesses, multitudes of people gathering socially, children running and playing. There was much to see and absorb, so much to reflect upon, such as the differences between the way the local children grow up playing energetically in the streets and the way ours do, engaged in smartphones and such practically from birth. Much to think about.
The climax of the trip was the visit to the old slave market, which was chilling and frightening. Most of it is gone now, a church built over the site. But the old dungeon underground is still there and you can go in and see a tiny space about the size of a bathroom where the slaveholders would cram 50 people at a time, chained together.
The degree of inhumanity of the slave trade is unfathomable. When the captives were in the dungeon they were chained together by their feet. They were put into these barely survivable conditions on the theory that the ones that survived were strong and would bring a good price.
Outside the dungeon, the men were chained together by their necks to keep them from attempting to escape. Near the auction block where they were to be sold was a whipping post. Before being placed on the auction block, the prisoners would be viciously whipped. Those who did not cry were judged to be the strong ones and would bring a higher price.
It’s hard to conceive of the degree of cruelty that has been unleashed by some people on other people throughout history. The legacy of slavery is long and deep and has only begun to be reckoned with the full depth of its depravity.
We left the nightmare behind at the slave market and returned to our comfortable, friendly rooms at the Maru Maru Hotel.
