StapleZanzibar
Wali wa Nazi
Rice cooked in coconut milk, served under every curry and grilled fish on the islands. The first thing a Zanzibari cook teaches and the hardest to get exactly right.
Serves 6 · 35 minutes
Wahadimu
Unguja's oldest farming population — the people whose mwinyi mkuu ruled the island before the Omanis came, who lost the fertile west to clove plantations and kept the coral rag east, and who still work the seaweed and the fishing grounds of the south coast.
Identity
Population: Several hundred thousand on Unguja, the largest indigenous group of the island
Location: Eastern and southern Unguja — the coral rag country from Makunduchi to Chwaka, plus the island's south coast
Language: Kiswahili, in the Kiunguja dialect that became the standard for the whole language
Language family: Niger-Congo → Bantu (Sabaki, G42)
Traditional governance: Ruled by the mwinyi mkuu, a hereditary Shirazi-descended paramount, until the office lapsed in 1873; shehas as village heads under the sultanate and after; today Zanzibar's local government within the union with Tanzania.
Clans, Sections & Sub-groups (3)
Most African peoples are federations of named sub-groups (clans, sections, chiefdoms or sub-tribes), each with its own dialect, territory and traditions.
Makunduchi and the south
Home of the Mwaka Kogwa new-year festival, the most famous surviving Hadimu tradition.
Chwaka and the east coast
Fishing and seaweed-farming villages on the shallow eastern lagoons.
Kizimkazi
Site of the 1107 mosque inscription, the oldest dated Islamic building in East Africa.
Culture
Clothing: Kanga and kanzu, with buibui for women in town; for Mwaka Kogwa, older dress and banana-stem weapons rather than the everyday.
Food: Rice, cassava, fish and coconut; the pilau and biriani of the town kitchens; seaweed now a cash crop rather than a food.
Ceremonies: Mwaka Kogwa, the Shirazi new year at Makunduchi, in which men fight ritually with banana stems to discharge the year's grievances and a hut is burned to carry off misfortune; unyago initiation instruction; taarab and ngoma performance.
Marriage customs: Islamic marriage with negotiated mahari; matrilineal features in land and house holding on the coral rag, alongside Islamic inheritance law.
Initiation rites: Unyago for girls, with senior women teaching household knowledge, sexuality and comportment through song and dance; equivalent instruction for boys around circumcision.
Food & Recipes
Every dish the Atlas publishes for Zanzibar and Tanzania, at national rather than community level — 21 in all: the staple a household eats daily, the dish the country names as its own, street food, what is cooked for a wedding or Eid, regional specialities and a drink. Quantities and method are given for every one, so these are recipes rather than descriptions, and each has a photograph from Wikimedia Commons. The Food page carries the whole continent, searchable by country and by ingredient.
Zanzibar
9 dishes
National dishZanzibar
Pweza wa Nazi
Octopus stewed in coconut milk with lime, cardamom and chilli, the dish Zanzibar is known for. Tenderising the octopus properly is most of the work.
Serves 6 · 1 hour 30 minutes
National dishZanzibar
Mchuzi wa Samaki wa Nazi
also Fish in coconut curry
Reef fish simmered in coconut milk with tamarind, turmeric and green mango, the dish that most concisely explains Zanzibar's position in the Indian Ocean.
Serves 6 · 50 minutes
Street foodZanzibar
Urojo
also Zanzibar mix
A tangy turmeric and mango soup piled with bhajia, crisps, boiled potato and chutneys, assembled to order at Forodhani night market. Every stall makes it slightly differently.
Serves 6 · 1 hour
Street foodZanzibar
Zanzibar Mishkaki
also Forodhani skewers
Beef skewers grilled at the Forodhani night market in Stone Town, sweeter and more heavily spiced than the mainland version, finished with tamarind.
Serves 6 · 40 minutes, plus 4 hours marinating
Festival & feastZanzibar
Zanzibari Biryani
Rice layered with spiced meat, fried onion and saffron and sealed to steam, made for weddings and Eid. Cardamom, clove and cinnamon are grown a few miles from the kitchen.
Serves 8 · 2 hours 30 minutes
Festival & feastZanzibar
Kashata
also Coconut brittle, Kashata ya nazi
Grated coconut or peanuts cooked into caramelised sugar with cardamom and cut into diamonds. The sweet of Zanzibar's markets and of every Eid table.
Serves Makes about 30 pieces · 35 minutes
Regional specialityZanzibar
Mkate wa Kumimina
A soft baked rice cake with coconut and cardamom, whose name means poured bread. Cut in wedges and eaten with tea or at the end of a meal.
Serves 8 · 1 hour 30 minutes, plus soaking
Drink & sweetZanzibar
Spice Tea
also Chai ya tangawizi
Black tea boiled with ginger, cardamom, cinnamon, clove and black pepper, using the spices the islands were colonised for. Drunk all day and offered to every visitor.
Serves 4 · 20 minutes
Tanzania
12 dishes
StapleTanzania
Ugali
Maize meal cooked stiff and turned out as a mound, eaten with fish, beans or greens across the whole country. The measure of a cook is whether it holds together cleanly.
Serves 6 · 25 minutes
StapleTanzania
Makande
also Maize and bean stew
Maize and beans simmered slowly with coconut milk, the Chagga and Pare version of the East African staple. Richer and looser than Kenyan githeri.
Serves 6 · 2 hours 30 minutes, plus soaking
National dishTanzania
Nyama Choma na Kachumbari
Goat grilled slowly over charcoal, chopped and eaten with a tomato and onion salad. Ordered by weight at a nyama choma joint and shared standing around the board.
Serves 6 · 2 hours
National dishTanzania
Mchemsho
also Boiled one-pot
Everything boiled together in one pot — plantain, potato, cassava, carrot, beans and meat — in a light broth. Northern Tanzania's household dinner, and what a Tanzanian cooks when feeding a crowd.
Serves 6 · 1 hour 30 minutes
Street foodTanzania
Chipsi Mayai
A chip omelette cooked flat in a pan and cut in wedges, sold from every street griddle in Dar es Salaam and Arusha. Cheap, filling and universally eaten.
Serves 2 · 25 minutes
Street foodTanzania
Mishkaki
also Marinated beef skewers
Beef marinated in papaya, ginger and spice, threaded on sticks and grilled over charcoal on every Tanzanian street corner after dark. The papaya is what makes it tender.
Serves 6 · 45 minutes, plus 4 hours marinating
Festival & feastTanzania
Pilau
Spiced rice with beef or goat, made for weddings, Eid and Christmas. The onions must be fried genuinely dark, which is where the colour comes from rather than from any powder.
Serves 8 · 1 hour 30 minutes
Festival & feastTanzania
Mkate wa Sinia
also Vitumbua tray bread, Rice tray cake
A soft, faintly sweet rice and coconut cake steamed or baked in a tray, cut into diamonds and served at coastal weddings and at the end of Ramadan.
Serves 10 · 1 hour, plus 6 hours soaking and rising
Regional specialityTanzania
Mchuzi wa Samaki
Fish curry in coconut milk with tamarind, from the Swahili coast. The tamarind is what separates the coastal version from anything cooked inland.
Serves 6 · 45 minutes
Regional specialityTanzania
Ndizi na Nyama
also Machalari, Green banana and beef stew
Green cooking bananas stewed with beef until they take on the meat's flavour and thicken the pot. The Chagga dish of Kilimanjaro, and one of Tanzania's most beloved.
Serves 6 · 2 hours
Drink & sweetTanzania
Kahawa na Tangawizi
Black coffee boiled with ginger and sold from brass pots carried through the streets of Zanzibar and Dar, poured into tiny cups and drunk in one.
Serves 6 small cups · 20 minutes
Drink & sweetTanzania
Togwa
also Fermented maize drink
Lightly fermented maize and millet drink, sour and faintly fizzy, drunk cold through the day. Non-alcoholic, probiotic, and given to children and the sick.
Serves Makes 2 litres · 30 minutes, plus 24 hours fermenting
Stories & Oral Literature
Mwaka KogwaFestival
At the Shirazi new year in Makunduchi, men of the village fight each other with banana stems while women sing, a licensed release of the year's quarrels. A hut is built and burned; the direction the smoke leans is read for the coming year. The festival is claimed as Persian in origin and is the most-photographed surviving practice of the island's pre-Omani population.
The Clove PlantationsHistorical account
When Omani rule made Zanzibar the world's clove supplier in the nineteenth century, the fertile western soils were taken for plantations worked by enslaved mainlanders. The Hadimu were pushed onto the coral rag, the thin eastern soils, and taxed to supply labour. That dispossession is the direct background to the 1964 revolution.
Proverbs
“Haraka haraka haina baraka.”
“Hurry hurry has no blessing.”
The Swahili world's most quoted counsel of patience.
“The coral rag rewards the one who knows its pockets.”
Farming thin soil is a matter of knowledge, not effort alone.
“The year's quarrels burn with the hut.”
Mwaka Kogwa's logic of annual release.
Mythology & Spiritual Beliefs
Creation: Islamic cosmology, in place for a millennium, over older Bantu understandings of spirits of place, the sea and the ancestors.
Beliefs: Sunni Shafi'i Islam; masheitani spirits and mizimu of place; possession treated by waganga healers; Mwaka Kogwa and unyago carrying pre-Islamic content within an Islamic society.
Ancestors: Graves of founders and of the mwinyi mkuu line remain marked; ancestral claims underpin land rights on the coral rag.
Gods, Goddesses & Spirits
Allah
The one God of Zanzibari Islam
Mizimu
Spirits of particular groves, caves and shores
Masheitani
Spirits that possess and are treated by specialists
Architecture
Traditional settlements: Villages of coral rag and thatch on the eastern coast, with mosque and open square; the ruins of Kizimkazi and Dunga among the island's oldest structures.
Building techniques: Coral rag masonry with lime mortar and makuti palm thatch; carved doors on the wealthier houses; the twelfth-century Kizimkazi mosque with its kufic inscription.
Village layout: Village around the mosque and baraza benches, houses with a front baraza for sitting, fields and coconut groves behind, boats and seaweed racks on the shore.
Artifacts
Kizimkazi mosque inscription
Heritage site
Kufic inscription dated 1107, the oldest dated Islamic monument in East Africa.
Mwaka Kogwa banana stems
Festival
Ritual weapons of the new-year fight at Makunduchi.
Seaweed drying racks
Livelihood
Equipment of the women's seaweed farming that transformed the east coast economy.
Ngalawa outrigger canoe
Craft
Double-outrigger sailing canoe of the Zanzibar fishery.
Historical Timeline
c. 1000–1500
Swahili settlement and Islamisation; Kizimkazi mosque built in 1107.
1500s–1700s
Portuguese then Omani influence; the mwinyi mkuu rules the island's farming population.
1830s–1890s
Omani capital moves to Zanzibar; clove plantations displace the Hadimu to the coral rag.
1964
The Zanzibar Revolution overturns the sultanate and redistributes plantation land.
Present
Seaweed farming and tourism reshape the east coast; Mwaka Kogwa is a national heritage event.
Sources & Further Reading
Open sources
- Britannica: ZanzibarEncyclopaedia Britannica
- UNESCO: Stone Town of ZanzibarUNESCO
Premium & scholarly sources