A Zanzibar Guide Book

Appropriately, I re-found this little guide book to Zanzibar in the old Arab chest which my father bought off nahodha, a dhow captain, in Zanzibar harbour. This edition is dated 1949, a few years after my parents left the island.

It's full of little gems of information about a small island state which was still under the control of the British empire in the form of the Colonial Office, for which my mother worked when she lived in Zanzibar. However, one of the features of the book which I most enjoyed were some very good pictures which included....

....this one of two ngalawas, small inshore fishing boats, being run up onto the beach. It all looks slightly staged - usually, one or two men went out fishing in each boat - but what it does show is their very elegant lines created, I feel, by the lateen sail. This elegance is as evident....

....in this picture of a larger dhow, the caption underneath suggesting that it was from Muscat, Muscat being the capital of Oman, the sultans of Oman being for many years the rulers of Zanzibar.

Whoever wrote the little book was obviously an admirer of these lateen-sailed boats as he also included a picture of two large dhows being careened - that is, brought into shallow water and supported so that, at low tide, the barnacles and other marine life could be scraped off, the planking re-caulked, and the bottom of the ship painted with anti-fouling shark oil.

Mike Chetham's description of the dhows of East Africa - link available in right-hand column of this blog - states that there were three types of large dhow which came down into East African waters, and from this I would guess that these two are baghalas, a ship whose design owes much to the carvels that the Portuguese used to round the Cape of Good Hope and discovered the sea route to India.

In my parents' time there would have been scores of ocean-going dhows anchored in Zanzibar harbour in the season, and as a boy I can remember them crowding the Old Port anchorage in Mombasa (above). Dhows still ply the seas between the Gulf and East Africa but these days they are powered by motors, so the symmetrical elegance of their hull-lines and the lateen sail has been lost.