CHAPTER IX.
HORSEFLESH AT ZANZIBAR.—THE OUTSKIRTS OF THE CITY, AND THE CLOVE PLANTATIONS.
‘Peregrination charms our senses with such unspeakable and sweet variety, that some count him unhappy that never travelled, and pity his case, that from his cradle to his old age beholds the same still; still, still the same, the same.’—‘ANATOMY OF MELANCHOLY,’ Part II. sect. ii. mem. 3.
Most Europeans at Zanzibar keep horses which they seldom ride. The Sayyid, however, had, after hospitable Arab custom, placed a large stud at the disposal of Lieut.-Colonel Hamerton and his guests. I had heard much of the Oman blood, so before excursioning to the outskirts of Zanzibar City we proceeded to the Prince’s stables.
The late ruler had rarely less than 200 mares, whose value ranged between $1500 and $2000: at present, however, the number is greatly reduced. They require as much nursing as European dogs: in the morning they must be picketed in the courtyard to ‘smell the air’; during the day they must take shelter from the sun under a long cajan-roofed shed; they must at all times he defended from rain and dew; and they must be fed with dry fodder—here, as in Paraguay, the belief is that the indigenous green meat becomes fatal to imported beasts. We found the treatment very rough. The animals were ungroomed, and mostly they had puffed legs, the result of being kept standing night and day upon a slope of hard boarding. Amongst them I was shown a curious Nejdi, which reminded me of Lady Hester Stanhope’s pampered beasts; the coat was silver-white, the shoulders were pinkish, and the saddle-back amounted almost to a deformity. The favourite charger of the late Sayyid is a little bay with black points, standing about 14 hands 2 inches: its straight fetlocks are well fitted for stony ground, it wears the mane almost upon the withers, and the shoulder is well thrown back, barely leaving room for the saddle. The hind-quarter, that weak point in the Arab, is firmly and strongly made, and the tail is thin, switchlike, carried nearly straight, as usual with the best blood, and remarkably high. The beau-ideal of a Nejdi is an animal all shoulder and quarter, connected by a bit of barrel; and to this pitch of excellence we are gradually breeding up our English horses. The charger in question is of the ancient Oman race, once celebrated for endurance: the late Sayyid, however, injured his stud by crossing foal and dam, brother and sister, till the animals fined down and dwindled to mere dwarfs. I remarked that, here as elsewhere, the Arabs have learned from Europeans to trace the genealogy of their horses through the sire, a practice unknown to the sons of the desert.
All the best horses in Zanzibar come from Oman: an inferior strain is exported by Brava (Barawa), and the Somali country. The latter sends good little beasts somewhat like those of the Pernambucan Province; but worn out by long marches and scant feeding, they usually die during the first rains. Upon the mainland they will live for years. Here, however, the new importations at first fatten; then they get foul; the sweat becomes fetid; they lose breath and become unfit for work, till fatal disease manifests itself by foam from the mouth. As in Malabar and Mauritius, where the field-officers have often been dismounted, it is next to impossible to keep horses in health and condition: they are also costly, $150 to $200, German crowns, being asked for Kadishs or garrons.
The Government stables at Zanzibar also contain a few mules brought from the Persian Gulf. They become liable to inveterate drowsiness; they start when approached, refuse food and drink, and soon succumb to the climate. The ass, on the contrary, here as in the East African interior, thrives even upon hard food, and consequently it is prized by the Arabs. There are many breeds. During the season fine animals are brought from Oman; iron-grey mares with white legs being preferred; Bahrayn and the Persian Gulf send a large light-coloured beast, resembling that of Baghdad; it is not, however, considered lasting. Asses imported from Brava and the Somali country are held fit only for carrying burdens, and the Unyamwezi breed, known by its lopped ears, though strong and serviceable, is always but half tamed, and is often vicious. The most useful and lasting are the Mutawallid or Muwallid, the progeny of Maskat beasts, Creoles born upon the Island—these we were advised to buy before leaving for the interior. I subsequently purchased thirty, and the last died within six months of landing: we then mounted Unyamwezi animals, and had nothing to complain of. Asses are ridden, as they always should he, upon the crupper; the ‘hulús’ are rather pads than saddles, covered with thick cloths and black sheepskins; no one uses stirrups, and the bridle is the rudest of contrivances. The price of donkeys ranges from $15 to $100: I bought a tolerable riding animal for $60, and I heard of one costing $350. Finally, the Sayyid keeps for the use of his plantation-mills a few miserable mangy camels from Brava and Makdishu: they may be worth $10 to $12 a-head.
Mounted on the Prince’s best we passed through the town, where the long sharp poles projecting from the low house-eaves are not pleasant to those riding spirited nags. This is the labour hour, and all are not inactive. The weaver on his raised clay bench, and shaded by his dwarf verandah, is engaged upon a turban, whilst his neighbour converts copal, reddened by cinnabar, into ear-rings and other ornaments. The tinsmith and the Comoro blacksmith, with the usual African bellows, are also at work hammering at pots and pans, fashioning the normal weapons, arrow and spear heads, and repairing old guns. The leather-worker is moulding a targe of rhinoceros-hide, apparently all umbo, and the vendors of oil and grain, spices and drugs, glass and ‘potions,’ are on the alert. By the way we walked into the partially-walled compound or court representing the slave-market, a bonâ fide affair, not like the caravanserai which used to be fitted up and furnished by the Cairene Dragoman for the inspection of curious tourists. In 1835 a wooden cage some 20 feet square often contained some 150 men, women, and children, who every day were ‘knocked down’ to the highest bidder in the public ‘place.’ In those times the yearly importation was 6000 to 7000. The bazar was subsequently held in the Changani Quarter, near the Western Point; the late Sayyid, however, having forbidden, by way of sop to the British Cerberus, the sale of men in the streets of Zanzibar as of Maskat, it was shifted to a plantation called Kirungani. As this was found inconveniently distant, it migrated to its present site. Lines of negroes stood like beasts, the broker calling out ‘bazar khush!’—the least hideous of the black faces, some of which appeared hardly human, were surmounted by scarlet night-caps. All were horridly thin, with ribs protruding like the circles of a cask, and not a few squatted sick on the ground. The most interesting were the small boys, who grinned as if somewhat pleased by the degrading and hardly decent inspection to which both sexes and all ages were subjected. The woman-show appeared poor and miserable; there was only one decent-looking girl, with carefully blacked eye-brows. She seemed modest, and had probably been exposed for sale in consequence of some inexcusable offence against decorum. As a rule, no one buys adult domestic slaves, male or female, for the sufficient reason that the masters never part with them till they are found incorrigible. These, however, are mostly Bozals, or wild serviles newly driven from the interior, and they are not numerous, the transactions of the year being now concluded. The dealers smiled at us, and were in good humour.
It would be easy to adorn this subject with many a flower of description; the atrocities of the capture, the brutalities of the purchase, the terrors of the middle-passage, and the horrors to which the wretches are exposed when entering half-civilized lands. It was usual to throw the slaves overboard when the fatal symptom, coprophagism, appeared amongst them. A single Dau (Dow) belonging to the late Prince Khalid lost when running a course 500 slaves by sickness, and by the falling of the pont-flottant or flying-deck—many a desperate naval action could not show such a butcher’s bill. A certain Charles L—— —, a kiln-dried Mauritius man, crucified seven negroes in terrorem: two were fastened outside the ship, the others were nailed by the feet to the deck, and by the hands to capstan bars, lashed across the masts. With a lighted tar-barrel in an empty boat he nearly caused the loss of an English cruiser, and when she was well on the reef he let off rockets and saluted her. Another man, a Spaniard, finding his ventures likely to die of dysentery, sewed them up before he sent them to the bazar; this slaver made an act of contrition before he died, and severely blamed his bowie-knife. Sensational paragraphs, however, are not wanted by those to whom the subject is familiar, and they are likely to mislead the many who are not. I shall return to the subject of slavery in another chapter.
Thence we entered the Malagash Quarter, where the land belongs chiefly to Sayyid Sulayman bin Hamed, a former Governor of Zanzibar; he is said to be so wealthy that he ignores the extent of his means. Here is the Lal Bazar, the very centre of prostitution, an Agapemone of some twenty Cyprians: all are Wasawahili—the Indian women, who appear almost European in complexion and features, having now left. Their faces like skinned apes, and lean legs encased in red silk tights, make their appearance revolting as their society is dangerous. Some of them cool the orbits of the eyes by a kind of loup of perfumed turmeric, whose golden tint causes the outer darkness to gloom extra sooty; others apply curry-coloured dabs to the woolly hair. Sundry of these patches are frontlets or medicines applied to the temples. In former days we used, for instance, ‘rose-water and vinegar, with a little woman’s milk, and nutmegs grated upon a rose cake,’ and the Jews are said to have smeared themselves with Christian blood.
The Malagash Quarter is at the far east of the city, leading to two tumble-down bridges which span a lagoon more deadly than that of British Accra. These ruins might easily be converted into dykes, and in process of time the mouth would be sanded or silted up; they are however, fated to make way for iron improvements. In my day the lagoon was connected by fresh water with the sea, and became now a muddy pool at the ebb tides of the Syzygies, then a sheet of festering mud which nearly encircled the settlement, and which converted the site of Zanzibar city into a quasi-island. Every evening a pestilent sepulchral miasma arose from it, covering the skin with a clammy sweat, and exhaling a fetor which caused candles to burn dim, and which changed the sound of the human voice. Lazy skippers anchoring here for facility of watering, thus exposing their men to the breath of the fetid lagoon, have lost in a few days half the crew; and although the water appeared to be of the purest, it became so offensive that often the casks had to be started.
We then passed over a sandy flat, thinly powdered with black vegetable humus. To the left was a creek upon whose sandy beach vessels are hauled up, and where ships of 300 to 400 tons can be safely careened: in a few years there will here be a dock. A mile of neat footpath placed us at the late Sayyid’s Summer Palace, Mto-ni, which is distant about three direct miles from the Consulate. After escaping the unpleasant attentions bestowed upon us by the tame ostriches, who are apt to use beak and wing, we dismounted for inspection. The building is of coral rag, pierced with square windows, and the wings are united by a verandah-terrace, supported by wooden pillars, and facing Meccah, for convenience of prayer. A few feet above the centre is the peaked roof of the Kiosk, which makes the place remarkable to crews entering the harbour. In front floats from sunrise to sunset the red flag of the Sayyid: the rear is brought up by a small cemetery, sundry offices, and lowly cajan-thatched hovels tenanted by slaves. The work of man is mean enough, but it is surrounded by the noblest handiwork of Nature, cocoas and mangoes, whilst the borders of the little stream could be beautifully laid out.
Gum Copal, formerly called in the trade Gum Anime, now Gum Elemi, is washed down by the rains, and is picked up by the slaves about the debouchure of this fiumara. On the Mto-ni road also we passed sundry places where pits, never exceeding five feet deep, had been sunk in the sandy plain, thinly clothed with sedgy grass. Upon the higher grounds, also, to judge by the eye, about 100 feet above sea-level, we found many deserted diggings. The soil is a dark vegetable mould, varying in thickness from a foot to 18 inches, and based upon the raised sea-beach of blue clay. This becomes fat and adhesive, clogging the hoe as it descends: the half-decayed blood-red fibre with which it is mixed throughout was recognized by the negroes as cocoa-roots. Bits of scarlet-coloured earth also variegated the faint blue marl, and at a depth of 2-1/2 feet water began to exude from the greasy walls of the pit. These places supply only the raw or unripe copal, locally called Chakazi,[95] and by us corrupted to Jackass: the true vegetable fossil must be brought from the coast. The tree was probably once common on the Island, but it has been cut down for masts and similar uses. Copal does not appear under that name in the list of exports from Zanzibar given by Captain Smee in 1811: possibly that officer alludes to it when speaking of ‘Dammer.’ In early days ‘gum-anime’ was held a precious medicine for rheums and heaviness of the head. It was imported viâ the Levant ‘from the place where incense is found, and that lande or soyle is called _Animitim_, and therefore the thing is called, Anime,’ says Dr Monardes, treating of the objects that are brought from the West Indies. He adds that American Anime was whiter, brighter, and said to be a ‘spice of _Charabe_ or _Succino_, which is called amber congealed.’ In 1769 Portugal forbade the importation of true copal, in order to protect the Jataycica or gum of the Jatoba (hymenæa), of which 14 Arrobas had been sent from Turiassu in the Brazil.
Leaving Mto-ni, after half a mile of beach, we turned towards the interior, and ascended the gently rising ground, beautifully undulated, which leads to the royal estates called Rauzah and Taif, formerly Kizimba-ni or Sebbe. For two or three miles a narrow path, which compelled us to ride in Indian file, wound through cocoa-groves and patches of highly-cultivated ground, with here and there a hut buried under fruit-laden mangos. The track, then 254 feet above sea-level, widened into a broad avenue of dark conical clove-trees, varying in height from 6 to 16 feet according to age; feathered almost to the ground, and extending, like the well-berried coffee-shrub, its branches at right angles to the trunk. All, however, bore the impress of neglect, where Dr Ruschenberger found a ‘picture of industry and of admirable neatness and beauty’ that employed from 500 to 700 slaves.
We saw little to admire in the ‘palace,’ a single-storied lodge of coral rag, and ample porches looking upon sundry courts and yards, negro quarters and drying-grounds. There is here a well said to be 100 fathoms deep, which gives water only in the rainy seasons; most of the upland plantations must draw the element from the little streams. The Arab care-takers, after refreshing us with cocoa-nut milk, led us out to inspect the grounds. These Semites, satiated with verdure, despise the idea of assisting nature, and yet at Maskat they will gaze delighted upon a dusty, ragged plot of sand-veiled rock, dotted with consumptive trees, and dignified by the name of a garden. Some years ago Lieut.- Colonel Hamerton taught the late Sayyid to plant rose-trees, which gave a crop as abundant as those of ancient Syria: during their owners’ absence the slaves uprooted the young growth in very wantonness. The nutmeg fared as badly. The Consul also succeeded in producing wall- flowers, lavender, and the apple-scented as well as the common geranium: imported from Europe with abundant trouble, they met the fate of all the roses. The Ravenala, or Travellers’ tree, was brought from the Seychelles by the Sayyid with the same unsuccess. Several kinds of jasmines were transported from Cutch to Zanzibar: the Arabs objected to them, that the scent depresses the male sex and unduly excites the feminine. Many flowers—for instance, the Narcissus and certain Acacias— labour under the same ill-fame.
Here, after admiring the delicious view of the tree-crowned uplands, the low grounds buried in the richest forest, the cocoa-fringed shore of purest white, and the sea blue as a slab of lapis lazuli, we had an opportunity of inspecting the celebrated clove plantations of Zanzibar. According to Castanheda, when Vasco da Gama first touched at Mombasah and Melinde, their Reguli sent him, amongst other presents, cloves, and declared that their countries grew the spice. Other travellers mention the clove being found at various parts of East Africa, and Andrea Corsali in Ramusio describes the produce as ‘not like those of India, but shaped more like our acorns.’ The Dutch, however, since their conquest of the Moluccas or Spice Islands in 1607, monopolized the clove like the nutmeg; and by destroying the former and enslaving the cultivators, they confined it, lest the price should fall, to the single Island of Amboyna. The naturalist traveller, M. Poivre, when governor of the Isle of France, brought from the least frequented of the Moluccas, in June 27, 1770, some 450 nutmeg stalks and 10,000 nutmegs in blossom or about to blossom, together with 70 clove trees and a box of plants, many of them well above the earth. In 1772 a further supply was procured; the greater part was kept in the Isle of France, the rest were dispersed amongst the Seychelles, Bourbon, and Cayenne. All the specimens given to private individuals died: skilful botanists, however, succeeded in preserving 58 nutmegs and 38 clove trees. Of the latter two bore blossoms in 1775, and the fruit was gathered in the following year; the produce, however, was small, light, and dry, and all deemed that the Dutch had been unnecessarily alarmed.[96] The project, however, proved completely successful.
In 1818 the clove-tree (Caryophyllus aromaticus) was introduced from Mauritius and Bourbon into Zanzibar; requiring little care, it speedily became a favourite, and in 1835 the aristocratic foreigner almost supplanted the vulgar valuable cocoa-nut, and the homely rice necessary for local consumption. The Banyans, Americans, and Europeans shared amongst them the principal profits of other commerce, and the cloves enriched the squirearchy, the landed proprietors. Yet it was early predicted that this prosperity would end in ruin; and presently the man who first introduced the spice became a beggar. After a few years extensive plantations, some containing 15,000 to 20,000 feet, were laid out in the richest parts of the Island. The trees, however, set at intervals of 14 to 40, and now 20 feet, occupied large tracts of ground, and they were so rarely trimmed, that degeneracy soon ensued. Similarly the Brazilian planter, though well aware of his loss, cannot prune his coffee shrub: his hands are all negroes, and if allowed to use cutting instruments, they would hack even the stem. Now the Zanzibar article cannot compete with the produce of Bourbon; and the Dutch having thrown into the market the valuable and long-withheld produce of the Moluccas, it threatens to become a drug. The people would do well to follow the example of Mauritius, whence the clove has long departed in favour of sugar. For the latter Zanzibar is admirably adapted: when factories shall everywhere be established, the Island will have then found her proper profession, and will soon attain the height of her prosperity.
The clove (Karanful), planted in picturesque bands, streaking the red argillaceous hills, is allowed to run to wood, and to die, withered at the top, in the shape of a bushy thick-foliaged tree 35 feet tall, and somewhat resembling a laurel. Grown from seed, it bears in the fifth year, and the fruit, the unexpanded flower-bud, is usually ripe in October. In rainy years the harvest beginning with early September is continued uninterruptedly: when the season, however, is dry the picking ceases in November and December, to be resumed in January. Hence the tales of two yields per annum. The crop, which lasts even till March, and which appears to be very uncertain, is hand-picked by Wasawahili and slaves—gathered, in fact, like coffee, except that, requiring ladders and more labour, it is a very slow process. Under favourable circumstances the tree should produce a maximum of 6 lbs; here, however, the ground is neither cleared nor manured, and the consequence is, that 30 trees rarely yield more than 35 lbs per annum. The fruit is sun-dried upon matting for three days: the workmen forget to turn it, and allow it to be broken and injured; moreover, they will not smoke it, and thus prevent over-shrinking and wrinkling. Some years ago Mr Wilson, an English engineer who died at Zanzibar, produced, by attending to the tree, and by properly desiccating his cloves upon iron hurdles, a superior article, with red shanks and large full heads. M. Sausse, a Creole from Bourbon or Mauritius, also succeeded in extracting an excellent oil, the clove oil of commerce being generally made by distilling cinnamon leaves. This novelty became a universal favourite with the Zanzibar public, who held it to be highly medicinal, and used it especially for _inflammations_. Locally the spice is employed as a condiment and infused as a medicine and a tonic: women of the poorer classes make necklaces and ear-rings of the corns; they also pound them to a paste, and mould them into different shapes.
The Asákif, or stalks pulled off when the fruit is dry, are exported to Europe under the name of ‘clove stems,’ and are used as a mordant for dyeing silks. An English house once provided tin canisters to preserve its purchases, whereas they are mostly sent home in bulk. Certain other merchants, ‘born with the pencil behind their ears,’ open the hatches, and to make the cargo ‘weigh out’ heave in sea-water, which, they say, does not much affect the flavour of pepper and cloves. The stems fetch from one-eighth to half of a German crown per Farsilah, or frail of 35 lbs. The price of cloves, originally $5 to $6 per Farsilah, has now fallen to $2 and even to $1. In 1856, the Island exported five millions of lbs; the next year, however, was unfavourable—the trees had been injured by drought; the over-supply had sunk the price 70 per cent., and many Arab proprietors talked of returning to rice and cocoa-nuts. Yet, in 1859, the crop rose to some 200,000 Farásilah = 7,000,000 lbs, valued at about £85,000; whereas 10 years before the total produce of Zanzibar, including Pemba, was 120,000 to 150,000 Farásilah, and in 1839-40 it barely numbered 9000.
We returned viâ the bush to the south of the city, passing through a luxuriant growth of the hardest woods. After a stiff ride over the worst of paths, a mere ‘picada,’ as the Brazilians say, we skirted the fetid lagoon which subtends the eastern city from north to south, and reached Mnazi Moyya, ‘One Cocoa-nut Tree.’ This bit of open ground is the Bois de Boulogne of Zanzibar, the single place for exercise, and we did not wonder that so many prefer to stay at home.
During the ’Id Saghir or Kuchuk Bayram, here called Siku-khu za Ídí, ‘One Cocoa-nut Tree’ is a lively place. Whilst the boys sing and dance about the streets, and the garrison blacks, armed with sabres, engage near the fort in a Zumo or Pyrrhic, wildly waving their tremulous blades, and the Wahiao or Bozals from about Kilwa execute their saltations near the bridge, and the other slaves carouse and junket in their own quarter of the town, each clan from the mainland keeping itself distinct, the grandees, fingering their rosaries and supported by long staves, proceed to Mnazi Moyya, where gallops, called races, form the attraction. About half-a-dozen garrons, rushing wildly about, represent the performers, and the performance is nothing new to the Anglo-Indian. The groups are motley if not picturesque. Here and there, surrounded by rings of sable admirers, are women boisterously singing and clapping hands, dancing and acting lionnes with all their might. Tremendous are the Vijelejele, the Kil, Zaghárit, or trilling of the spectatresses. Men also stamp and wriggle in a rude ‘improper’ style to the succedaneum for a drum, a hollow wooden cylinder one foot in diameter, with the open end applied to the breast, and the dried and stretched snake-skin patted upon with finger and palm. Most of these people, regardless of fever or cholera, are primed with fermented cocoa juice. The heavily-clad Shaykhs, bestriding their asses, are preceded by outrunners, who mercilessly push aside and ‘bakur’ the crowd; and the latter turn viciously as bull-terriers. There is not much striking, but jostling and thrusting away are the rules. At Lamu and the wilder places swords and daggers are often bared on these occasions, and the Shaykhs have no little trouble to preserve the peace. Contrasting with the full- dressed crowd are the naked children, who seem all afflicted with umbilical hernia. This is the result of careless cutting, but the unsightly protuberance will wear away in after life, and a pot-belly is here, as elsewhere in Africa, looked upon as a good sign. The negro faces and bodies are marked with the tattoo in almost every possible fashion; some wear straight black lines, others curved; these have perpendicular, those horizontal marks, and not a few wear painted squares with central spots, like the wafers upon the garment of the old country clown. At length the princes make their appearance, and are received with a file-firing of guns and pistols, whilst shouts and drums disturb the air; the races are formally run, and the crowd disperses through the unclean streets of the city.
There is still some exploration to be done on the west or landward front of Zanzibar Island. Colonel Hamerton, however, strongly advises us not to risk fever, and to reserve every atom of strength and energy for the Continent.
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Footnote 95:
Tchakazi, espèce de gomme-résine, dont j’ignore l’origine (M. Guillain, Part II. p. 87).
Footnote 96:
Establicimientos Ultramarinos, vol. iii. Madrid, 1768.