Mangapwani Beach

In my mother's photograph album is this picture of a beach in Zanzibar, taken in the late 1930s or early 1940s. It looks a perfect beach, with white coral sands, coconut palms to shade the sun, a small sheltering headland, and warm, shallow water to bath in, yet it's also a working beach, for the sleek boats pulled up on it are ngalowas, the lateen-sailed, outrigger canoes used by villagers all along the East African coast for fishing.

It's called Mangapwani which, translated from the KiSwahili, means 'Arab Beach'. My mother refers to it in her writing, for example, "After church, Sundays were often occupied by picnics, out to Fumba or Mangapwani for bathing in a lovely warm clear sea." My father also visited the beach - this a man for whom beaches were not his favourite places - for his album has several pictures of him at Mangapwani with a group of friends, in the time before my mother arrived in Zanzibar.

Mangapwani is also the name of the nearby town, which lies close to the northwest coast of Zanzibar. One would expect, these days, that such a perfect beach would be crowded with tourists but a look on Google maps shows it deserted - both of people and fishing boats.