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Updated: May 22, 2025
The ship's cook, in blood-stained white, watches from the butcher's shop, and a black Zanzibari stoker grins through the bars of the engine-room-hatch, one ray of sun shining straight into his pink mouth. The officer of the watch, a red-whiskered man, is kneeling down on the bridge to peer through the railings, and is shifting a long, thin black revolver from his left hand to his right.
One of the most curious sights in Zanzibar is a line of Zanzibari boys, each balancing a great tusk on his shoulder, worth from five hundred to two thousand dollars, and which is unprotected except for a piece of coarse sacking.
One would only have found their bones, and their bones pretty well scoured too. I speak of them as a class, of course. There were races loyal enough no doubt, the Zanzibari, for instance. But the difficulty with them was to prevent them fighting when there was no occasion. In fact the blacks who were loyal made up for their loyalty by a lack of common-sense.
The money was paid, and the mad dance was held at night in a walled courtyard at the back of Madame Binat's house. The lady herself, in faded mauve silk always about to slide from her yellow shoulders, played the piano, and to the tin-pot music of a Western waltz the naked Zanzibari girls danced furiously by the light of kerosene lamps.
His head was covered, as always in the house, with a white embroidered skullcap. In one small hand he held a Venetian goblet, in the other a bottle of medicine. It was the hour for Dr. Fallows' prescription. "Really," Fanny Brassfield exclaimed, in her high-pitched, insolent voice, "I must get myself one of these what is he again? Zanzibari?"
The Zanzibari chuckled. "You want know, eh?" "We don't care. One black fellow does not matter," said Compton, coolly. "You brute!" muttered Venning, but stopped as Compton's hand gripped him. The Zanzibari chuckled again. "What you give, eh, if cut loose that Muata?" "What do you say?" "You pay me? Good. In night Muata is loose. He run up river.
From her engine-room came stokers from Egypt, and from her forward deck Malays in fresh white linen, Mohammedans in fez and turban, Portuguese officials, chiefly in decorations, Indian coolies and Zanzibari boys, very black and very beautiful, who wound and unwound long blue strips of cotton about their shoulders, or ears, or thighs as the heat, or the nature of the work of unloading required.
They were the local race, the Swahili, had we but known it; the original "Zanzibari" who furnished Livingstone, Stanley, Speke, and the other early explorers with their men. Others, however, were much less "civilized."
There was the Sultan's body-guard in gold-laced turbans, the merchants of the bazaars in red fezzes and gowns of flowing silk, the Malay sailors in blue, the black native police in scarlet, the ladies of the harems closely veiled and cloaked, the market women in a single garment of orange, or scarlet, or purple, or of all three, and the happy, hilarious Zanzibari boys in the color God gave them.
He touched his naked breast, and then pointed at each in turn. "They would attack us," roared Mr. Hume. The chief nodded. "Now you know who that stranger was who came with his long story." "One black chap is like another," muttered Compton. "Who was he?" asked Mr. Hume. "The servant of the white chiefs who bound me." "The Zanzibari boy!" exclaimed Venning. "My Jenkins!"
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