But at this time the city is silent; doors are either shut or torn out of their frames, windows tightly shuttered. A torn-off signboard on which is written “Maganlal Yejchand Shah”; a broken window in the shop Noorbhai Aladin and Sons; a similarly gaping and empty store next door, M. M. Bhagat and Sons, Agents for Favre Leuba, Geneva.
Several barefoot boys are walking by, one of them holding a gun.
“This is our problem,” says one of our guides. His name is Ali. He worked on a clove plantation. “We had only several dozen old guns, confiscated from the police. Very few automatic weapons. The principal arms are machetes, knives, clubs, sticks, axes, hammers. But you’ll see for yourselves.”
We got rooms in the deserted Arab neighborhood, in the Zanzibar Hotel. The building was constructed in such a way that it always provided coolness and shade. We sat down at the bar, to catch our breath. Every now and then some people we didn’t know would come up to see and greet us. At one point, a slight, energetic old woman came in. She began questioning us: What are we doing here? what for? where from? When she got to me and I told her where I was from, she seized me by the hand, paused, and began reciting in flawless Polish:
Pogodą rana lśni polana,
Cisza opieszcza smukłość drzew,
Dygotem liści rozszeptana,
Źdźbla trawy kłoni lekki wiew.
Naggar, Arnold, our escort, all those barefoot warriors now congregating in the hotel’s reception area, were frozen in astonishment.
Tak cicho jest i slodko wszędy,
I tak przedziwny wkoło świat,
Jakbyś przed chwilą przeszła tędy,
Musnąwszy trawy skrajem szat.
“Staff?” I asked, hesitatingly.
“Of course it’s Staff. Leopold Staff!” she said triumphantly. “My name is Helena Tręmbecka. From Podole. I have a hotel right next door. It’s called Pigalle. Please come. You will find Karume there and all his people, because I am serving them free beer!”
What happened on Zanzibar? Why are we here, in a hotel guarded by a troop of barefoot zealots with machetes? (If truth be told, their leader has a rifle, but there’s no telling whether it’s loaded.)
If someone looks carefully at a detailed map of Africa, he will notice that the continent is surrounded by numerous islands. Some are so small they are registered only on highly specialized navigational maps, but others are large enough to appear on ordinary atlases. On the northern side of the continent lie Dzalita and Kerkenna, Lampione and Lampedusa; on the western side of the Canary and Cape Verde Islands, Gorée and Fernando Po, Príncipe and São Tomé, Tristan da Cunha and Annobón; and on the eastern side Shaduan and Gifatun, Suakin and Dahlak, Socotra, Pemba, and Zanzibar, Mafia Island and the Amirante Islands, the Comoros, Madagascar, and the Mascarene Islands. In reality, there are many, many more; one can count dozens, if not hundreds of them, for some branch out into whole archipelagos, while others are encircled by mysterious worlds of coral beds and sandy shoals, which emerge only at low tide to display their dazzle of colors and shapes. The abundance of these islands and promontories suggests the act of creation being as it were interrupted, never completed, so that the continent which is visible and palpable today is merely that part of geologic Africa that has managed to emerge from the oceans, while the rest remains at the bottom, and these islands are just those of its peaks that have broken the surface.
One can imagine this geological phenomenon had historical consequences. Africa had long been at once a place of terror and of temptation. On the one hand, it struck fear into foreigners, and remained unexplored and unconquered. For centuries, its interior was successfully defended by a difficult tropical climate, long incurable diseases (malaria, smallpox, sleeping illness, leprosy, and the like), the lack of roads and means of transport, and, also, the frequently fierce resistance of its inhabitants. This inaccessibility of Africa gave birth to the myth of its mystery: Conrad’s “Heart of Darkness” began at the continent’s sunny coasts, as one disembarked from the ship onto solid ground.
But at the same time Africa seduced, beckoning with its dream of rich spoils, lavish booty.
Whoever set out for its shores embraced a most risky undertaking, an endgame of life and death. As late as the first half of the nineteenth century, more than half the Europeans who made it here died of malaria — but many of those who survived returned with sudden and great fortunes: loads of gold, ivory, and, first and foremost, black slaves.
And it is in this connection that the dozens of islands scattered along the continent’s shores come into the picture, aided by a multinational band of sailors, merchants, and robbers. The islands become for them toeholds, mainstays, havens, and factories. They are, first of all, safe: too far from the mainland for Africans to reach in their unstable boats carved from tree trunks, yet close enough for the Europeans to establish and maintain contact.
The role of these islands increases especially during the epoch of the slave trade: many of them are transformed into concentration camps, where slaves awaiting the ships that will carry them to America, Europe, and Asia are imprisoned.
The slave trade: it lasts approximately three hundred years. It begins in the middle of the fifteenth century, and ends — when? Officially, in the second half of the nineteenth, but in some instances significantly later. In northern Nigeria, for example, it ends only in 1936. The trade occupies a central position in African history. Millions (the estimates differ — fifteen to thirty million people) were captured and shipped under horrendous conditions across the Atlantic. It is thought that in the course of such a journey (which lasted two to three months) nearly half the slaves routinely died of hunger, asphyxiation, or thirst; sometimes all of them perished. Those who survived were later put to work on sugar and cotton plantations in Brazil, in the Caribbean, in the United States, building the riches of that hemisphere. The slave traders (mainly the Portuguese, the Dutch, English, French, Americans, Arabs, and their African partners) depopulated the continent and condemned it to a vegetative apathy: up to the present day, large stretches remain desolate, transformed into desert. To this day Africa has not recovered from this misfortune, from this nightmare.
The slave trade also had disastrous psychological consequences. It poisoned interpersonal relations among Africa’s inhabitants, propagated hatred, inflamed wars. The strong would try to overpower the weak and sell them in the marketplace, kings traded their subjects, conquerors their prisoners, courts of law those they had condemned.
On the psyche of the African this trade left the deepest and most painfully permanent scar: the inferiority complex. I, a black man or woman: i.e., the one whom the white merchant, occupier, torturer can abduct from house or field, put in irons, herd aboard ship, sell, then drive with a whip to ghastly toil.
The ideology of the slave traders was based on the belief that the black man is not human, that mankind is divided into humans and subhumans, and that with the latter one can do as one will — preferably, exploit their labor and then dispose of them. In the notes and records maintained by these traders is laid out (although in a primitive form) the entire later ideology of racism and totalitarianism, with its core thesis that the Other is the enemy; worse— subhuman. The philosophy that inspired the construction of Kolyma and Auschwitz, one of obsessive contempt and hatred, vileness and brutality, was formulated and set down centuries earlier by the captains of the Martha and the Progresso, the Mary Ann and the Rainbow, as they sat in their cabins gazing out the portholes at groves of palm trees and sun-warmed beaches, waiting aboard their ships anchored off the islands of Sherbro, or Zanzibar, for the next batch of black slaves to be loaded.