Stone Town is the old city of Zanzibar, the UNESCO World Heritage Site of narrow lanes and carved wooden doors and coral stone buildings that the Arab Omani Sultanate built in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as the commercial capital of the East African spice and slave trade.
The Arab traders who sailed the monsoon from the Gulf of Oman to Zanzibar with the northeast monsoon and returned with the southwest monsoon used Zanzibar as the entrepôt for the ivory, the cloves, the slaves, and the spices of the East African interior that the Swahili coastal traders delivered to the stone town warehouses. The annual monsoon cycle was the engine of the Zanzibar economy for two centuries.
The monsoon is still the engine of the dhow traffic that moves cargo between the Zanzibar islands and the Tanzanian mainland.
The Eighty2 anchors in the dhow harbour off Stone Town, the same anchorage that the Omani dhows used and that the local cargo dhows still use as the harbour for the traditional wooden vessels that carry the produce between the islands. The Eighty2 at anchor alongside the dhow is the specific visual of the offshore sailing vessel in the historic maritime context: the two types of boat that the same trade wind has been moving across the same water for the centuries that separate their design traditions.
The Spice Tour and the Clove Harvest
The Zanzibar spice tour is the overland visit to the clove and cinnamon and nutmeg and black pepper plantations that cover the central plateau of the main island, the agricultural legacy of the Omani Sultanate’s spice economy that planted the clove trees across Zanzibar and Pemba in the nineteenth century to control the global clove supply that the Dutch East India Company had previously managed from its monopoly on the Banda Islands in Indonesia.
The Zanzibar clove walk through the plantation, the guide breaking the leaf and the bark and the dried bud and releasing the clove oil in its various stages of the plant, is the sensory education in the spice that the medieval European merchant was willing to pay a fortune for and that the Eighty2’s galley uses in quantities that the plantation produces in minutes.
The connection between the clove in the galley and the clove on the tree and the trade route that moved it from one to the other across the centuries is the connection that the Zanzibar chapter of the Naora circumnavigation makes tangible in the afternoon walk through the plantation above Stone Town.
