Lose Yourself In Stone Town

For most visitors to Zanzibar, Stone Town is their first point of contact with this East African island before they head to the beach resorts. But if you only have a long weekend at your disposal, Stone Town offers more than enough mini adventures to keep your camera clicking away…

- Toast Coetzer

It’s 8 am in Stone Town, Zanzibar, and I’m sitting in the rooftop dining room of the Al-Minar Hotel, four storeys high. Across from me, on top of another building, I spot a water thick-knee. From a widening crack in yet another building, a small tree is growing. In it I see a broad-billed roller – a rare bird in South Africa, but here it seems to have become urbanised. Maybe the roller is on holiday too…

Birds have fewer worries than we do when it comes to crossing borders: no queues, visa fees or passport hassles. But we tend to forget how easy it is for us South Africans to jump on a plane and head to exciting parts of Africa. South Africans don’t even need a visa to visit Zanzibar!

Stone Town is a collection of jumbled buildings, with only narrow streets – built for foot traffic – between them. From above it must look like a jigsaw puzzle.

For centuries it was an important trading post on the coast of East Africa. Stone Town is on a route that connected similar ports in Mozambique to the south with Kenya in the north, and beyond to the Arabian Peninsula.

Zanzibar’s history, however, is darkened by its key role in the slave trade. Thousands of slaves were brought here and traded from the open marketplace, after which they were put on ships and sent to lands from where there was no possible return.

When you step outside your hotel, you step into this rich, complicated history. The house of notorious slave trader Tippu Tip is close to my hotel. In his day, he headed west, crossing Tanzania on foot all the way to the Congo. Tippu encountered Livingstone and Stanley on his travels and helped them to plan their own journeys.

Guess who else is from Zanzibar? Freddie Mercury! It’s a strange and funny scene to imagine: a buck-toothed boy humming the harmonies of “Radio Ga Ga” as he skips along a cobbled street.