Three Weeks in Jambiani
Jumbled thoughts on place and community
What does it mean to live in a place? Is there a certain amount of time that must pass until you can say you’ve lived there? Is it enough to rent privately and work locally? If you spend just a few weeks in a village, but shop locally, eat locally and enjoy getting to know the residents, have you lived there? It’s a question I’m asking myself while travelling slowly through Africa and one that I’d like to shed some light on. I feel like I’ve lived in Jambiani, despite only spending 3 weeks here. I feel like I’ve learned a lot while being here. I’ve seen the holidaymakers come back from the beachfront and creep through the village street like they’re tip-toeing across an alien planet and I judge them with the same scorn as the locals, although I know many of the locals look at me with that same contempt. So whether I can say I’ve lived here or not, I have certainly learned a few things - things that I would like to take home with me and implement in Britain.
This collection of villages has, at most, a few thousand residents, but everybody seems to know each other and groups of children play in the street from first light until it’s time for tea.
The boys compete in games that reward strength and masculinity while the girls look after the toddlers close to home. The women gossip in doorways and the men who aren’t working gossip under the biggest tree in the village. Almost 25 years ago, on his journey from Cairo to Cape Town, Paul Theroux wrote of this uniquely African phenomenon -
“And a feature of every settlement was the sight of African men standing under trees, congregated in the shade. They were not waiting for buses, they were just killing time, because they had no jobs…In Kenya, whenever I saw a well-formed tree near a village or town, I saw men under it, doing nothing, looking phlegmatic and abstracted.”
While he wrote this about Kenya, I have not passed through a single African village, be it on the mainland or here in Zanzibar, that does not conform to this statement.
Life here is conducted at a pace about half the speed of that in Europe. Despite this, it is neither more laconic or less enthusiastic. Sitting outside, you can hear the laughter of children before 07:30 every day. In the evenings, you can hear Tanzanian pop music or breezeblock-shaking dub played on ear-splittingly terrible sound systems. I don’t know whether it has something to do with being by the sea, but you feel energy flowing in waves here. There might be total quiet but for the twittering of birds, and then whooooosh - 5 children run past shouting and singing, but then their voices fade, the tide recedes and quiet resumes. This juxtaposition between calm and chaos is a joy to behold.
It’s something that I haven’t experienced in Europe, no matter where I’ve been. Children’s laughter is reserved for carefully arranged playdates and their parents are too busy worrying about the future to actually smile in the present. Urban sprawl has obliterated casual communities, with fewer nods and smiles being exchanged by familiar strangers across the continent. After just 3 weeks in this collection of villages, I greet and am greeted by almost all of those I pass while getting my breakfast. It has left me with a sense of urgency that I must contribute in some way to the betterment of my community when I return home - I only hope this urgency persists over the next couple of years before I do return.
People here are slow to go to work. They take their time with cooking. They even hustle holidaymakers like they don’t really need the cash. It might be easy to chalk this up to Zanzibar’s ‘island vibe’. That ephemeral feeling that almost forces you to slow down and breathe in the moment. The crash of the waves, the creaminess of the Pina Coladas, the sunsets that melt into the ocean like mango sorbet.
But what is it about “island life” that obliterates western notions of productivity, self-improvement and economic development? While out on my morning run, I saw a woman bathing two naked infants on a gravel path with a bucket of water. Two men raced past on motorbikes dragging about 20m of cable which scraped loudly on the Claymore-blasted road ahead. Property developments littered the coastline like an answerphone message apologising for an absence… again.
In all of these instances there is a joyful acceptance at one’s condition. Throughout the continent, babies are being born with AIDs in beautiful deserts, the sweetest fruit on the planet is being plucked from trees shading war criminals and you can see the world’s largest slum from your Nairobi National Park hot air balloon ride.
There is always going to be a duality in Africa. Heaven and Hell on Earth might be separated by a barbed wire fence or maybe even a dual carriageway. In the aforementioned paragraph I described examples of people making the best out of bad situations and maybe that’s because it’s so much easier with the sun on your face and food in your belly. Maybe the practices and traditions of tens of thousands of years actually mean more to human happiness than blind technological progress. And maybe, just maybe, strong, small communities are better for adult relationships and child rearing than rows of soulless homes with double garages and 7ft fences.