Hi there my Hivean friends and followers!
As you might know from some of my previous posts, we recently visited this beautiful African archipelago called Zanzibar and I´m excited to finally come up with a fully-fledged post about this extraordinary tropical place. I have already shared some little sneak peeks of what we saw there here on my blog but those were mostly just random pictures without much of description so let me start out this post with some general information about Zanzibar and then also about its people as they are what this photo series of mine will mostly be about ;)
Located in the Indian Ocean, just a few degrees below the equator, Zanzibar is an archipelago that consists of two bigger islands called Unguja and Pemba and a number of smaller, mostly uninhabited islands and islets. Since 1964, Zanzibar is officially a part of Tanzania but it used to be a greatly autonomous region before and it actually still enjoys a decent level of autonomy even now as the archipelago has its own administration, government and even president.
As for the history of Zanzibar, it´s believed that the archipelago has been inhabited for at least 20,000 years with some ancient tribes of the Bantu People probably being the first documented inhabitants back in the first centuries AD. Later on, in the 16th century, Zanzibar was colonized by the Portuguese who then started to fight over the control of the archipelago with Arabic sultans. Since the beginning of the 18th century, Zanzibar was fully controlled by the sultans for almost 200 years until the end of the 19th century when the British started to colonize the archipelago. During a significant part of the Arabic era, Zanzibar was the center of slave trade in East Africa and it was not until the British intervention on the archipelago when first efforts to abolish slavery appeared. Zanzibar was a protectorate of Britain until 1963. Just one year later, in 1964, the archipelago merged with Tanganyika, then sovereign mainland state across the Zanzibar Channel, forming a brand new country called Tanzania, which is actually a blend of these two names (Tan-ganyika and Zan-zibar).
As you can see, the history of Zanzibar is very interesting and diverse and so are the people living on the islands. These days, approximately 1.5 million people live on Zanzibar, most of which are Swahili People but there are also many other ethnic minorities living there. The vast majority of the population are Muslims (I guess because of those almost 2 centuries of Arabic colonization) but there are also some Christians, Hinduists etc. and from my observation, they live together peacefully.
So this was a little insight into the official background of the archipelago and its people and now I can add some more personal findings too. First of all, you may wonder why I actually dedicated this series to photos of people. Generally, I´m known to prefer taking photos of nature, animals and landscapes to anything and anybody else and I think it has always been quite obvious here on my blog. It´s only very rarely that I take photos of people and when I do that, it usually feels kind of awkward and unsuitable to me.
For some reason, however, this changed on Zanzibar. The locals were just so incredibly friendly, cheerful and relaxed that I simply couldn´t stop taking pictures of them :) You might remember that we spent a few years in Latin America and also in a number of European countries so we are quite used to encountering and experiencing different cultures but the Zanzibar people were just a whole new level. As you will see in the photos below, Zanzibar (and I was said that Tanzania as a whole too) is still very poor but the locals seem to be always happy, smiling and grateful even for the very little they have.
Tourism has been growing pretty fast on the archipelago but most of the locals still seem to be employed in agriculture, fishing and seaweed farming so their income and living standards are way below the world average. But again, that doesn´t stop them from living happy lives, having fun and enjoying the lovely tropical climate and super warm turquoise ocean.
From what we observed, it seems that education is not one of the priorities there as we saw many very young kids helping their parents with their businesses or just playing on the beach during the time when European kids have to be at school. On the other hand, many of the locals are super smart and talented, especially at languages. Obviously, Zanzibar is very popular with Czech, Slovak and Polish tourists and travelers and to our great surprise, we met a lot of locals who actually spoke these languages (just like those two super cool guys in the Slovakian and Polish national shirts in one of the pictures below). Moreover, those who work in the tourism sector often also speak English, French, Italian, German and Arabic. Plus Swahili of course, the official language of Tanzania. And when I asked them how they actually learned all of these languages, they shocked me even more by replying: "From the Google translator." What?! Honestly, at first, I thought they were joking but then, I really saw some locals learning new languages like that. Incredible. I mean can you imagine how many languages they would master if they had the opportunity to study at universities in developed countries?
But yeah, that was just another cool thing that makes the people of Zanzibar so special, inspiring and fun to be around. We really enjoyed our time with the locals and we learned a lot from them about their lifestyle, culture, habits etc. Of course we also tried to support them as much as we could. We ate at the locals restaurants, bought fruits and vegetables at the street markets, bought a lot of souvenirs, handicrafts etc. We also brought some candies for the local kids and it was so rewarding to give them away while watching the happy faces of the little ones.
So yeah, people turned out to be unexpectedly huge subject for my photo shootings on Zanzibar and when going through the pictures after returning back to Prague, I could´t believe I actually took around a hundred of photos of people there. That´s probably more than I had ever taken before during my whole life :D After some sorting out and editing, I ended up with 80 pictures that I would like to share with you guys here on my Hive blog. I know it would be way too much for one or two posts so I figured I would split the photo series into 4 parts, each featuring 20 shots.
Without further ado, here comes the first batch of photos depicting the amazing people of Zanzibar :)
I hope you enjoyed the pictures. As for the location of the photos, all of them were taken on the Unguja Island, the biggest island of the Zanzibar Archipelago that is actually sometimes incorrectly referred to as Zanzibar as well. Most of the pictures were taken in and around the picturesque coastal town of Jambiani that is located on the southeastern coast of the island. The town, its famous beaches and natural surroundings are stunningly beautiful and you can definitely expect some posts about them too, just like posts about the renowned Jozani National Park, seaweed farming, the mesmerizing beaches of Kendwa, Nungwi and many other cool places of the island ;)
Thanks for your attention everyone and stay tuned for more travel content from this magical Tanzanian archipelago. Until then... Hakuna Matata!
Edit: You can find the other parts of the series below:
Amazing people of Zanzibar, Tanzania - part 2
Amazing people of Zanzibar, Tanzania - part 3
Amazing people of Zanzibar, Tanzania - part 4
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