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.
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