ZANZIBAR MARKET. 409 



Captain Grant, the companion of Speke, in his famous African journey, 

 gives some characteristic sketches of Zanzibar at the period of his visit 

 (I860):— 



" Though the streets of Zanzibar," he says, "■ are too narrow for a 

 wheeled carriage, and the supply of water deficient, everything looked clean 

 and neatly kept ; and the shopkeepers, chiefly Indians, were respectful, even 

 to a painful degree, rising as we passed them. The bazaar is very abundantly 

 supplied with vegetables, fruit, and dried fish ; little butcher meat, but liquor 

 shops abound, and water has to be purchased — the best quality being carried 

 from a hot spring, which bubbles from under a rock, and tastes unpleasantly 

 warm. Men in the market-place have an odd way of hawking about their 

 goods for sale. Goats, carved doors, beds, knives, swords, etc., are all paraded 

 up and down, and their prices shouted out. The market for human beings is 

 a triangular space, surrounded by rickety huts, thatched with cocoa-nut leaves, 

 and the parties of slaves (negro men and women, brought originally from the 

 interior of Africa), on being exhibited, are guarded by men with swords. 

 Some of the unhappy groups sit calmly in the market-place, looking very 

 clean, well-fed, and dressed, with a depressed anxious look, saying to you 

 with their eyes, ' Buy me from this yoke of slavery.' It is a very striking, 

 though most humiliating sight, to observe one of the Zanzibar rakish-looking 

 crafts, felucca rigged (called dhows) arrive from Ibo, on the mainland, crammed 

 with naked slaves for the market, all as silent as death. The Arab owners, 

 gaily dressed, stand at the stern, and one holds the colours, in seeming 

 defiance of the British Consulate, as he sails past. The price of slaves was low 

 in 1860, only £3 each; and many Arabs would have taken less, as Colonel 

 Rigby (then H.M.'s Consul), had released upwards of 4,000, who became inde- 

 pendent, living in a newly-made part of the town, and gaining a livelihood by 

 fetching water, and selling the produce of the island. 



" The climate of Zanzibar is very relaxing, owing to the humidity of the 

 air, a great amount of rain falling during the year. The rain comes down in 

 plunges, pelting showers, or like squalls at sea, and in the intervals any bodily 



exertion is attended with profuse perspiration and lassitude The 



island has two crops of grain yearly, and four of manioc, which, with dried 

 shark, is the staple food of the people. They cook it in every form, making 

 also flour of it. One has only to walk of a morning along the roads leading to 

 the town, to see the ' productiveness of this beautiful island. Negro men and 

 women, laden with mangoes, oranges, plantain, sugar-cane, grass, cocoa-nut, . 

 manioc, yams, sweet potato, Indian corn, ground nut, etc., go in streams to the 

 market. The return of these crowds is, in contrast, utterly ludicrous. Nothing 

 do they then carry but a stick over their shoulders, with a cut of stale fish 

 hanging from it, and one wonders at the extreme poverty of the people in the 

 midst of such abundance. 

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