“Jambo.” “Karibu.” “Habari gani.” “Rafiki.” “Mzungu.” These are words that I hear on a daily basis walking around the streets of Stone Town. Swahili is the lingua franca here in Zanzibar. While English is the second official language in Tanzania, and many people in Stone Town, at least those involved in the tourism industry or who have a higher level of education, do speak English, everyone prefers to speak Swahili. Once you leave the city or the tourist areas, Swahili is the only language spoken.

 

Swahili actually originated in Zanzibar, and was spread throughout much of Eastern Africa from here through trading. It is now one of the official languages in Tanzania and Kenya and is spoken from southern Somalia to Uganda, Rwanda, Burundi and into the Democratic Republic of the Congo as well as bits of Zambia, Mozambique, Madagascar and the Comoros. Swahili is at its basis, a tribal language related to the Bantu language group, but it has been influenced by the diverse history of Zanzibar. Persian, English and Portuguese words are incorporated into the language, often slightly altered from their initial version. French fries (chips) are a common street food here, deliciously served topped with salad, often a meat skewer and spicy sauces, and are called “chipsi”. The months are “Septemba, Octoba, Novemba.” The police are “polisi” and a school is “sculi.” Law is “sheria”, although it has nothing to do with sharia law.

 

 

Coming from my background as a Peace Corps volunteer, and my experience living and traveling in Latin American countries, where there is no language barrier for me, it has been extremely frustrating and limiting for me not to be able to communicate with local people. We have made two trips to the field now as part of my work, to Pemba and to Makunduchi, a small village on the very southern tip of Zanzibar. During these trips we ran or participated in meetings and trainings, but everything was conducted in Swahili, so the most I could do was pick up bits and pieces based on visual clues, context, and the occasional English word that was dropped throughout the presentation. This has put up a large barrier for me on a personal level, as I want to be able to communicate with local people and not just rely on those involved in the tourism industry, who are often trying to sell me things, or expats for my social interactions. I know that Swahili is not required for my job, I can do my work successfully just in English as I am primarily working on reporting, which is done exclusively in English, but from a personal level, if I am going to spend six months living on this island, I want to be able to communicate comfortably, in the way I am able to in Latin America.

 

I bought some language CDs which I have been studying at home, but this hasn’t been very successful. So I decided I needed to find myself a tutor to help me out with the language. There is a young man that always hangs out on my doorstep and who I have become very friendly with, named Awadh, and we have been having conversations about music and about life on Zanzibar. I just contracted him to become my informal Swahili tutor. He has been quite persistent about wanting to hang out with me all of the time, and the other day he was talking about the need to find a job to help support his family, so I am going to pay him a small amount to give me lessons 2-3 days a week. Additionally, my co-worker, set me up with a Swahili instructor at the local university, Shani, to give me private lessons. She is also the Spanish teacher at the university and I will help her with her students who are learning Spanish. I’m hoping to not feel like such a mzungu (European, used for white people and tourists in general. It has the same meaning and connotation as gringo in Latin America).

 

Swahili is a beautiful language and has a very warm tone and rhythm to it. The construction of the language seems fairly straightforward (from what I’ve learned so far) and the sounds of the letters are very similar to English, with the exception of the vowels which have the same sounds as Spanish. I think with a little bit of practice, Swahili should be relatively easy to learn. The main difficulty however is that, much like Guaraní, with the exception of words that come from English, Swahili is not connected to any root language (such as Latin) that can serve as a basis for understanding the words. To start out, I will just have to memorize words and sounds. Then as I begin to have a better understanding, I will be able to put them together and make sense out of the language. It will be difficult, but I think with the help of Awadh and Shani and constantly practicing with people when I can, I will be able to have a decent grasp of the language after my six months here.

The other evening a met a small group of British and Dutch tourists at a waterfront bar where I was unwinding from my first day of work and three previous days of travelling. I mentioned that I was an intern at a peacebuilding and conflict transformation NGO on Zanzibar. They gave me a funny look and finally one of them asked me, “Is there a conflict going on here in Zanzibar?” With large numbers of tourists pouring in recently for the Sauti za Busara music festival, the only sign of any conflict seemed to be a spirited haggling over prices for hakuna matata (no worries) t-shirts.

 

While there are certainly no ongoing crises in Zanzibar as there are in many other parts of Africa, and there has been very little direct violence since the bloody 1964 Revolution, there are simmering tensions on the island that have very deep historical roots.

 

Zanzibar, due to its strategic location, has always been a mecca for trade across the Indian Ocean, and because of that, it has always been very diverse and multi-cultural. There was a long history of early traders from all around the Indian Ocean, followed by a short period of Portuguese colonial rule. The modern situation, however, began in 1622 when the Omani dynasties ousted the Portuguese in the battle of Hormuz. This began a long period of Arab and Omani control that has had a lasting effect on the present-day situation.

 

The Omani’s were in control of Zanzibar for almost 300 years and became very powerful through profits from the slave trade. The sultan of Oman even moved the seat of his government to the island in 1841 and the notorious and brutal slave market in Stone Town was said to have traded over 1 million lives. The period of Omani rule came to an end in 1890 when Zanzibar became a British protectorate, but the Omanis were still held in positions of power in a form of a British puppet regime.

 

Another large and important minority was the South Asians who had come as merchants from the Portuguese colony of Goa in southern India nearly one hundred years earlier. They, along with the Omanis, were the preferred groups of the colonial powers and were given all of the top positions in government and comprised most of the business leaders and land-owners in Zanzibar. The native African population were left marginalized and impoverished, no longer facing the horrors of the slave trade, but suffering from a great deal of structural violence that kept them in a position of permanent oppression. This led to the need for a change.

 

The change came about shortly after independence was granted to the island. On January 12^th, 1964, the Zanzibar revolution started and the old Arab leadership was quickly overwhelmed and overthrown. Unfortunately, this led to many days of indiscriminate killings and rapes of Arabs and South Indians around the island, with some people claiming that this was a genocide. Estimates for the death toll have ranged from just a few hundred to 20,000, nearly all Arabs and South Indians.  The Afro-Shirazi Party (ASP) came out on top, which is the political party that, in its new form, the Chama Cha Mapundizi (CCM), has led the government since the revolution.

 

However, Zanzibar is a classic case of the oppressors becoming the oppressed. Centuries of slavery and unequal land ownership ended very quickly with a brutal killing of the ethnic group responsible for the oppression and a new political structure was developed that didn’t fully rectify all of the inequalities present in Zanzibari society (something that would have been an impossible task).

 

Fastforward to 2000 when political tensions began developing again around contested elections. The CCM/ASP had won every election since the revolution and hadn’t succeeded in making a just and inclusive society. The main opposition party, the Civic United Front (CUF), emerged from some of the political coalitions of the old Arab government (although no longer based on ethnic lines), with its base of power on the often-neglected northern island of Pemba, began getting a large percentage of the overall vote. They were never able to defeat the CCM, though, and they cried corruption. This resulted in riots surrounding the 2000 and 2005 elections, which left many dead and wounded. The worst violence during this period came with a massacre on January 27^th, 2001 that left 35 dead and more than 600 wounded, according to Human Rights Watch. The centuries-old political divides were re-emerging to cause new episodes of violence in the 21^st century.

 

To avoid political violence around the 2010 election, the leaders of both parties decided to work together and form the Government of National Unity (GNU). While the two political parties would still exist at the local level, at the national level (I’m using nation here to refer to Zanzibar, although Zanzibar is really only a semi-autonomous region of Tanzania) there are no political parties. Fortunately, the 2010 elections were peaceful, but there is still a great deal of concern surrounding the 2015 elections, which are less than a year away.

 

This is where Search for Common Ground comes in. SFCG is working closely with the GNU to assure that both political parties continue to work together and avoid future violence. They are working with 7 radio stations, 2 on Pemba and 5 on Unguja (the main island, often just referred to as Zanzibar), on programs focusing on good governance to help people understand the workings of the government and allow them to both support and hold the GNU accountable. They are also working directly with government officials and civil society groups to support the idea of an accountable, transparent and just GNU. As an intern (who still understands very little Swahili), I am working mostly behind the scenes on all of these programs.

 

This is the political background leading up to the work that I am currently engaged in, as I understand it, and based on the reading I have done and the conversations I have had. I feel it is a pretty accurate representation, although I absolutely understand that I have broadly oversimplified the situation. The CCM and the CUF are no longer divided clearly on ethnic lines and to say that the current political situation is neatly tied to Arab domination and slavery from two centuries ago, is a misrepresentation. However, history has a way of repeating itself and preserving the structures of conflict and oppression, even if the context may have changed. As I learn and understand more, I will update this blog and my analysis of the conflict may change, however, I believe that the present situation on the island can be looked at in the broader picture of Zanzibar’s turbulent and contested history.

 

Most of the historical facts for this blog entry came from my guidebook, The Rough Guide to Zanzibar, and Don Petterson’s account of the Revolution in Zanzibar. Additionally, my information comes from historical plaques and sites in Stone Town and conversations that I have had since arriving here.

On Thursday and Friday of my first week at work I had the opportunity to travel to the northern island of Pemba to participate in a midterm review meeting with our two radio station partners on the island. Kheirat, the program assistant and the person with whom I work most closely, and I boarded a 12-seater plane on Thursday afternoon and took off for the 30 minute flight to Chake Chake, the main town on Pemba.

 

Pemba is the ignored younger brother of Zanzibar. It has just a fraction of the population, is very quiet and rural and has very little tourism (quite shocking, actually, compared to the hordes of tourists that are everywhere on Unguja). Unfortunately, it is also very neglected and extremely poor, again, because it doesn’t experience the influx of tourism dollars that Unguja does.

 

We landed at the tiny airport and took a taxi in to the Hafidhi Hotel and Conference Center, one of the nicest hotels on the island and the site of our radio meeting the following day. After settling in to the room, I went for a walk around the town.

Chake Chake was quite run down and, at only 5:30 in the afternoon, had already almost completely shut down for the day (people on Zanzibar joke that after 5 the only thing you can do on Pemba is sleep). People were extremely friendly, though, and most everyone seemed to want to say “jambo” to me without trying to sell me something or offer me their services. I made my way down to the jetty on the waterfront where I met a group of kids that were splashing in the filthy water. The called out to me “muzungu” (white man) and urged me to come down and join them. We managed a few words of a conversation in Swahili but my “unasema Kiingereza?” (do you speak English?) was met with many shaking heads. I turned around and headed back to the hotel.

 

The following day the meeting began in the hotel conference room and was conducted entirely in Swahili. I tried to pick up as much as I could and some of it was translated to me in English. Only my counterpart, Kheirat, and one of the radio producers could speak any English, though. Even though I didn’t understand much of what was being said, I could tell that the meeting was a success. After the meeting we visited the office of one of the radio stations and then returned to the hotel with a few hours to kill.

 

We had a little money left over in our budget for the day, so we hired a taxi to take us out to the ruins of Pujini before dropping us off at the airport. This was what was left of a mosque and a small city built by a 16^th century tyrant named Mkama Ndume, or “grasper of men”. This small rural village was once a center of commerce and there was an ancient channel into the city where dhows could come in and unload their goods. The steps up the rampart to this port were one of the best-preserved parts of the ruins. There was also the “jealous well” which was allegedly constructed so Mkama Ndume’s two wives could both collect water without having to see each other. It was an interesting excursion for the afternoon and amazing to see how much more urban and cosmopolitan Pemba was 500 years ago.

 

We finally headed back to the airport and had a nerve-wracking flight into a big storm that was soaking Zanzibar at the time. We landed safely, though, and got some incredible views from the airplane on our way in. Travel even between the islands is prohibitively expensive, so I don’t know how many more opportunities I will have to do this, but it definitely made for an interesting experience during my first week.

I am now a week in to my internship and my time in Zanzibar. After a five long, tiring flights, I arrived at Karume International Airport, named for the famed first president of Zanzibar’s Revolutionary Government. The last leg of my flight was a twenty-minute-long journey on a tiny and crowded puddle-jumper plane that offered an amazing view of the approach to the beautiful, tropical island that will be my home for the next 6 months. I was accompanied by my future supervisor and we were met by the company driver who took us from the airport on the outskirts of Zanzibar City to the heart of narrow, winding streets that make up Stone Town, the historic core of Zanzibar City. The car made it to the front of my new office, but then we had to get out and walk to my apartment as the streets became too narrow for anything more than motorcycles, bicycles and pedestrians. We arrive to the guest-house and I am shown my new room, a small bedroom with an attached bathroom and a nice balcony looking out over my narrow street to St. Joseph’s Catholic Cathedral a block away.

Stone Town is like no place that I have ever been. It is a labyrinth of narrow streets and alleyways with beautiful, but crumbling, old buildings, stores, mosques, and churches packed in on either side. The buildings block out all views of landmarks and only leave a narrow strip of sky to appear between their roofs. The streets are filled with children playing pickup games of soccer, niqab-clad women returning from the market with only their eyes showing, hordes of tourists taking pictures of everything, people shouting jambo (hello) and rafiki (friend) getting you to come into their stores, chickens and stray kittens.

 

After getting everything sorted in my room, I took a quick shower and headed down to Forodhani Gardens, a waterfront park that turns into a giant outdoor food court with tables overflowing with skewers of fish and meat, the famous octopus skewers, chapatis, sambusas, naan, falafel, rice cakes, cassava, breadfruit, corn on the cob, grilled bananas, and the famous “Zanzibar Pizzas”, chapatis that are stuffed with a variety of ingredients and then cooked in front of you.

I got my fill of street food (so far I have eaten mostly street food and haven’t suffered any consequences yet) and headed back to my room to pass out. I was exhausted from my five flights and had to be ready to go to work the following morning at 8:30.

 

My first few days have been spent mostly in the office as my working hours are eight to five every day. I have also been trying to work on my Swahili and take care of other business in the evenings, but I have managed to get out and explore my fascinating new home each afternoon. Today I grabbed my map and set out to work my way through the maze of streets surrounding my apartment. It is extremely difficult and very easy to get lost, something that does concern me a bit. I have been attempting to map out known routes back to my place and stick to them, while trying to explore as much as possible. This afternoon, I had chosen my route and attempted to stick to it. I was going to head from my apartment through the narrow streets to the north end of Stone Town and then follow the waterfront back to Forodhani Gardens. After leaving my apartment I set out to Jaw’s Corner, a junction of 5 narrow walking streets where men sit and play cards and drink tea. I left the corner on the road heading north. After 30 minutes of wandering through narrow streets, thinking I was heading in the right direction, I come around a corner and realize that I am right back where I started, at Jaw’s Corner. All I could do was laugh. I somehow managed to walk in circles. The saving grace is that Stone Town really isn’t that big, so no matter how lost you get, you know that you will either end up somewhere you recognize, if not the very same place that you started your journey.

 

I am still in the stage where everything I encounter is wondrous and amazing. I want to say that Zanzibar is even more exotic than the images conjured by its name, but I hate using the term “exotic” as it implies a certain level of objectification of a very real place and very real people going through very real struggles. But still, Zanzibar is stranger and more exciting than any place I have ever visited, much less lived. I’m sure I will adjust, but like everything else, it will be a process.

Today is the eve of my departure on my next big adventure, this time to the island of Zanzibar, Tanzania. I will be starting an internship with Search for Common Ground, an international peacebuilding and conflict transformation non-profit that is working to end violent conflict throughout the world. This internship will make up the final semester of my graduate degree program at the Monterey Institute for International Studies, where I am studying International Policy Studies with a focus on Human Security and Development and receiving a Conflict Resolution Certificate. This trip is not only my latest adventure to a different part of the world, but it is the next step in the fascinating, unconventional path that I have taken since finishing my BA. As can be expected, I am both nervous and excited for this huge step!

 

I want to catch everyone up briefly on what has been happening in my life over the past decade and what has led up to this point where I am heading off to Africa. After finishing my BA in Film Studies at the University of Southern California, I shipped off to South America to serve as an Early Elementary Education Peace Corps Volunteer. I kept a blog during that experience as well and I’m hoping to maintain a similar framework for this blog. After returning from the Peace Corps I went through a long and very difficult readjustment/job hunting period that was complicated even more by the fact that it was perfectly timed with the 2008 economic crisis. After a summer spent living at home and working at a coffee shop, I eventually moved back to Los Angeles and got a job as a Spanish teacher at a small charter school in a rough, inner-city neighborhood. This was an extremely difficult position, but I stuck on for a second year, although in a different position, as the coordinator for the After School program at the school. At the end of this year, the school was in the process of being shut down and I had already started my plans to go to graduate school.

 

However, as things have a tendency to work out, the school didn’t shut down. Given that I was one of the few remaining employees, I helped the transition into a new administration and was offered a job as a guidance counselor and made up part of the administrative team. I worked as a guidance counselor for two years and, although the school was always an extremely tough place to work, I really enjoyed that job and that position. However, after two years, I needed to go back to graduate school, either to receive my guidance counseling credential or to shift careers. While I loved counseling and could see myself happily working in this career path, I felt like that wasn’t my calling, so I decided to shift gear and return to graduate school.

 

I began my program at the Monterey Institute in August of 2012. My classes were excellent and the friendships that I developed will hopefully be life-long. However, the classes I took in the Conflict Resolution track and with my professor, Dr. Pushpa Iyer, were truly inspiring and led me to my current internship position and a hopeful future career in conflict resolution or human rights. In addition to my classes, I went on unforgettable research trips to Gujarat, India (see our blog for this trip) and Cuba, I did an independent study project in international LGBT rights, and I completed an excellent internship at Global Exchange in San Francisco.

 

Now, however, I am beginning my final project in graduate school and hopefully the first step in a future career. Africa is a completely new continent for me and will definitely be a step away from what I am accustomed to. I will need to learn Swahili (although English is widely spoken in Zanzibar) and adapt to life in a very different culture. However, it is a transition that I am looking forward to and I’m quite certain that it will be an excellent and memorable experience.

 

This blog will serve as a journal, a way to keep in touch with friends and family, and also a professional document to discuss some of my observances, experiences, and findings from my internship in Africa. I hope to come up with a balance of personal stories and material that will eventually support the report that I am writing as my final deliverable for graduate school. Please feel free to follow along and comment on my entries!

 

Tomorrow I will head to the Seattle Tacoma International Airport to begin the first leg of my 5-leg, 2-day long flight to Zanzibar (Seattle to Vancouver to Toronto to Addis Ababa to Dar Es Salaam to Zanzibar). I don’t anticipate much sleep these next few days! I will be in touch shortly with my first impressions.