such a warren of streets in some of the finest lines from this underrated gem of early Shakespeare:
I to the world am like a drop of water
That in the ocean seeks another drop,
Who, falling there to find his fellow forth,
Unseen, inquisitive, confounds himself.
The Comedy of Errors (I.ii.35–8)
Getting lost today in Stone Town can be a befuddling affair: one is as likely to happen upon a palace as a slum tenement, a mosque blaring anti-Western rhetoric from the loudspeaker as a European church in the neo-gothic style. To add to the effect, this puzzle of streets smells strongly – as indeed the whole island does – of cloves, which with other spices (cinnamon and nutmeg) are the main local crop.
I came once to Zanzibar as a child, and my sense of it as a place of wonder was doubtless set by those early memories. We arrived for our visit on a hydrofoil, a ship-sized hovercraft which a local entrepreneur had recently acquired on credit to ferry passengers from the mainland to Stone Town. The hydrofoil disappeared soon after with its insolvent owner, to the confusion of the local police, who had little means of following an ocean-going hovercraft. It turned up years later, I believe, off in the Gulf, as an air-conditioned pirate ship for the modern day. Of Zanzibar itself I remember taxicabs carpeted inside with Persian rugs, and the catamaran fishing dhows spilling their resplendent cargo on the shore.
The Zanzibar archipelago is made up of two main islands – Unguja and Pemba – lying off the coast of modern-day Tanzania, and the location of these islands made them a prized seat for a succession of colonizing powers. Not only are the islands marvellously lush, but they are also far enough offshore to be safe from all but advanced maritime nations, as well as being directly in the path of the seasonal tradewinds that circulate between Africa, the Middle East and India. Indeed, so attractive were the islands that the Busaidi dynasty, who had controlled Zanzibar since 1698, moved their seat from Oman to the southern island of Unguja early in the nineteenth century. Arabic merchants built an empire there through the trade in spices, ivory and (above all) slaves, and expended their wealth on the palaces which line the seafront of Stone Town. The immensely powerful Busaidi dynasty soon caught the interest of the Western powers, and by the middle of the nineteenth century American and European consuls were resident in Stone Town. When Edward Steere arrived in 1864, then, Stone Town was anything but the barbaric wilderness that he feared when he left England. Indeed, it was considerably more cosmopolitan than his former parish in the remote Lincolnshire town of Skegness. He remarked on arrival that ‘the whole aspect of the place from the sea is more Italian than African’, and was surprised to see riding in the harbour the Sultan’s latest acquisition, the battleship Shenandoah, which had recently been retired from Confederate service in the American Civil War.7
The European quarter of Zanzibar. (Reproduced by kind permission of the Syndics of Cambridge University Library)
The organization that sent Steere to Africa, the Universities’ Mission to Central Africa (UMCA), had been founded by four universities (Oxford, Cambridge, Durham and Trinity College Dublin) in response to an appeal made by David Livingstone in a speech to the Oxford Union in 1857. Livingstone, who had spent nearly two decades evangelizing in Africa by that time, was considered a saint in his own lifetime, a veneration that does not seem to have been reduced by the fact that he reputedly managed to convert only a single person to Christianity during all his mission work (and that convert lapsed soon afterwards).8 It was not only, however, Livingstone’s Christian zeal which captured the enthusiasm of the earnest Victorian university men; rather, it was his principled stand against the Indian Ocean slave trade, against which he railed in speaking tours while on periodic return to Britain, making him a philanthropic celebrity. The UMCA had quickly gathered steam, and had sent their first Missionary Bishop out in 1861, though the incumbent died shortly after arriving on the mainland, living only long enough to send home reports of pestilence, famine and war. Steere travelled out in the entourage of the second appointee, Bishop Tozer, and before retreating to the safety of Stone Town the pair had made a concerted attempt to set up in the interior, where Livingstone felt the main work of conversion and education was to be done. Among the many bleak descriptions of this voyage up the Zambezi in Steere’s letters, now kept in Rhodes House (Oxford), is a delightful description of Steere holding one of the new patent steel-ribbed oilcloth umbrellas over the bishop’s head.9
It must have been just such first encounters with Europeans that made the factory-produced umbrella a universal symbol of status through much of Africa. For people relentlessly assaulted from above by sun or driving rain, this was an infinitely more impressive invention than others of which European civilization was so proud. I cannot help thinking, after reading Steere’s description, of a senescent askari (guard) who worked at our house outside of Nairobi. Vuli would arrive promptly at sundown and fall fast asleep in a chair outside the house, and on the few occasions he did wake (usually roused by his own snoring) he summoned the entire household, having convinced himself that one of the Labradors was a leopard. On his days off Vuli would walk to market, wearing a shower cap and armed with an umbrella and a squash racquet, the inalienable markers of his civility.
For all the amusement afforded by the image of Steere and Tozer under their umbrellas on the Zambezi, Steere’s letters paint a sobering picture of torturous illness within the mission party and vicious warfare on the riverbanks (though, following the tradition instituted by the explorers, they responded to these hardships with evening readings of Shakespeare).10 Having tried but failed to establish a foothold at various locations closer and closer to the coast, he and Tozer eventually left for Zanzibar at the end of August 1864, having decided that their ends would be best served by setting up a seminary on Zanzibar to train local priests for redeployment in the interior. Though Steere’s nineteenth-century biographer defends the move as a ‘tactical retreat’, it was seen as a shameful capitulation by many, including Livingstone himself, who dismissed the Zanzibar mission as nothing more than a chaplaincy to the consulate.11
Even if Steere setting up in Stone Town was in many ways an admission of defeat, he nevertheless applied himself fiercely to the tasks at hand, the most urgent of which was to get the Sultan (and the local British Navy vessels) to take seriously the anti-slavery ‘Moresby’ treaty the two had signed decades earlier. The disregard for the ban on trading human cargo was underlined by the fact that upon their arrival the Sultan gave the UMCA party, along with a palace in which to set up operations, five slave boys as a welcoming gift. These and all the UMCA’s first subjects for evangelization – including those whom Steere taught to work his printing press when it arrived – were literally a captive audience, boys from mainland tribes who had been lured away from their families in southern Tanganyika by tende halwa (‘sweet givers’).12 A small number of these, including most of those at the UMCA mission, were then confiscated from the slavers by the Royal Navy. Steere later recorded his first impression of his encounter with the boys presented by the Sultan:
Now if you can imagine yourself standing opposite to five little black boys, with no clothing save the narrowest strip of calico [merikani] round their middles, with their hands clasped round their necks, looking up into your face with an expression of utter apprehension that something more dreadful than ever they had experienced would surely come upon them, now that they had fallen into the hands of the dreaded white men, you will feel our work somewhat as we felt it. And then, how are you to speak, or they to answer? You have not one word in common. Yet these are the missionaries of the future.13
Steere’s confidence that these damaged boys would find a vocation in the church might seem delusional, and yet the future was to see some of his hopes come to fruition. Among these boys was John Swedi, who became the first East African to take holy orders,