Zanzibar Nightlife

Alright, so people are always asking me what I do here – what does a regular day/week look like in my life in Zanzibar. And I always feel like I’m really disappointing them when I tell them that it’s actually pretty normal. Because it’s such a tourist destination, Zanzibar can actually be quite expensive and so when you’re looking to control your spending your options can become somewhat limited. Anyway, besides work, my friends and I usually end up doing the same thing almost every weekend, usually in the same places and with the same people (because everybody does the same stuff in the same places so we’re always running into each other). Usually there’s a day on a beach somewhere and then a day in town doing errands or taking it easy. Otherwise, we have a pretty regular weekend night-circuit by now (I think I’ve mentioned before how amazing I find it that people here, although admittedly mostly expats, can drink so much in a country that 99.something % Muslim) – Friday and Saturdays we usually start at Livingstone’s, a bar in the heart of the tourist area with a really nice patio on the beach and tables right on the sand. It’s actually owned by someone in the President’s family…so I’m pretty sure that there are political implications to frequenting that place, but we try not to think about it like that. Apparently the restaurant next door has been refused a liquor license though because they don’t want the bar owned by someone in the President’s family to have too much competition.

Anyway, Livingstone’s is pretty good (albeit expensive) for a few drinks with the usual crowd – there’s live music on Friday nights that pretty good and you can dance. Sometimes people are up on the bar and on the speakers dancing which just adds to the atmosphere of course. From Livingstone’s we usually move to Dharma Lounge – which has more of a club atmosphere. Lots of dancing and it’s right near the bakeries where they work all night to have fresh bread ready for the next morning so when you get hungry while dancing it’s a short and quick walk to the bakery for fresh bread to refuel! Doesn’t really get much better than that.

Another fun place is Migombani (actually it has like a dozen names, among them: Banana Bar and Prince Chris’ Garden…I have no idea why – but it can make it hard to find because everyone knows it by a different name – plus it has like 5 entrances so everyone goes there by a different route)…it’s a local bar that’s actually pretty quiet and laid back…although if you order food be prepared to wait 2 hours to get it. But it’s cheap and the music’s not overpowering so you can hang out and relax with friends and not get hassled too much. Another popular local place is Bottom’s Up where the atmosphere is a bit awkward but the drinks are cheap. But the one time I went there my drink went from about $1 when I ordered to almost $2 when it arrived. The waiter then pretended not to understand me when I informed him of this change and tried to argue it…so I haven’t really been back there. Or if you’re more adventurous you can try Starehe – it’s a local rasta bar (but it’s in the tourist district and the prices reflect this – although I’ve definitely seen them collecting the not quite finished beer bottles and combining them and then selling them for cheap to locals). The entrance is a souvenir shop so you can do your shopping on the way in or out, the food’s not bad and the atmosphere is fun if you’re with a big enough group. You do tend to get hassled a lot though.

And if we’re (or at least if I’m) feeling really adventurous we can go to Bwawani…it’s a hotel just out of town that has a couple clubs. I’ve been there once and lasted all of 15 minutes…it’s more of a local hang out (Livingstone’s and Dharma Lounge are more Expat hangouts) and it’s actually kind of sketchy and seedy. No matter where you’re standing there’s always someone trying to dance up on you from behind…so you have to be constantly moving and yet always staying with friends…It’s also a place that’s notorious for prostitutes (at Dharma Lounge the bouncers supposedly keep them out but you still get them in there). Every once in a while the police will come by and crack down on the prostitutes in the clubs and clear them all up. Apparently a couple weekends ago they did a big sweep of Bwawani and decided that the most efficient way to make sure they got all of the prostitutes would be to take every female out of the place (prostitutes, local girls, Expats, etc) and put them in jail until the next morning. A friend of mine got caught up in the sweep and was not too impressed let me tell you. Another friend went later and he was amazed at how quiet the place was and spent the night wondering why there were so few women in the place.

So anyway, that’s an overview of the weekend hangouts…I kind of feel like I was writing for a guidebook or something but now at least if you ever come to Zanzibar you know where to go to find the nightlife!

No, no. After you...

So, my roommate brought this book with him and added it to the communal library we’ve tried to start up in our house (people can borrow as needed and late fees are to be paid in cookies, chocolate or ice cream). It’s called: Talk to the Hand: The Utter Bloody Rudeness of the World Today, or Six Good Reasons to Stay Home and Bolt the Door, by: Lynne Truss and it’s a book about proper manners and etiquette and how they seem to be lacking in today’s day and age. Reading through it and looking at what types of behaviours she has decided to pick on has gotten me thinking about manners back home versus manners here and how etiquette is so culturally determined. Like, I feel like I have decent manners, I manage to avoid most gross faux pas back home, but here sometimes I feel like I’m making the biggest etiquette blunders! Now, I know it’s justified to a certain extent by cultural differences but when people are politely averting their eyes as you eat with your left hand or when you’re running into people in doorways because both of you think that you have the right of way…it kind of drives home the point that some things, like manners, cannot be taken for granted and must be re-evaluated and relearned everywhere you go.

Anyone who’s ever traveled probably has a story about that time they didn’t know something and ended up offending their host, coworker, colleague, random stranger on the street…whether it’s because you left food on your place, didn’t leave food on your plate, refused seconds, didn’t return a greeting properly or used the wrong hand, there’s always something you didn’t know (or temporarily forgot) that puts you in an awkward position and makes you feel a little bit, or maybe even a whole lot, culturally insensitive. I think they call this the learning/adjustment process or something. Anyway, here are a few of my etiquette blunders so far.

The right hand. In Zanzibar, as in most places where Islam is the dominant religion, it is proper to eat and to conduct the majority of exchanges with your right hand only as it is seen to be clean. I still remember the mortification when, while eating dinner at our country coordinator’s house during the holy month of Ramadan, I reached for a dish with the wrong hand. Oh the humiliation. But then once you have the food on your plate, assuming that you gathered it with the right hand, how then do you eat it? Some things, like vegetables are easy enough…but half a chicken? Getting the meat off with only one hand can be quite a challenge. Although I’ve since been told that for difficult foods like chicken, you are allowed to hold down a bit of it with the left hand while you eat with your right hand.

There have also been several occasions where walking down the street I’ve waved to people with my left hand. Usually it’s because I’m carrying something in my right and I just forget. They’re very tolerant of it but they usually get this strange look on their face. And then of course there’s the juggling act I go through every time I try to buy something. It’s very impolite, even offensive, to take anything with your left hand or to pay with your left hand…so what to do? I accept the purchase with one hand while simultaneously trying to hand the vendor money at the same time all the while balancing whatever else I’m carrying and trying not to drop it all. I still have not mastered the trick for this.

Doorways. I am so used to men letting me walk through a doorway first, it’s almost second nature now to expect them to give me the right of way. Here though, the men always walk first and so for the first two months or so I was constantly running into people in doorways because we would both try to go first. I am getting the hang of this one, but there’s always this really awkward moment when sometimes I forget that I’m walking with another foreigner and he will hang back to let me go through the doorway first while I simultaneously hang back to let him go first…and then no one gets through the door and there’s this really awkward pause when no one knows what to do...

Greetings. People are constantly greeting you here. Everywhere you walk in town, people are saying Jambo, Habari, Mambo, etc. At first I found this really taxing because I’m not used to so many people talking to me when I’m running to the store and then there’s always that feeling that they’re trying to talk to you because they want something from you. But greetings are really important here, they are lengthy and there are rules and it’s really rude to not answer. So I was in the shamba (it means farm, but we use the expression – “going to the shamba” to mean going to the field for a visit or to do some work) a few weeks ago and this lady approached me and greeted me. So I returned the greeting and then got distracted by something and started to turn away. Which prompted her to turn to my colleague and ask why I wasn’t completing the greetings properly and using the correct ones. It turns out that while I had replied sijambo (I’m fine – literally I have no problems) to her hujambo (you’re fine? – literally you have no problems?) I had failed to continue the greetings and specifically to use shikamoo (it’s a greeting that indicates respect). It was a little bit awkward, but luckily I was given a second chance to restart the greetings and to carry them out properly.

So those are a few of my blunders and awkward moments so far. I’m sure I’ve made many more that I haven’t even noticed and haven’t been brought to my attention yet. And I’m sure I’ll make many more before my time here is up. Good times, but I don’t think I’m quite ready to stay home and bolt the door.

Fieldwork in Tumbatu

This last weekend I made a short work trip to Tumbatu Island – it’s a small island off the north coast of Unguja (the main island in the Zanzibar archipelago)…and a little bit off of the beaten track to say the least. My Rough Guides book describes Tumbatu as a “dagger-shaped [island]…whose inhabitants are famed for the pride, aloofness and lack of hospitality when dealing with visitors”. The residents of Tumbatu claim to be descendants of the ancient Persian kings who came to island from what is present day Iraq and then intermarried with people who came from the mainland to create today’s Tumbatu people. They actually ruled much of Unguja from their island fortress and have since maintained a high degree of isolation from the mainland.

So I was a little bit nervous about going at first…not really sure what kind of reception I would get, but I was going for work, with an enumerator so I figured that it’s actually tourists they don’t really like and since I had work to do I didn’t really count as a tourist in this case. And in fact, I found the people to be extremely welcoming. I met with the local level government when we arrived and then was shown to the house where I would be staying. They had obviously put me in one of the villages nicer houses – it was made of bricks instead of mud and coral stone, and we even had solar powered lights. Because they didn’t want to be dependent on Zanzibar or mainland Tanzania for electricity, all power comes from solar panels on the island – which only a few houses are connected to.

The first day was spent conducting group discussions, wealth ranking exercises and individual interviews with heads of households from the village. We met with village leaders, single mothers accompanied by children whose bellies were distended from malnutrition who told us that during hard times they maybe have one cup of tea a day, we had interviews interrupted by flocks of chickens and wherever we conducted the interviews we always drew a crowd of spectators who all seemed more interested in just staring at me than in the interviews themselves – all of this made quite an experience. I learned that land in Tumbatu is mainly coral soil, which is very thin and therefore not very good for agriculture which means that they have to import a lot of food from Unguja which is expensive and considering there are very few jobs in Tumbatu (the village is basically all houses – I think I saw one small store) they don’t have currency to buy food.

After a really early night, it gets dark at 6:30pm here and I didn’t want to deplete my host’s batteries by running the solar powered lights too long reading (I think it was lights out at like 9pm) and a really hot night (no fans!) I was allowed to visit a nearby madrassa (preschool) to watch some of the lessons…but I think I was too much of a distraction because as soon as they saw me the kids stopped whatever they were doing and just stared. It was actually a strange feeling, being the only foreigner on an entire island that really doesn’t get that many visitors. I definitely got a lot of attention. Not that it was hostile or anything, but the intensity of their attention, and not having anywhere else to deflect it, was extremely wearing. We then had a few more meetings and interviews and then took some times to visit some of the ruins on the island. We saw the remains of a palace – only the basic outline is still visible and the ruins of a mosque.

And then it was back on the boat and back to Unguja. Tumbatu definitely had a certain aesthetic appeal – it was extremely quiet, quite green because it’s the short rainy season right now, and just little things, like how the paths and roads through the village are made of coral stone and seashells, but there were also many drawbacks. The level of poverty was quite intense, the language barrier also made things difficult. Not that my Kiswahili is all that good anyway, but they made a point of making it clear to me that they don’t speak Kiswahili because they have their own dialect (the claim is that it’s a purer form of Kiswahili, because it is definitely related) and also their isolation made for a sometimes awkward experience (an interesting note, is that the two villages on the island are even isolated from one another – they are only a few miles apart and yet have developed different dialects). It was definitely an experience and I am glad that I went but I have to admit that I was really happy to be back in town Sunday afternoon.

to see pictures of Tumbatu please go to:
http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2105305&l=52399&id=122506550