A FALLEN TREE IN STONE TOWN

by Jonathan Walz 

Forodhani Gardens, Zanzibar (photo: Martin Walsh)

I

On July 9, 2020, a large tree fell in the Vuga area of Stone Town, Zanzibar.* Its collapse was sudden and loud. People quickly gathered. The tree’s meaning to different people emerged in the subsequent three days as the tree was discussed, disassembled, hauled-off, reflected-on, and mourned. Clarity about the tree’s meaning and social role emerged from its death.

II

Unique trees are essential to societies in eastern Africa and throughout the world. From mainland Africa to Seychelles, the baobab, coco de mer, fig, and mango play roles in story-telling and ritual practice, not to mention their contributions to sustenance and medicine. Common English names for other trees with distinct uses and cultural significance – all found in contemporary Zanzibar – include, but are not limited to, the bodhi, breadfruit, camphor, cassia, cinnamon, clove, coconut, date, ebony, euphorbia (succulent), false ashoka, ficus, frangipani, Indian almond, kapok, mahogany, mangrove, neem, peepal, saman, tamarind, and teak.

Trees serve a multitude of purposes. Particular species provide shade or windbreaks. Trees can be ornamental. Large or old trees serve as shrines, house ancestors, or, for some societies, they can represent the center of the symbolic universe (i.e. an axis mundi). Trees can obscure visibility and sound, facilitating secrecy. The wood of some species can be used to make objects: posts, flooring, utensils, beehives, weapons, watercraft, musical instruments, and carvings. Many trees produce edible fruits, seeds, roots, leaves, saps, or gums or are consumed as timber for construction projects or for firewood, charcoal, or animal fodder. Extracts from trees can be employed as latexes, oils, dyes, hunting poisons, or incense. The cosmetic cabinets of Swahili women contain an assortment of tree products revered for their affordances.

Trees in Stone Town (photo: Jonathan Walz)

Large trees are visible and prominent, with high crowns that mark places of importance on the countryside or in cities. In Stone Town, multi-story architecture often obstructs viewsheds. There are no natural features other than trees to distinguish places from a distance, especially when viewed from the perspective of a pedestrian in the alleyways. In parts of Tanzania, forests serve as sacred groves or identify ancient settlements (see the scholarship of Elgidius Ichumbaki (2015), who suggests reconsidering the meaning of “archaeological site” using trees). Trees have meanings that stretch beyond their immediate times and locations; they can live on in place names, for example throughout Zanzibar (Myers 2016). 

III

The tree that fell in Vuga had a social life. It was planted by Khamis Salum in 2000. The Ficus benjamina - Weeping or Java Fig - has an origin in India, Malaysia, and Indonesia. This species is a large evergreen tree, 10-20 meters in height with drooping foliage. Hardy and fast-growing, it has a strong root system and bears orange to red berries (Dharani 2002).

The Weeping Fig functioned as a shade tree for nearby offices. Taxi drivers wedged everyday items in the openings in its trunk and among its lower branches. It was an attractive destination for urban animals, including a pair of Broad-billed Rollers, a colony of Yellow-headed Dwarf Geckos, and a Great Plated Lizard that lived in a stone wall at the base of its trunk. When it fruited, the tree attracted Greater Galagos and two species of fruit bat.

All of this ended when the tree fell. When it collapsed across a dirt road it landed without injury to people or property. Community members in the area gathered, taking photos in awe.

(photo: Jonathan Walz)

IV

After the tree’s collapse, three entities were contacted because each has purview over the trees of Stone Town, a World Heritage Site: the Stone Town Conservation and Development Authority, Urban Municipal Council, and Department of Forests and Non-Renewable Natural Resources. Discussions with the authorities documented the details of the tree and offered guidelines for the removal of its remains. Photographs were taken by authorities and its species confirmed. Then, clearance began. A representative from the Urban Municipal Council arrived on-site to observe a hired worker with a permitted chainsaw disassemble the tree. At 12 meters in height and almost a meter thick at breast height, the removal process of the tree spanned two days. This species produces soft wood useful as firewood (not charcoal), so its trunk and branches were carried away by community members. 

V

During subsequent days, two individuals independently visited the site of the tree fall and performed rites. The individuals were older men who discretely left items at its stump and spoke inaudible words. They stayed in the vicinity briefly. The Weeping Fig was a shrine to a spirit. The two visitors each left an offering (sadaka), including a small white cloth. This interpretation also explains the appearance of eggs and vials of rosewater at the base of the tree in previous years. The rite maintains harmony for an individual or community by preventing evil or pollution as a result of the demise of the mzimu, the Swahili name for a spirit dwelling.

Trees have specific meanings and uses to different stakeholders. This event should inspire conversations about the roles of trees, their socio-nature, urban environmental histories, and the symbolic and spiritual character of cities (Myers 2016: 83). Trees are physical and metaphysical anchors. Western perspectives on trees delimit and can erase other cultural meanings and uses of trees. While the built environment of Stone Town may be “of elsewhere” (Meier 2016), trees and green spaces in Zanzibar still yield deep significances that draw heavily from the African and Indian Ocean cultural intersections in Zanzibar. For instance, the words jini and shetani have Arabic roots, but pepo and mzimu have Bantu roots. These terminologies are variously used to indicate spirits or spirit dwellings among the Swahili. The cultural significance of these terms and the context of use are obscured when trees or green spaces and districts on the island are framed simply as areas of public enjoyment (or “parks”), which embraces a Western concept of nature and green spaces for urban Africa.

(photo: Jonathan Walz)

VI

The words, performances, and objects associated with special trees are essential for comprehension of their significance as heritage. The material approach to the fallen Weeping fig and its consumption (as firewood, and so forth) is understandable in a comparatively impoverished setting that has been culturally degraded by tourism. Yet, the performance of rites shows that even under these less than ideal circumstances, or, better yet, because of the circumstances, meaning persists. Using a case from Transkei, Throop (2003) articulates that from on-the-ground treatments of trees there is the potential to distil the surrounding power relations. In Zanzibar, this postulate applies to trees as central places of social practice that respond to colonial experience, the intersection of town-and countryside, and environmental change. Contradictions exist in the “heritagization” of Stone Town (Sheriff 2019). One everyday tension is the disproportionate emphasis placed by conservators on architecture (already questioned for its “authenticity”) as compared against, for example, intangible practices that surround trees that endure at prominent points or in place names in Stone Town.

*Note that the tree that is the subject of this post is not shown for ethical reasons. All of the images included here are of other trees in Zanzibar.

References

Dharani, N. 2002. Field Guide to the Common Trees and Shrubs of East Africa. Cape Town: Struik Publishers.

Ichumbaki, E. 2015. Monumental Ruins, Baobab Trees and Spirituality: Perceptions on Values and Uses of Built Heritage along the East African Coast. Unpublished PhD Dissertation, University of Dar es Salaam, Tanzania.

Meier, P. 2016. Swahili Port Cities: The Architecture of Elsewhere. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Myers, G. 2016. Urban Environments in Africa: A Critical Analysis of Environmental Politics. Chicago: Policy Press.

Rival, L (ed.) 1998. The Social Life of Trees: Anthropological Perspectives on Tree Symbolism. London: Routledge.

Sheriff, A. 2019. Contradictions in the heritagization of Zanzibar ‘Stone Town’. In B. Schnepel and T. Sen (eds.) Travelling Pasts: The Politics of Cultural Heritage in the Indian Ocean World. Leiden: Brill. 221-245.

Throop, J. 2003. The python and the crying tree: interpreting tales of environmental and colonial power in Transkei. International Journal of African Historical Studies 36 (3): 511-532.

A RECIPE FOR DISPELLING NIGHTMARES

by Martin Walsh

Mhamadi Khamis Makame

My last post, ‘Burning the Golden weaver’s nest’, was about an unusual ingredient in the treatment of possession-related  illness in Makunduchi, in the south-east of Unguja island. Fumigation and steaming are common components in traditional medical practice in Zanzibar. They are also essential in the invocation of possessory spirits, as Hassan Gora Haji describes in his recent PhD dissertation on the songs that accompany spirit possession rituals on Tumbatu island and elsewhere in northern Unguja.

Here is part of his description of kupigwa nyungu, ‘to be given a vapour-bath’:

“Nyungu [literally ‘clay pot’] is a mixture of medicinal plants which are boiled together and used to fumigate oneself […]. But according to waganga, traditional doctors, nyungu is a kind of medicine for steaming which is made with a mix of the leaves of seven different plants. These plants vary from mganga to mganga or from one kind of spirit possession treatment to another. […] The nyungu medicine is used to attract the spirit so that it comes as soon as it is called.” (Haji 2018: 54; my translation).

Crouching under a mat

On 18 October 2007, when working on the Gray Brothers’ documentary The Nightmare (Para Docs Productions, 2008), I took the crew to film a series of interviews about a recent Popobawa panic in Potoa. Afterwards, one of my in-laws demonstrated the use of nyungu medicine for the camera. His patient was a young boy who had been sent to him for treatment, and had been staying there for some time. As both of them crouched under a mat, Mzee Mhamadi held a bunch of steaming leaves under the boy’s nose and encouraged him to inhale the vapour.
 

After this demonstration, Mzee Mhamadi listed the seven plants that he would have used if he had been doing this for real. He described this as a nyungu mix for treating treating jinamizi, which is loosely translated as ‘nightmare’, but often refers to more specific phenomena, such as the frightening hallucinations that can accompany sleep paralysis and manifest as incubi or succubi.

Inhaling the vapour

Here are the seven ingredients, listed in the order in which he gave them and identified with the help of available botanical glossaries of Swahili plant names in Zanzibar:

1. muwakikali, Horsewood, Clausena anisata (Willd.) Hook.f. ex Benth. (family Rutaceae).
2. mnanuzi, Orange Climber, Toddalia asiatica (L.) Lam. (family Rutaceae).
3. mchakuzi, Uvaria acuminata Oliv. (family Annonaceae).
4. mbaazi, Pigeon Pea, Cajanus cajan (L.) Millsp. (family Leguminosae).
5. kivumbazi, Ocimum spp. including Basil, Ocimum basilicum L. (family Lamiaceae).
6. mpera, Guava, Psidium guajava L. (family Myrtaceae).
7. mchakati, Mallotus oppositifolius (Geiseler) Müll.Arg. (family Euphorbiaceae).

The last of these botanical identifications is the least certain: Heine and Legère (1995: 107) also record mchakati as Leucas sp. (family Lamiaceae) and Acalypha ornata Hochst. ex A.Rich. (family Euphorbiaceae).

The nyungu medicine

Most of these plants, including the cultigens, are used in a variety of medicinal and ritual preparations in Zanzibar, and some are well known as traditional medicines more widely. According to Heine and Legère, waganga consider Horsewood to be “one of their most useful plants” (1995: 244), while they and other authors give different examples of its use.

Ingrams describes the use of Orange Climber roots in a “Hadimu” (south and east Unguja) ritual for “Calling a devil for possession” that is somewhat different from the northern Unguja (Tumbatu) practices already described:

“Take a piece of mnanuzi root, and three of muiza jini [mwizajini, Coffee senna, Senna occidentalis] […] and boil together in a new pot. When it boils, place a pad on the patient’s head (to stop burning) and place the pot on top of it. The patient will then shake her head, but the pot will not fall down. The medicine man then gives the patient some of the mixture to drink. The devil will now come, and though he may go away for short periods, will always come back. After this the medicine man will drop the muiza jini down a ruined well, so that it is out of the way of mischief-makers, and the other root will be fastened to the leg of the possessed person, where it will stay for seven days.” (1931: 453)

Listing the ingredients

Elsewhere Ingrams discusses the magical significance of the numbers 3, 4, and 7 in Zanzibar, and parallels further afield (1931: 478).

As Hassan Gora Haji makes clear in his dissertation, the herbal steam bath is only one part of a spirit possession or healing ritual, which may also involve specific incantations. Ingrams also records a sample of these. I didn’t get another opportunity to ask Mzee Mhamadi more about this, and alas he is no longer with us, though I’m told that at least some of his medicinal knowledge has been passed on.

Acknowledgements
In memory of Mhamadi Khamis Makame, and with thanks to Adam Gray for sending me unused footage from the filming of The Nightmare. All of the images in this post are taken from that footage.

References

Haji, Hassan Gora 2018. Uchambuzi wa Nyimbo za Uganga wa Pepo Zanzibar: Mtindo na Dhima Zake. Unpublished PhD dissertation, Chui Kikuu cha Taifa cha Zanzibar (SUZA).

During filming

Heine, Bernd and Karsten Legère 1995. Swahili Plants: An Ethnobotanical Survey. Köln: Rüdiger Köppe Verlag.

Ingrams, W.H. 1931. Zanzibar: Its History and People. London: H.F. & G. Witherby.

Kombo, Yussuf H. 2017. Jozani Natural Forest: Zanzibar Treasures in Wild (2nd edition). Zanzibar.

Legère, Karsten 2003. Plant names from north Zanzibar. Africa & Asia (Göteborg) 3: 123-146.

Williams, R.O. 1949. The Useful and Ornamental Plants in Zanzibar and Pemba. Zanzibar: Zanzibar: Protectorate.

BURNING THE GOLDEN WEAVER'S NEST

by Martin Walsh

On a recent trip to Zanzibar, one of the books I picked up at the incomparable Masomo Bookshop was a primer of Kae (Kikae), the dialect of Makunduchi on the south of Unguja island. Rukia M. Issa’s Chowea: Kifahamu Kikae Lugha ya Wamakunduchi was published in Zanzibar last year. It’s a fascinating addition to the literature on this local idiom, which is now better known than most rural Swahili dialects.

The main title, Chowea, is the equivalent of Standard Swahili sema, and literally means “speak!” – by implication in Kae. It’s written in Teach Yourself style, with each chapter focusing on a particular aspect of village life and the vocabulary associated with it, beginning with everyday greetings and ending with the language of Makunduchi’s famous New Year ritual, Mwaka Kogwa.

It’s this organisation by lexical fields that I find most appealing, not least because it allows for the introduction of words and phrases that don’t find their way into the more conventionally ordered vocabularies of Kae.

The chapter on traditional medicine is a case in point, and full of intriguing information. My favourite so far is the phrase “Jumba la ndege Mnana”, “The weaver bird’s nest” (literally “large house”), which is glossed “Likichomwa hufanywa mafusho na kufukizwa mgonjwa mwenye maradhi hasa yanayo ambatana na shetani”, “When burnt it produces healing vapours used to fumigate a sick person, especially someone with an illness associated with a possessory spirit” (p. 91).

A subsequent example corrects and expands the phrase and illustrates its use: “Jumba lya ndege ya mnana kavu hutendwa mafuso ya wana. Jumba la ndege aina ya mnana lililo kavu hufanyiwa mafusho ya watoto” (p. 96). In other words, “The dry weaver bird’s nest produces medicinal fumes for treating children”.

African Golden Weaver in the Zanzibar Museum (photo: Martin Walsh)

Mnana is the name of the African or Eastern Golden Weaver, Ploceus subaureus Smith 1839. The subspecies aureoflavus is a highly gregarious and common bird on the island that typically builds a tightly-woven oval or spherical nest with grass or reed strips. Breeding can occur at any time of the year, and disused dry nests are presumably readily available. I’m unaware of any other record of their use for fumigation, or indeed similar practices being reported elsewhere.

Fumigation with the steam from herbal concoctions is a regular feature of exorcism and healing rituals in Zanzibar, but I’ve no idea why this brightly-coloured weaver’s nest is used in some contexts, and what those circumstances are. I presume that there is much more to be learned about this.

As the cover of Chowea reminds us, the culmination of the public festival of Mwaka Kogwa is the burning of a hut (kibanda) constructed of dry palm leaves or crop residues for this purpose. It is set alight by an elder of ceremonies – the mkuu wa Mwaka in Rukia Issa’s account – who immediately rushes out and runs into the bush, while people set about extinguishing the fire. The idea is that the evil spirits at the heart of Makunduchi will follow after him, thus cleansing the village for another year.

It’s tempting to see a parallel between the burning of the weaver’s nest and the community purification ritual, though there’s no evidence that participants draw any comparison between them, either consciously or subconsciously.  As already noted, we lack information on this kind of exorcism, and while existing descriptions of Mwaka Kogwa focus on its history and politics, they are comparatively weak on the analysis of its symbolism and local significance.

Photo 776701, (c) Peter Steward, some rights reserved (CC BY-NC)
 http://www.flickr.com/photos/pete_steward/10315455745/

References

BAKIZA 2012. Kamusi la Lahaja ya Kimakunduchi. Zanzibar: Baraza la Kiswahili la Zanzibar (BAKIZA).

Chum, Haji 1994. Msamiati wa Pekee wa Kikae: Kae Specific Vocabulary. Uppsala: Nordic Association of African Studies.

Echtler, Magnus 2008. Changing Rituals: The New Year's Festival in Makunduchi, Zanzibar, Since Colonial Times. Unpublished PhD dissertation, University of Bayreuth.

Issa, Rukia M. 2018. Chowea: Kifahamu Kikae Lugha ya Wamakunduchi. Zanzibar: Intercolor Printers.

Pakenham, R.H.W. 1959. Kiswahili names of birds and beasts in the Zanzibar Protectorate. Swahili 29 (1): 34-54.

Pakenham, R.H.W. 1979. The Birds of Zanzibar and Pemba. B.O.U. Check-list No. 2. London: British Ornithologists' Union.

Racine-Issa, Odile 2002. Description du Kikae, parler Swahili du sud de Zanzibar, suivi de cinq contes. Leuven and Paris: Éditions Peeters.

Walsh, Martin 2011. Elephant dung and expelling spirits. East African Notes and Records, 13 February 2011. Online at https://notesandrecords.blogspot.com/2011/02/elephant-dung-and-expelling-spirits.html.