By Joel Denker
The steamy tropical air of the Indian Ocean port was thick with spicy fumes. Aromatic droplets fragrant with cloves filled the atmosphere. A recent college graduate teaching in Dar es Salaam, the capital of Tanzania, I walked through the harbor during a brief sojourn on the island off the coast of the East African nation. Zanzibar was formally part of Tanzania but had a culture all its own. I had often discussed the spice island’s history in my classes at a secondary school outside Dar. A number of my students, many of whom wore the distinctive white caps of Islam, hailed from the predominantly Muslim society.
After reading so much about Zanzibar’s storied past, I was eager to see the island for myself. At the time, in the mid-sixties, the state was ruled by a totalitarian regime allied to the Soviet Union. The secretive rulers decreed that no visitor could stay overnight. Hence I wanted to make the most of the short time available.
Looking around the harbor, I watched port workers hauling large bags of cloves, the chief export of what was then the world’s largest producer of the spice. Cans of coconut oil rested on the dock. A ship headed for Bombay waited in the harbor.
I briefly explored the narrow streets of Stone Town, the ancient quarter of the capital, which had more the feel of Persia and Arabia than of Africa. Many of the island’s people of mixed blood had ancestors from both of those trading powers. I stopped to gaze at the intricately carved double wooden doors of the houses.
I decided to see the countryside. Touring in a taxi, I was overwhelmed by the sheer abundance of tropical crops—pineapples, peppers, breadfruit, coffee, bananas. My gracious driver-guide amazed me when he peeled off some cinnamon bark, a spice of mysterious origin, which I had heretofore seen only in a spice jar. He also showed me a clove branch. The air was redolent of lemon grass. Wherever we drove, piles of drying coconuts lined the road.
I was mesmerized by the lush green area. It felt like a “tropical landscape,” I wrote in a letter to my grandparents. I was not then fully aware of the arduous labor on which the island’s wealth depended. Harvesting cloves, I later learned, was still done in the traditional manner. Workers climbed to the tree’s upper branches. They snagged the ends of branches with long hooked poles, pulling them until they were within their reach. Grasping the clusters of aromatic buds, they dropped them in a basket.
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To learn more about cloves, see The Carrot Purple and Other Curious Stories of the Food We Eat, coming in October from Rowman & Littlefield: https://rowman.com/ISBN/9781442248861/The-Carrot-Purple-and-Other-Curious-Stories-of-the-Food-We-Eat.
