LITMIR.BIZ

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      I AWAKE IN AN enclave of Christendom to the muezzin’s call. My room at the old missionary hospital is appropriately bare but spacious as well, with shuttered windows opening on to a sun-blasted courtyard and a lone palm tree beside Christ Church Cathedral. The cool, smooth floor offers more by way of relief than the fan, which wobbles and creaks alarmingly overhead. Even at dawn the air feels thick and moist beneath the mosquito net.

      I can remember no Anglican building which has moved me more than the cathedral. The pale pink mortar of the exterior has been blackened by tropical mould, giving to the whole vastness of the structure the gaunt magnificence of an ancient ruin. The interior, showing similar signs of decay, is full of the incongruities and misunderstandings born out of a fusion of alien cultures. The materials combine African and Mediterranean elements – local coral and mortar for the walls, and twelve marble pillars at the rear of the nave which were shipped here from Europe and so confused the local builders that they were erected upside down. The apse strives for further classical effect, raised on a marble floor and lined behind the high altar by a ring of seats carved in African style from local wood.

      Beneath a slab between the altar and seats lies the cathedral’s builder and first bishop, Edward Steere. Above all, though, the place is a monument, and an apt one, to David Livingstone – big, flawed and craggily grand. As building began on Christmas Day in 1873, the missionary-explorer’s embalmed body was being borne down to the coast by his companions, Chuma and Susi, on his most famous journey of all. The arrival of this touching little cortège in Zanzibar three months later captured the British public’s imagination as no single act had during Livingstone’s lifetime. On a pillar at the entrance to the sanctuary is a symbolic relic which encapsulates the whole episode, a crucifix made from the tree at Chitambo in Zambia under which his servants buried Livingstone’s heart.

      His work as a missionary had been a hopeless failure, but Livingstone’s mission in the grander sense was complete. A month before his death, the Sultan of Zanzibar had submitted to pressure and signed a decree abolishing the slave trade in his dominions. Christ Church Cathedral, named after St Augustine’s first cathedral in England, arose on the site of the old slave market. The altar was on the spot where once the whipping-post stood.

      The service began with gusto, Rock of Ages sung in Swahili. The sermon that followed was barely audible. At an English parish church it tends to be the other way round – congregations singing softly, vicars talking loudly. Here the hymns are fortissimo throughout, unaccompanied but instinctively reaching for three-part harmony. Women and children sit on the left of the aisle in bright print frocks that challenge the sombre interior. Men and the older boys sit on the right. All efforts to break down this custom from the Islamic past have failed but neither side has any other inhibitions. They come and go, the well-off clattering noisily on leather-soled shoes, the humble passing soundlessly on bare feet.

      Afterwards, a young man named Denis asked if I had found the old slave cells below my room. He guided me down steps descending from the courtyard of St Monica’s to a subterranean chamber. We had to duck low to enter, and once inside remained in a crouch. In the dark I could just make out a cavern about 30 feet long and 12 feet wide. On either side was a raised ledge on which slaves had lain, chained to the wall. The clearance between ledge and ceiling was less than 2 feet. I tried to clamber on to a ledge but was almost physically repulsed by claustrophobia.

      Crouching and breathing heavily, I was struck by a thought obvious but compelling. The profligacy of the slavers was one of the puzzles of the ™ like the ships on which the slaves were transported, this chamber created conditions so atrocious that their mere survival was a wonder. But what if the suffering was not incidental, was instead intrinsic to a design intended to crush those it did not kill? The slavers’ reckless disregard for their merchandise made a perverse sense only if their ultimate concern was to extinguish the last flicker of the human spirit.

      We are not used to coming across such crucibles of suffering intact. This death chamber of innumerable souls lies directly beneath the spot where I lie, under a mosquito net and a lazily turning fan.

      ‘WHAT YOU HAVE to remember about Zanzibar,’ said the Deputy Chief Justice, ‘is that it might be Africa, but it is not of Africa. Persian, Arab, Indian – even British to some extent – but it is not African.’

      After just a few hours, I could see what he meant. That morning I had walked the mile or so to Dar es Salaam harbour, hefting the unfamiliar weight of the rucksack and already regretting bringing so many books. Dar was raw African metropolis, raucous, ramshackle. On seething streets lined by general stores offering cheap, gaudy trifles, traffic was reduced to a boiling gridlock. Sweating and floundering along, I nevertheless felt a momentary sense of liberation for having foresworn a taxi. Now, ferried less than thirty miles out into the Indian Ocean, I was brought to the Orient.

      Zanzibar belonged in that realm of the traveller’s imagination occupied by phantasms, a destination from an opium dream. From a childhood stamp collection, that most potent of geographical stimulants, I recalled images of minarets and dhows, and bearded, turbaned potentates. To this world, the British were merely the last, and least tenacious, of the imperial powers to be carried on the trade winds.

      The east coast was known to the geographers of Greece and Rome, most notably Ptolemy whose Geography referred to the region as Azania. Arab travellers called it Zenj, and were the first to explore it, al-Masudi in the tenth century, and the great ibn-Batuta on his voyage from Aden to Kilwa around 1330. The Shirazis brought the religion of Arabia and the culture of Persia. Reaching out across the Indian Ocean, they linked Africa with India, China and the Malay peninsula, trading slaves and ivory for glass and porcelain. The Portuguese came and went. Then, under the Omani sultans, Zanzibar entered its pomp.

      No longer now did the traveller come to Zanzibar by dhow. These majestic and sinuous craft, the great jehazi of the Gulf trade and the cheeky little mashua plying the inshore waters, their lateens scything the sky like the crescent of Islam, were going the way of the transatlantic liner. Busy harbourside kiosks below the Lutheran church in Dar sold passage by motorised ferries which swept the visitor out to Zanzibar in hours.

      At first sight the fabled shoreline was also disappointingly prosaic. Imagination prepared the visitor for a scent of cloves and ambergris coming off the sea, and a Sultan’s palace – bombarded by the British in 1896 in the briefest of all colonial conflicts – worthy of the name. The old Stone Town sat at the water’s edge, white and flat, just a few stubby minarets rising above the line of red-tile roofs. The harbour, once teeming with dhows, was deserted.

      Feigning deafness to the imprecations of porters and hotel touts, I struck out towards the heart of the old quarter. Along Creek Road, lined with mango trees, the town sprang to life. At the market a crowd was gathered around a very large dead shark. Children gazed, transfixed, while men in skull caps negotiated noisily for cuts from the leviathan; even the flies seemed to abandon salted fish drying pungently in the sun for this new attraction.

      Down in the Stone Town, alleys wandered among high lattice balconies. Along these narrow lanes, domestic and community life merged. Children tumbled from doors at the feet of a passer-by. Women gossiped from behind bright veils. Mysteries and intrigue seemed to lurk among the maze of lanes, although the reality was that in this intimate jumble no household could retain its secrets.

      The Deputy Chief Justice’s house lay along one of the alleys. From Wolfgang Dourado’s door hung the emblem of Amnesty International, as though it were a crucifix to ward off evil. Dourado, indeed, was a Catholic of Goanese descent, but the cool, darkened living-room that lay beyond the door was furnished in the Arab manner.

      ‘So you’re an Aussie, eh?’ he said. Before I could correct him he went on, ‘in that case you’ll want a beer.’ He returned with an icy can. I gulped gratefully and in the hope of being offered another decided against correcting the misunderstanding.

      He was a tiny bobbing figure with a high-pitched voice and a gleam in his eye, one of that breed of combative lawyers with their origins in the Indian subcontinent, who have devoted themselves in Britain’s ex-colonies to a good scrap and free speech with almost equal relish. For a member of the bench his pronouncements

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