Spices, Music and the Sea: What Makes Us Zanzibari

In Zanzibar, identity doesn’t live in words. It lives in the senses. The way clove oil stains your fingers after harvest. The hum of an oud string drifting through an open window in Stone Town. The salt on your tongue when a ngalawa cuts across the shallows.

We are an island that has always moved through sound, scent and salt. Our roots are not stories in a book; they are recipes, rhythms and routes carved by the sea.

The Music

Music in Zanzibar is never just performance. It’s how we speak when words fall short. From the taarab orchestras of the old sultans to the fishermen’s call and response, our melodies were built on exchange between Africa and Arabia, India and the coast. The songs carried gossip, poetry, flirtation and prayer.

Few people know that the word taarab comes from the Arabic ṭarab, meaning “to be moved emotionally by music.” The earliest taarab was performed in Sultan Barghash’s palace in the late 1800s when the Sultan invited an Egyptian ensemble to Zanzibar to train local musicians. The result was something new: Arabic melodies, Swahili poetry and African rhythm woven together into a form that belonged only to this island.

Early taarab singers like Siti binti Saad changed everything. She was the first woman to record in Swahili and to sing about real life, love, jealousy and social class instead of palace tales. Her 78-rpm records made in Bombay in the 1920s spread across East Africa, turning taarab from royal entertainment into the soundtrack of ordinary Zanzibari life.

Even now, when young artists sample taarab beats into bongo-flava or Afro-fusion tracks, they are continuing the same story, taking something inherited and making it speak for today.

The Spices

Walk through a clove farm after the rain and you’ll understand how deep the land runs in us. The smell rises warm and sharp, part medicine, part memory. Our kitchens speak in the language of spice: cardamom, cinnamon, nutmeg. Every house smells a little different, but every one tells the same story, that food here is not decoration, it’s ancestry.

Cloves, now so symbolic of Zanzibar, were first planted here around 1818 by Omani settlers using seedlings from the Moluccas. Within a few decades, our soil and humidity produced a quality so distinct that karafuu za Zanzibar became a standard in global trade. Even the British navy once used Zanzibar clove oil as a disinfectant on long voyages.

But beyond commerce, spices shaped our social fabric. On the island, every spice carries meaning: cardamom in wedding milk tea, cinnamon in postpartum baths, nutmeg as a tonic for energy. The Swahili word for spice, viungo, also means “the things that give life flavour.” In Zanzibari kitchens, the spice jar is a medicine cabinet, a symbol of care and a connection to the land.

In recent years, small family farms have returned to traditional mixed cultivation, growing cloves alongside bananas, cassava and yams, the same way our great-grandparents did before monoculture. The rhythm of the land is coming back, one harvest at a time.

The Sea

Before there were borders, there were sails. The ngalawa was our first classroom, a place where patience and precision were worth more than strength. The sea still teaches us how to read the wind, how to return home without maps, how to live by cycles larger than ourselves.

The ngalawa’s twin outriggers give it balance in shallow water and surf, a design almost identical to the lakana canoes of Madagascar. Linguists and maritime historians believe outrigger technology reached the Swahili coast through centuries of contact between East Africa and the Austronesian world, long before modern nations existed. Malagasy sailors had crossed from Southeast Asia a thousand years ago, and their designs, words and boat-building skills slowly blended into the Indian Ocean’s maritime culture.

In Zanzibar, that heritage became something distinctly local. Builders shaped mangrove trunks by eye, without measuring tools. They joined planks with coconut fibre rope and sealed seams with shark oil or crushed coral paste. The boat’s name, ngalawa, even echoes the Malagasy word lakana, showing how languages carry the sea’s memory too.

Each ngalawa is slightly different, no two keels curve the same way. And each carries a lineage: from the man who cut the wood to the father who taught the son to read the wind. That’s why when a fisherman says bahari inakupa na inakuchukua “the sea gives and takes” it’s both warning and prayer.

Keeping the Thread

Music, spice, sailing. They’re not three separate things. They are one rhythm, three notes of the same song. To keep them alive isn’t nostalgia. It’s responsibility.

We don’t preserve the past for show; we live it every day in kitchens, workshops and waves. It’s in the hands that drum, the women who dry cloves on woven mats, the captains who still trust the moon more than a motor.

This is who we are. Zanzibaris. A people stitched together by scent, sound and sea. Still listening. Still sailing. Still home.