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
Wapemba
The people of the green island — Pemba's farmers and clove growers, who supply most of Zanzibar's cloves, whose reputation for sorcery draws clients from across East Africa, and whose politics have been the archipelago's most contested for thirty years.
Identity
Population: ≈ 500,000 on Pemba
Location: Pemba island, north of Unguja, hillier and wetter, with Chake Chake, Wete and Mkoani as its towns
Language: Kipemba, a Swahili dialect distinct from Kiunguja
Language family: Niger-Congo → Bantu (Sabaki, G42)
Traditional governance: Historically local Shirazi-descended lineages and diwani officials; under the sultanate then the revolutionary government; today part of Zanzibar with a long record of opposition voting and consequent friction.
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.
Wete north
The most productive clove country and the island's largest town.
Chake Chake centre
Administrative centre with the Portuguese-era ruins at Pujini and Ras Mkumbuu nearby.
Mkoani south
Port and fishing communities of the southern island.
Culture
Clothing: Kanzu, kofia, kanga and buibui as elsewhere in the archipelago; conservative dress and strong Islamic observance.
Food: Rice, cassava, banana and fish; cloves as the cash crop that shapes the year, with the picking season absorbing the whole population.
Ceremonies: Bullfighting without killing, a Portuguese inheritance still practised at Pujini and elsewhere; Maulid; ngoma and taarab; clove-harvest labour parties.
Marriage customs: Islamic marriage; the island's kinship reckoning includes matrilineal elements in land alongside Islamic inheritance.
Initiation rites: Unyago instruction for girls; Quranic completion celebrated; the first clove harvest worked independently is a practical passage.
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
The Island of DoctorsReputation
Pemba has been famous across East Africa for centuries as a centre of uganga, healing and sorcery. Clients travel from the mainland and beyond to consult waganga there. The reputation is old enough to appear in nineteenth-century travellers' accounts and it persists, uneasily alongside strong Islamic observance.
Cloves and PoliticsEconomic and political history
Pemba grows the bulk of Zanzibar's cloves but has repeatedly been on the losing side of the archipelago's politics, particularly after 1964 and in the contested elections from 1995 onward, which brought violence and, in 2001, killings and mass flight to Kenya. Clove pricing and marketing controls have been a running grievance throughout.
Proverbs
“Mchagua jembe si mkulima.”
“The one who is choosy about the hoe is not a farmer.”
Get on with the work.
“The clove tree pays the school fees.”
A one-crop economy, stated plainly.
“The island cures and the island curses.”
Pemba's double reputation.
Mythology & Spiritual Beliefs
Creation: Islamic cosmology over older Bantu beliefs; the island's spirit landscape is unusually elaborated even by coastal standards.
Beliefs: Sunni Shafi'i Islam; a dense world of masheitani, mizimu and treatments; possession cults such as kibuki with Malagasy connections; waganga healers of continental reputation.
Ancestors: Graves of founders respected; ancestral claims underpin clove-tree ownership, which is inherited separately from the land it stands on.
Gods, Goddesses & Spirits
Allah
The one God
Masheitani and mizimu
Spirits of place and of possession, central to Pemba's reputation
Kibuki spirits
Malagasy-derived possession spirits honoured in dedicated ceremonies
Architecture
Traditional settlements: Towns of coral and lime with markets and mosques; villages among clove and coconut plantations; the ruins of Ras Mkumbuu and the fortified site at Pujini.
Building techniques: Coral rag and lime masonry, makuti thatch, carved doors; Pujini's earthwork and stone fortification, unusual on the coast.
Village layout: Village around mosque and baraza, clove drying mats spread on any flat ground during harvest, boats on the creeks.
Artifacts
Clove drying mats and sorting equipment
Livelihood
Tools of the harvest that dominates the island's year.
Ras Mkumbuu ruins
Heritage site
Tenth to fourteenth-century Swahili town with mosque and tombs.
Pujini fortified site
Heritage site
Fifteenth-century earthwork and stone stronghold, unique on the coast.
Uganga apparatus
Ritual
Instruments and medicines of the island's healing specialists.
Historical Timeline
c. 900–1500
Swahili towns at Ras Mkumbuu and elsewhere; Islam becomes general.
1500s–1600s
Portuguese presence; Pujini fortified; bullfighting introduced.
1800s
Omani clove plantations expand, worked by enslaved mainlanders; Pemba becomes the main producing island.
1964–2001
Revolution, then contested elections with violence in 1995, 2000 and 2001.
Present
Cloves and fishing sustain the island; political grievance remains live.
Sources & Further Reading
Open sources
- Britannica: Pemba IslandEncyclopaedia Britannica
- Human Rights Watch reporting on Zanzibar electionsHuman Rights Watch
Premium & scholarly sources