Livingstone’s Tribe: A Journey From Zanzibar to the Cape

Denis interpreted: ‘He says he will stay in Zanzibar to make converts. But there is danger. He has been stoned.’

‘Stoned?’

‘Four times. When preaching. But the Bible tells us this is not a new thing.’

Between Denis and Frank, there was no lack of fervour to see Zephaniah achieve martyrdom. Only Canon David appeared to regard the competition for converts with misgivings. David Bartlett and his wife, Marion, were missionaries of the old school with more than ninety years in Africa between them, he as priest, she as a surgeon. A frail, shy woman also well into her seventies, Marion’s contribution to African well-being was in fact the more tangible. When polio was still a dreaded disease, she had been the only surgeon in the bush performing a relatively simple operation to release contracted leg tendons in children. Many Tanzanians were only able to walk because of the skills of this small, unassuming woman. Yet with their simple devotion and faith, the Bartletts had become almost anachronisms.

They had retired once, to the West Riding of Yorkshire, until receiving an appeal to return for one last spell of service in Africa. ‘The people were ever so nice,’ Marion said. ‘But one hated the supermarkets.’

I TOOK MY leave of Zanzibar seated on the balcony of the Sultan’s palace, cooled by a breeze coming off the harbour below. It was called the People’s Palace now, a monument to the revolution, but few among the masses appeared interested in coming to gaze on the decadence of the past. There were more ghosts than visitors and that afternoon I had the place, in all its mournful tawdriness, to myself.

In 1964, as the revolutionaries stormed through the alleys of Stone Town, the last of the Omani sultans, the amiable Khalifa II, fled to his yacht out in the bay and escaped to Mombasa, and thence to exile in Bournemouth. The sultans had long since ceded their authority to Britain and, since the declaration of a protectorate over Zanzibar in 1890, had withdrawn to the shadows to enjoy the grace and favour of imperial servitude. They welcomed the pomp bestowed by an avuncular colonial regime, presenting themselves on ceremonial occasions in robes encrusted with CBEs, KCMGs and even, in the case of Khalifa, a GCMG, as well as lesser gewgaws and Omani daggers. Year had succeeded year in what a biographer of another contemporary monarch, George V, described as ‘benign verisimilitude’.

Most spirited of the lot was not a sultan, but a princess. Salme, a sister of Sultan Bargash, eloped with the local German agent and lived the rest of her life in Jena as his wife with the name Emily Ruete, bearing him numerous offspring. She died in 1924, having written poignantly about her double life. Her apartment aside, the mood of the palace was glum. One of Bargash’s favourite objects, a large grandfather clock, tolled ponderously beside a life-size oil painting of Sultan Hamid KCMG. The furniture was ornate, heavy, the antithesis of the Arab design virtues of lightness and simplicity. Most depressing of all were the Sultan’s living quarters, where a fine writing desk and chest stood beside a formica wardrobe and a cheap black dressing-table with chipped and peeling lacquer. Here the unmanned monarchs lay abed at night, listening to the Indian Ocean lapping among the dhows, all power and vigour gone.

The balcony, at least, was a grander theatre of Zanzibar’s decay. A polished blue sea slid away to three small islands glittering green and white. Down at the waterside palm trees brushed the whitewashed fortifications of the palace and the road curled past the honeyed walls of the Beit el-Ajab. For a moment it was possible to imagine the great jehazi down from Arabia, the clamour in the harbour as they were loaded with cloves and ivory, the whisper of the south-west monsoons; and to recall the words of James Elroy Flecker …

I have seen old ships sail like swans asleep

Beyond the village which men still call Tyre …

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