Chake-Chake

Pemba was settled and trading long before the town on this ridge amounted to anything. Swahili towns grew on the island's creeks and headlands from the ninth century onward, and the ruins at Ras Mkumbuu, with its large mosque, and the walled site at Pujini east of Chake-Chake belong to that world of merchants shipping mangrove poles, rice and ivory across the Indian Ocean. Pujini, dated to the fifteenth century, is remembered in island tradition as the stronghold of a ruler known as Mkame Ndume.

Chake-Chake itself grew as a defensible market on the high ground above the creek, first occupied between about 1500 and 1600, and it took on its present role during the nineteenth century when Pemba became the most productive clove island of the sultanate's empire. Plantations worked by enslaved labourers covered the interior, and the island's harvest — then as now, larger than Unguja's — was shipped through the creeks to Zanzibar. The town became the administrative centre of the island under the sultans and then under the British protectorate.

The revolution of 1964 and the union with Tanganyika brought the plantations under state control, and cloves have remained a state-supported export ever since. Pemba became a stronghold of opposition politics in the multiparty era, and its elections have been repeatedly disputed, which has left the island both politically distinct and economically neglected compared with Unguja. Diving tourism, focused on the channel reefs, arrived from the 1990s but remains small.

Pemba is Swahili, Muslim and markedly more conservative than the beach districts of Unguja. Mosques are the fixed points of every village, the week turns on Friday prayers, and Ramadan is observed strictly. Kiswahili is spoken with a distinct Pemban accent that islanders identify instantly, and long, formal greetings are expected before any conversation begins.

The island is known throughout East Africa for traditional medicine and divination, and people travel from the mainland and beyond to consult healers here — a reputation that outsiders often sensationalise and that residents treat as an ordinary part of life. Another local tradition is the village bullfight, in which a bull is teased and turned by men with cloths in a ring of spectators before being led away unharmed; it was introduced by the Portuguese, is known as mchezo wa ng'ombe, and is staged in the villages.

Music and dance follow the Swahili coast — taarab, drumming at weddings, and recitation at religious festivals — and weddings are the great village occasions. Visitors are rare enough outside the dive lodges to attract friendly curiosity, and the manners that matter are simple: cover up, greet first, ask before taking photographs, and accept that things happen at the island's pace.

Chake-Chake is a small town serving an island of around half a million people, most of whom live in villages among the clove and coconut plantations. The town holds the island's main hospital, the regional offices, the secondary schools, the banks and the market, so business from all over Pemba comes up the ridge in the morning and goes home in the afternoon.

Cloves remain the backbone of the rural economy, bought through the state trading system, and the harvest seasons dictate the year: buds picked by hand from tall trees, dried on mats along every roadside, and the smell of them everywhere. Fishing, seaweed farming on the east coast, rice, cassava and fruit fill the rest, and money sent home from relatives working in Unguja, Dar es Salaam and the Gulf matters to many households.

Pemba is poorer than Unguja, with thinner infrastructure, an electricity supply dependent on a submarine cable, and fewer of the tourism jobs that have reshaped the larger island. Its politics are a live issue rather than a historical one, and many islanders feel the archipelago's investment stops at the channel. Daily life is quiet and regulated by prayer times, the market, the school day and the tide.

Pemba eats the Swahili food of the archipelago with more of it grown at home. Fish, octopus and squid from the creeks and the channel are cooked in mchuzi wa nazi, a coconut curry, or grilled over charcoal, and served with wali wa nazi, rice cooked in coconut milk. Ugali, boiled cassava, breadfruit and green bananas cooked as a vegetable are the everyday starches, and beans and greens fill out the plate.

Spice is the island's identity. Cloves are its crop, and cinnamon, nutmeg, black pepper and cardamom grow alongside them, going into pilau and biryani for weddings and Eid and into the strong, sweet chai drunk all day. Breakfast is that tea with mandazi, vitumbua — small rice-and-coconut pancakes — or fried cassava with chilli salt, and mishkaki skewers are grilled at the roadside in the evening.

Fruit is abundant on such a wet, green island: jackfruit, breadfruit, mangoes, custard apples, pineapples and coconuts drunk green. Sweets follow the Omani and Indian inheritance, with halua, kashata made of coconut or peanuts, and sugarcane juice pressed with lime and ginger. Alcohol is served only at the handful of lodges, and eating out in the town means the plain, good, cheap restaurants around the market rather than anything designed for visitors.