1 day in Zanzibar

Amazing, fantastic pictures.

Wow- thanks so much, Gregor. Your captions helped me learn something about Zanzibar (I knew nothing about the country) and the photos are so powerful. I hope you’ll share more of your work with us here on Matador.

Gorgeous!

Insightful – great pics!

Wow! Incredible. Such deep focus on shot 2. Thanks for sharing these here!

Bravo! I know the tense issues you likely faced during the shoot and I high five you for getting it done in a remarkable fashion.. Bravo Bravo Bravo from one professional to another..

Thanks GR for a great slideshow. Reminds me of my last trip to Zanzibar – it’s really a beautiful place.

@Julie: in fact, Zanzibar is part of Tanzania (the current name of which is actually shortened from the original, more cumbersome name – the “Tanzania and Zanzibar Independant Association” (Tan. Zan. I. A.))

I love your pictures! You capture Zanzibar really well. I spent 4 days there in March 2008 and you bring back so many memories from my trip! Such a gorgeous island! I had to walk out of the fish market, I couldn’t stand the smell and almost dry reached, you are brave to spend enough time in there to take photos.

Your photographs are beautiful and very expressive, tempting many to want to experience the Island for themselves. However the caption under number 14 that says “[Zanzibar] … was the hub of the slave trade for all of East Africa, and more than one million souls were bought and sold during that time” is nothing less than an ugly missionary propaganda that caused the slaughter of more than 12 thousand innocent Muslims in two days between 11th and 12th January, 1964, by the invading mercenaries from Tanganyika — a month after Zanzibar’s independence from the British — This was followed by imprisonment, torture and disappearance of hundreds more and and exile of thousands of Zanzibaris to other parts of the world.

In East Africa the biggest slave trade was not in Zanzibar but in Mozambique, under the rule of the Portuguese, that is why we have today more than 80 million people of African descent in Brazil alone. Other slave markets existed in Tanganyika and Kenya as well until well into the 20th Century while the sale of slaves to Christians in Zanzibar was halted in 1822 as a result of a treaty between the Sultan Said bin Sultan and the British because of the treatment of African slaves in Europe and the Americas.

Ridiculous figures are thrown around so as to inflate the number of slaves sold in Zanzibar and we are told that millions were shipped to Oman. If so many millions of slaves were sent there, why is the population of Oman right now less than two million and in that population we do not see many people of African descent? Has there been a disappearing act? Save for a few wealthy sheiks, why would anyone in his right mind take a slave to the Arabia desert where food was scarce!

St. Monica Church as well as other missionaries in Zanzibar have started their propaganda against Arabs a long time ago and by the 1930s the slave trade issue into a big moneymaking enterprise; indeed with their propaganda they have scored points against Muslims, but in that process they lost their souls as they became the instigators of and responsible for the massacres that took place in1964 and much of the ugly acts that followed. By the way, please read Jonathon Glassman’s chapter titled “Racial Violence, Universal History and and Echoes of Abolition in Twentieth-Century Zanzibar” in Abolitionism and Imperialism in Britain, Africa, and the Atlantic, edited by Derek R. Peterson. Glassman proves beyond any shadow of doubt that the St. Monica with its basement was built long after the slave market was closed in Zanzibar and the basement was for keeping medicines because it was cooler than in rooms above surface.

All the best,
Ibrahim Noor

Wonderful pictures. Made me feel quite nostalgic for Zanzibar.

Very nice pics and I’m sure they were hard to get. You can see on the looks of the faces in the meat market that people are questioning why you’re photographing them, and it looks that way on more than a few other pictures as well. It looks like a beautiful place.