In Stone Town, people know how to celebrate: Eid ul-Fitr, Eid al-Adha, Tanzanian Independence Day, Christmas, New Year, Zanzibar Revolution Day. And that was just in the five months that I was there. There are still seven months of celebration in Zanzibar that I have not been witness to.
I arrived in Unguja, Zanzibar near the end of Ramadan. It was a hungry 10 days. I will always remember where I was at the end of the fasting. It was Forodani Gardens, at the night food market. There were people everywhere, eating much food after a day of nothing. Ramadan ends when the new moon is sighted. It had been seen in Malaysia. People were excited, and full of food. No moon was seen that night. The next night again the market, lit by gas lamps that swarmed and shimmered with people. The message spread again: they'd seen the moon in Dar es Salaam, surely now it was a mater of minutes. And then the call rose up from the middle of Stone Town and people in Forodhani cheered and hugged each other. Fourty days of fasting was over. The next three days were celebreation days. The streets buzzed with exquisitely dressed women and children - new dresses of blues and red and yellows, flowing chiffon, lace, bling. Thick make-up. Men and boys clean and smart. The day time for visiting friends and family and eating. The night time for night markets and street games and general celebrations.
The second Eid, Eid al-Adha, is supposedly the biggest Eid but it snuck up quietly and suddenly we were told that tomorrow and the next day and the next day there would be celebrations. This time I was involved and I went house to house visiting friends, drinking litres of chai and eating what seemed to be whole cakes and kilograms of biriani. It was like the first Eid but it lasted more days. It didn’t seem as festive as the first one but that may have been because at the first one people were hungry and so their happiness seemed larger as they suddenly had boundless energy from the regular meals they had been eating.
On Independence day, to be honest I didn’t do much. But I know there were celebrations on Thursday and Friday night.
Then came Christmas and never before have I have I been in a place where Christmas is not only celebrated by opening presents and being with family, it is CELEBRATED on the 24th, the 25th and the 26th (regardless of whether you are Christian) with music and dancing and many parties, out in the open for all to join. And New Year, well, in all the markets and in all the dance halls and beaches and in all other public spaces, everyone together to count down to 12 midnight. Everyone with everyone, it seemed as if no one was by themselves.
My final celebration and my actual point of this story was Zanzibar Revolution Day. It was on a Thursday. At 12 midnight on Wednesday night, air-raid sirens began wailing around the town and the sound of machine gun fire echoed off the stone buildings. If you did not know it was Revolution Day you would have thought the island was under siege. Glowing “bullets” were being shot and they arched over Stone Town and neighbouring Maisara. The sirens and gun fire continued for a long time, interspersing the impressive and very loud fireworks display happening in Mnazi Moja show grounds. The air lit up and would explode into hundreds of coloured lights and then du-du-du-du-du-du-du, more bullets were shot.
After the fireworks, the crowd turned and began the walk to The Traffic Circle (or as it is called in Zanzibar, The Keep Lefty). Here there would be lit up water fountains. But people were really going there because this is where cars would take it in turn to race around the circle and the more daring of the crown would try to jump on the vehicles. Dala dalas, trucks, scooters, Jeeps, minis, all these and more took their turn to drive. And as the night wore on the driving got more daring. Of course this is illegal. Up until 12:30am the police were there, closing the road, preventing the cars from entering. And then the game began.
It would have been boring for the police to stay there the whole night, both for the crowd and the police themselves. So the police leave, knowing full well that the cars would arrive and the people would get slightly out of hand and slightly dangerous. And then I can just imagine the police saying to themselves, "man I am bored, do you think we have waited long enough, I want to join the fun”, and then when they thought they had left just enough time for things to be getting a bit crazy, the would come roaring down the road, lights blaring and they would skid to a halt and armed reinforcement would spew out of the back of the vehicle and begin the chase.
I was with my Danish Tanzanian friend, watching the cars from a distance. And then there was a shout and another and we turned to watch the spotlighs blaring down on us and then the crowd started running and so we joined, running, running away from the cops, laughing at being chased and then stumbling to a stop and watching and waiting for the police to leave again, giving us space once again to get a little reckless so they they could play again and come and pretend to chase us away.
It was a big fat game that the police and the people played that night. It did however somehow prevent the drivers and the audience from getting too dangerous as each time they came to chase us, the level of recklessness dropped and as far as I know, no one was killed…
Three days later I left Zanzibar, the island of celebrations. The thing is with Zanzibar, they know how to celebrate, to celebrate out in the open, for all to join. And this makes the whole event all the more festive and you, the celebrator feels part of something bigger, really part of a town who knows how to have fun and does so at any excuse.
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