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
Wamakunduchi
The people of Zanzibar's southern tip, who open the Shirazi new year each July with a ritual stick fight and the burning of a hut, in a festival of Persian origin that has been held on this coast for a thousand years.
Identity
Population: Tens of thousands in the south-east of Unguja
Location: Makunduchi and the villages of Zanzibar's southern district
Language: Kimakunduchi (Kikae), an old southern Swahili dialect notably distinct from standard Kiswahili
Language family: Niger-Congo → Bantu → Swahili (southern dialects)
Traditional governance: Village elders (wazee) and the shehia administration; the mwaka kogwa festival's ritual officers hold their own hereditary authority.
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 town
The festival's centre and the district's principal settlement.
Kizimkazi and southern villages
Communities along the southern coast, including the oldest dated mosque in East Africa.
Fishing and seaweed households
Families working the reef and the seaweed farms that now employ many southern women.
Culture
Clothing: Kanga and kanzu; the mwaka kogwa participants wear ordinary clothes for the fight, which is part of its character; ceremonial dress for the women's procession.
Food: Rice, cassava, coconut and fish; the communal cooking of mwaka kogwa, when whole villages eat together, is the festival's other half.
Ceremonies: Mwaka Kogwa, the four-day Shirazi new year in late July: ritual stick fighting with banana stems, the burning of a ceremonial hut, women's songs of complaint, and a feast at which no guest may be turned away.
Marriage customs: Islamic marriage; the southern villages have their own wedding song traditions distinct from those of the town.
Initiation rites: Quranic school; unyago instruction for girls, which in the south retains forms less common in Stone Town.
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
Fighting to End the YearFestival
At Mwaka Kogwa the men of the northern and southern halves of Makunduchi fight each other with banana stems. It is a real fight, conducted with rules and good humour, and its purpose is to discharge the year's grievances so that the new one starts clean. Women sing songs in the same spirit, addressed to husbands and neighbours, saying things that could not be said on any other day.
The Hut That BurnsRitual
A ceremonial hut is built and set alight, and a ritual specialist runs from it. The direction the smoke takes is read for the year ahead. The whole sequence descends from Nowruz, the Persian new year, carried to this coast by Shirazi settlers and observed here for roughly a millennium, several thousand kilometres from Iran and in a language nobody in Iran would recognise.
Proverbs
“Haba na haba hujaza kibaba.”
“Little by little fills the measure.”
A Swahili proverb on accumulation and patience.
“Strike now so you may greet in the morning.”
The stick fight's purpose.
“The house that burns takes the year's quarrels with it.”
The hut, and what it is for.
Mythology & Spiritual Beliefs
Creation: Islamic cosmology; the Shirazi origin narrative, in which Persian settlers arrived and married into coastal society, is the community's own account and is debated by historians.
Beliefs: Sunni Shafi'i Islam; alongside it the Nowruz-derived mwaka kogwa and a body of spirit practice, mizimu and mashetani, which the pious criticise and the villages continue.
Ancestors: Shirazi descent is claimed and is central to the community's self-understanding; the Kizimkazi mosque, dated 1107, is the oldest Islamic inscription in East Africa.
Gods, Goddesses & Spirits
Allah
The one God
Mizimu
Ancestral and place spirits of the southern villages, addressed at named sites
The mwaka officers
Hereditary ritual specialists who conduct the new year sequence
Architecture
Traditional settlements: Villages of coral rag and lime with makuti palm thatch; Makunduchi's spread of low houses; the ceremonial ground where the hut is built each July.
Building techniques: Coral rag and lime with mangrove-pole roofing; makuti thatch of plaited coconut frond; boat building for the reef.
Village layout: Villages set back from the shore with the mosque and the mwaka ground central, farms and coconut groves behind, seaweed lines in the shallows.
Artifacts
Mwaka Kogwa festival
Festival
The Shirazi new year, with ritual stick fighting and the burning of a hut.
Kizimkazi Mosque
Heritage site
Bearing a Kufic inscription dated 1107, the oldest in East Africa.
Kimakunduchi dialect
Language heritage
An old southern Swahili variety markedly distinct from the standard.
Seaweed farming lines
Livelihood
The shallow-water cultivation that now employs much of the south's female workforce.
Historical Timeline
1107
The Kufic inscription at Kizimkazi is carved, the oldest dated Islamic text in East Africa.
Medieval period
Shirazi settlement and intermarriage; Nowruz observance takes root as mwaka kogwa.
1840–1964
Omani rule and the clove economy; the south remains agriculturally and culturally distinct from Stone Town.
1964
The revolution; the southern villages' Shirazi identity becomes politically salient in a new way.
1990s–present
Seaweed farming transforms the southern economy; Mwaka Kogwa becomes a national and tourist event.
Sources & Further Reading
Open sources
- Britannica: ZanzibarEncyclopaedia Britannica
- Ethnologue: Swahili dialectsSIL International
Premium & scholarly sources