Stone Town

A fishing settlement on this sheltered headland became a town of consequence in the nineteenth century, when Sultan Seyyid Said moved the Omani court from Muscat to Zanzibar and made the island the capital of a commercial empire. Coral stone and lime mortar went up in tall houses along the lanes, with Indian and Omani merchants, Hadhrami traders, Goan tailors, Parsi shopkeepers and European consuls crowded into a few hundred metres. Cloves from the plantations of Unguja and Pemba, ivory carried from the interior, and the trade in enslaved people taken from the mainland paid for all of it; the market where captives were sold stood where the Anglican cathedral now stands, and was closed under British pressure in 1873.

Britain declared a protectorate in 1890. In 1896 a dispute over the succession ended in a bombardment of the palaces from ships in the harbour, an affair of 38 to 45 minutes that is generally called the shortest war on record. The palace, the harem attached to it and the lighthouse in front were left unsafe and pulled down; the House of Wonders took only minor damage, and the Old Fort behind it survived everything.

Independence came in December 1963, and the revolution of January 1964 swept the sultanate away; the town's Arab and South Asian communities were killed or driven out in large numbers, and many houses stood empty and decaying for decades afterwards. Zanzibar joined Tanganyika in April 1964. Restoration began in earnest in the 1980s and 1990s, and in 2000 the old town was inscribed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site, since when tourism has become the main reason buildings are repaired — and the main pressure on them.

Stone Town is the source of much that is called Swahili. The Kiunguja dialect spoken here became the basis of standard Swahili, taught across East Africa, and the town's architecture is a record of the same mixing: Omani courtyards, Indian balconies and shopfronts, British verandas and coral-stone walls, with carved doors whose brass studs echo Gujarati designs and whose lintels carry Quranic inscriptions, lotus flowers or chains.

Taarab, sung poetry accompanied by an orchestra of violins, ouds, qanun and percussion, developed in these lanes under Sultan Barghash's patronage; Siti binti Saad, a singer from a nearby village, took it to a wide audience in the 1920s and was the first East African woman to record commercially. Music clubs still rehearse in the old town, and the Sauti za Busara festival each February fills the Old Fort. The Zanzibar International Film Festival has drawn film-makers from the Indian Ocean world since the 1990s. Freddie Mercury, born here in 1946 to a Zanzibari Parsi family, is the town's most famous export, if an ambivalent one.

Manners are conservative and courteous. Greetings are long and matter more than the business that follows, modest dress is expected of residents and visitors alike, and Friday prayers and the Ramadan fast set the shape of the week and the year. Cats are everywhere and left alone; children play football in every square after school.

About 219,000 people lived in Zanzibar City at the 2022 census, of whom only a small share live inside the old town itself; most of the population is across the creek in Ng'ambo, Michenzani and the wards spreading inland, where the markets, bus stands, schools and hospitals are. Stone Town's own resident numbers have fallen as houses have become hotels, shops and offices, a shift that worries conservation bodies as much as the state of the buildings.

Tourism is the engine: guides, taxi drivers, cooks, boat crews, curio sellers and hotel staff make up much of the working population, alongside government offices — Zanzibar has its own president, parliament and ministries — the port, and the clove trade that the state still controls. Fishing remains important, and the fish market at Malindi sets the day's prices early.

The day begins before dawn with the first call to prayer, the market and the port at their busiest by seven, and a long, hot, quiet middle to the afternoon. Life returns to the streets at dusk, when Forodhani fills and the seafront wall is lined with people. The old town's persistent problems are practical: buildings collapsing after heavy rain, water and electricity supply from the mainland cable, waste, and the cost of living in a place priced for visitors.

Zanzibar's cooking is the most spiced in Tanzania, and the town's markets show why: cloves, cardamom, cinnamon, nutmeg, black pepper and lemongrass are grown on the island. Pilau and biryani are the festive dishes, fragrant and layered; fish, prawns and octopus are cooked in mchuzi wa pweza and other coconut curries; and wali wa nazi, rice cooked in coconut milk, accompanies most meals. Ndizi nyama, green bananas stewed with meat, is an everyday plate.

Street food has its own vocabulary. Urojo, known to visitors as Zanzibar mix, is a thick, sour, turmeric-yellow soup poured over potato, fritters and crisps. Mishkaki are marinated meat skewers grilled over charcoal; mkate wa kumimina is a soft rice bread; vitumbua are little coconut-rice pancakes eaten at breakfast with chai. The Forodhani stalls sell all of it after dark, along with grilled seafood and cassava.

Sweets and drinks reflect the Omani and Indian past: halua, a dense, sticky cardamom sweet, is cut into slabs in the lanes near Darajani; kashata is made of coconut or peanuts and sugar; and tiny cups of bitter kahawa are poured from brass pots in the evening. Fresh sugarcane juice pressed with lime and ginger is the standard cold drink, alcohol is sold mainly in hotels and tourist restaurants, and the fruit — jackfruit, custard apple, mangoes, breadfruit — is worth the market visit on its own.