Nungwi

Nungwi has been a boat-building village for as long as records of the island go back, and its importance was always the sea rather than the land. The northern point of Unguja stands at the entrance to the Pemba Channel, where the sailing routes between the East African coast, Arabia and India converged; dhows put in here for repair, water and shelter, and the shallow sand at the point made a natural yard for laying a keel. The vessels built here — the jahazi of the Swahili coast and smaller open boats, planked by hand and rigged with settee or lateen sails — carried mangrove poles, cloves, fish and passengers, and the same shapes are still being built on the same beach.

The village lay outside the main currents of Zanzibar's history. The sultans' wealth was made in Stone Town and on the clove plantations of the centre and of Pemba, and the north was a place of fishermen, coconut groves and coral-rag country. The lighthouse at Ras Nungwi, the oldest on the island, marks the northern tip, and until the late twentieth century the road from Stone Town was poor enough that Nungwi was effectively a day's journey away.

Tourism arrived in the 1990s and changed the west shore beyond recognition. Villagers had resisted it until then, and Nungwi's beach was among the last in the area to take hotels; once they came, the west-facing sand, the sunsets and the snorkelling and diving offshore made it the most visited beach in Zanzibar, and dive centres and bars followed. The village behind the strip has kept its own life and its own rules, and the tension and the trade between the two define the place today.

Nungwi is a Muslim Swahili village, and its year follows the prayer calendar, Ramadan and the two Eids. Kiswahili is the language of everything; the village keeps the greetings, the seniority and the modesty of the rest of rural Zanzibar, and a stranger who greets properly before asking anything is treated very differently from one who does not.

The village's distinctive craft is boat-building. Shipwrights work by eye and inherited practice rather than drawings, shaping planks of local and imported hardwood with adzes and steaming them into curve, and the knowledge passes from father to son. Fishing follows the moon and the monsoon: the north-east kaskazi from about December to March and the south-east kusi from about June to September decide where and when boats go out, and a calendar of tides is common knowledge here.

The other culture in Nungwi is the visitors'. Dive schools, beach bars, boat crews and hotel staff make a second, younger, mixed community, and the contrast with the village is stark — swimwear a hundred metres from a mosque, alcohol in a place where it is not otherwise drunk. Most residents are accustomed to it and expect visitors to make the switch at the top of the beach; dressing for the village is the courtesy that matters most.

About 31,000 people live in Nungwi, which the 2022 census made the island's second-largest settlement after Zanzibar City. The village's own economy is fishing, boat-building, small-scale farming on the thin coral soil, and coconuts, with an increasing share of households drawing income from hotels, restaurants, dive centres and the transport that serves them.

The day begins with the dawn prayer and the boats going out; the catch is landed and sold on the sand during the morning, and the yards work through the cooler hours. The middle of the day is quiet and hot. From the late afternoon the beach fills, with football on the sand, sunset boats going out, and the restaurants lighting up along the shore.

Growth is the local issue. Building has spread along the coast towards Kendwa, pressing on fresh water, waste disposal and the reef; land prices have risen far beyond what village families can pay; and the benefits of tourism are unevenly shared, with the best-paid jobs often going to people from elsewhere. Power cuts, which affect the whole island when the mainland cable fails, are a regular interruption.

Fish decides the menu. Kingfish, red snapper, tuna, prawns, squid and octopus come straight off the boats, grilled over charcoal with lime and chilli or simmered in mchuzi wa nazi, a coconut curry, and served with wali wa nazi, rice cooked in coconut milk. Octopus is the one to try: tenderised, cooked slowly with coconut, cardamom and tamarind, and eaten with rice or chapati.

The village eats more simply than the beach. Ugali, boiled cassava, beans, greens and small fish are the everyday plates; pilau and biryani appear at weddings and at Eid; and mandazi, vitumbua — small rice-and-coconut pancakes — and fried cassava with chilli salt are the snacks sold from stalls with strong, sweet, spiced chai. Mishkaki, marinated meat skewers grilled over charcoal in the evening, are the usual street supper.

Fruit is abundant and local: coconuts drunk green and then scraped for their flesh, mangoes and jackfruit in season, bananas cooked as a vegetable, and sugarcane juice pressed with ginger and lime. Spices from the farms inland — cloves, cardamom, cinnamon and black pepper — flavour nearly everything cooked in a Zanzibari kitchen. Alcohol is served at the hotels and beach bars rather than in the village, which observes the usual practice of a Muslim community.