Zanzibar; city, island, and coast. Vol. 2 (of 2)Burton, Richard Francis, Sir
History
Zanzibar; city, island, and coast. Vol. 2 (of 2)
Burton, Richard Francis, Sir
Africa, East -- Description and travel; Ethnology -- Tanzania -- Zanzibar; Zanzibar -- Description and travel
of a single block of hard wood. In the ‘Reise auf dem Weissen Nil’ (p.
32), extracted from the Vicar-General Knoblecher’s Journals, we read of
the chief Nighila and his followers carrying stools of tree-stumps,
ornamented with glass-ware. The other approximations of custom,
character, and climate between the North Equatorial basin of the White
River (Nile) and the coast of Eastern Intertropical Africa are
exceedingly interesting.
The costume of the Domus Aurea and Rosa Mystica is as simple: a skin or
a cloth round the loins, another veiling the bosom, and in some cases a
Marinda or broad lappet of woven beads, like the Coëoo of Guiana,
falling in front, with a second of wider dimensions behind. A flat ruff
of thick brass wire encircles the throat, making the head appear as in a
barber’s dish; white and red beads, or the scarlet beans of the Abrus
tree, form the earrings and necklace, bracelets and anklets, whilst a
polished coil of brass wire, wound round a few inches of the leg below
the knee, sets off the magnificent proportions of the limb. Young girls
wear long hair, and the bold bairn takes his bow and arrows before
thinking of a waist-cloth.
The Wanyika are a slave importing tribe: they prefer the darker women of
the South to, and they treat them better than, their own wives. Children
are sold, as in India, only if famine compels, and all have the usual
hatred of slave merchants, the ‘sellers of men.’ When a certain Ali bin
Nasir was Governor of Mombasah he took advantage of a scarcity to feed
the starving Wanyika with grain from the public depôts. He was careful,
however, to secure, as pledges of repayment, the wives and children of
his debtors, and these becoming insolvent, he sold off the whole
deposit. Such a transaction was little suspected by our acute
countrymen, when, to honour enlightened beneficence, they welcomed with
all the plaudits of Exeter Hall, ‘that enlightened Arab statesman, His
Excellency Ali bin Nasir, Envoy Extraordinary of H.M. the Imam of
Muscat, to the Court of H. B. Majesty;’ presented him with costly
specimens of geology, and gold chronometers; entertained him at the
public expense, and sent him from Aden to Zanzibar in the Hon. East
India Company’s brig of war, Tigris. This Oriental votary of free trade
came to a merited bad end. He was one of the prisoners taken by the
doughty B’ana Mtakha of Sewi, where the late Sayyid’s ill-starved and
worse-managed force was destroyed by the Bajuni spear. Recognized by the
vengeful savages, he saw his sons expire in torments; he was terribly
mutilated, and at last he was put to death with all the refinements of
cruelty. And he deserved his fate.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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