Paje

Paje is an old coral-coast village whose living came from the reef and the thin soil behind it: fishing from small outrigger canoes and sailing boats inside the lagoon, coconuts, cassava and a little livestock. The east coast was never the wealthy side of Zanzibar — the clove plantations, the trading houses and the sultans' palaces were all on the west — and villages here supplied the city with fish, coir rope and thatch while remaining poor and remote.

The change that reshaped village incomes came with commercial seaweed farming, introduced to Zanzibar's east coast after research into cultivating the crop on the islands. Villagers, and above all women, began planting cuttings of red algae on the tidal flats, harvesting and drying them for sale to buyers who export the crop for the carrageenan used in food, toothpaste and cosmetics. For many households it was the first independent cash income, seaweed became one of Tanzania's larger earners of foreign currency, and it remains a defining feature of the shoreline, though prices are low and the ice-ice disease that damages the crop spreads with warmer seawater.

Tourism followed in the 1990s and 2000s. Paje's particular asset was the wind: a steady side-onshore breeze through most of the year, flat shallow water inside the reef and a wide sandy flat at low tide, which together make one of the better places to learn to kitesurf. Kite schools, hostels and beach hotels spread along the front, the road from Stone Town was improved, and the village acquired a second, seasonal population of instructors and long-staying riders.

The village is Swahili and Muslim, and the calls to prayer, Ramadan and the two Eids order the year. Kiswahili is spoken everywhere; greetings are long and matter; and the modesty expected of residents is expected of visitors too as soon as they leave the sand. Weddings are the big village occasions, with drumming and singing that carry along the coast for several evenings.

Seaweed farming has given the coast a distinctive daily culture of its own. Groups of women in kanga and headscarves walk out at low tide with bundles of cuttings and return with sacks, working to the tide table rather than the clock, and the crop is spread to dry on racks and mats along the roadside. A handful of village cooperatives now make soaps and oils from the seaweed instead of selling it raw.

The other population is the kite crowd: instructors, seasonal workers and riders who stay for weeks or months, which gives Paje a younger and more informal feel than the resort strips further north, and a nightlife of beach bars that the village keeps at arm's length. Relations are generally easy, but the etiquette is plain — dress when off the beach, ask before photographing, and do not treat the village as an extension of the hotels.

Paje's people live in houses of coral rag and cement set back from the shore among coconut palms and small plots of cassava. Fishing and seaweed remain the village's own work, alongside a growing number of jobs in hotels, restaurants, kite schools and transport, and many families now have some income from each.

The rhythm is set by the tide as much as by the sun. Boats go out and come back on the water; the seaweed farmers work the flats when they are exposed, whatever the hour; and at high water the lagoon fills and the kites go up. The middle of the day is hot and slow, and the evening belongs to football on the sand, the mosque and the bars, a few hundred metres apart.

The pressures are those of a village that grew quickly. Building has spread along the beachfront and inland, fresh water is limited and salty near the coast, waste and plastic are visible problems, and power cuts affect the whole island when the mainland cable fails. Land prices and rents have risen far beyond local wages, and warmer seas have damaged the seaweed harvest that many households depend on.

The lagoon supplies the kitchen. Fish, octopus, squid and prawns are grilled over charcoal or cooked in mchuzi wa nazi, a coconut curry, and served with wali wa nazi — rice cooked in coconut milk — or with chapati. Octopus cooked slowly with coconut, cardamom and tamarind is the dish of this coast, and small fish caught inside the reef are fried whole and eaten with kachumbari, a salad of tomato, onion and lime.

Village cooking is simpler and starchier than the beach menus: ugali, boiled cassava, breadfruit, beans and greens, with pilau or biryani for weddings and Eid. Breakfast is chai spiced with ginger and cardamom, with mandazi, vitumbua — little rice-and-coconut pancakes — or fried cassava dusted with chilli salt. Mishkaki, marinated meat skewers, are grilled at the roadside in the evening.

Coconut runs through everything, grated and pressed for the first and second milk, and the palms along the shore are tapped for their sap as well. Spices from the farms inland — cloves, cinnamon, nutmeg, black pepper — flavour the curries, and tropical fruit is sold from stalls on the coast road: mangoes and jackfruit in season, bananas cooked as a vegetable, and sugarcane juice pressed with lime and ginger. Alcohol is served in the hotels and beach bars rather than in the village.