Welder religions sometimes make a hell of a racket when the hour of reflection approaches. Most blood-curdling is the call of the muezzin to the Maghrib prayer, closely followed by the roaring of Christian bells, which the ghantas, the traditional bells of Hindu temples, defiantly defy. We are sitting high above the roofs of Zanzibar’s capital, Stone Town, and the sound is being played synchronously from three sides, while the sun settles down in the Indian Ocean, giving us permission to have our first drink of the day, according to old tropical rules. But the pious trio doesn’t sound like the cacophony of a fierce competition for the right faith, but rather like an animated, neighborly palaver that also suits Zanzibar’s soul much better. From time immemorial, pragmatism has not ruled on the island off the coast of Tanzania, rather than dogmatism, uniting Muslims, Christians and Hindus in the spirit of business acumen and the only truth of profit. This is the creed of the merchants who once made Zanzibar rich, stocking their dhows with spices and incense, ivory and slaves, ready to sail like Sinbad the Navigator to empires long gone. But a replacement has already been found, because in recent years the Zanzibarians have discovered a new, more philanthropic form of human trafficking as a source of gold: tourism.
Turquoise, indigo or ultramarine
Within one generation, twenty thousand overnight stays have turned into five hundred and forty thousand, and from a handful of hammocks for backpackers in palm straw huts on the beach there have been more than half a million beds in all categories of comfort and all sizes of the tourist keyboard. The construction boom is unbroken, especially on the east coast with its shores shimmering in turquoise, indigo or ultramarine, depending on the tide. Here, new hotels are springing up like tropical mushrooms – albeit discreetly hidden in the maquis landscape from the eyes of the beholder – and attract masses of people from the destitute mainland of Tanzania.
Urgent problem: There is only one official garbage dump in Zanzibar, far too few to keep up with the growing tourism.
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Bild: TUI Care Foundation
The island’s population has doubled to two million in a very short time, a rapid growth that the infrastructure is hopelessly chasing after. There is only one official garbage dump, financed by the World Bank, for the entire island, which is slightly smaller than Mallorca and threatens to turn into a landfill full of plastic waste everywhere along the tourist coastline. Because four-fifths of the rubbish is produced by the holiday hotels and only one-fifth by Zanzibar’s residents, whose sensitivity to environmental issues is not growing nearly as fast as the environmental problems are doing, which every visitor quickly experiences first-hand: when we found a fresh Buy a water bottle and ask the dealer to dispose of the old one, he throws it into the ditch and stares at us in astonished disbelief when we fish it out again.