Zanzibar: The story of two cathedrals and a slave market

Churches in ancient towns like Zanzibar usually have the community’s history tied to it. In Stone Town, the story is no different of the Catholic and Anglican cathedrals which many Zanzibaris and East and Central Africans reckon with. Although there are no traces of it anymore, Catholicism in Zanzibar, began with Portuguese monks who built […]

Churches in ancient towns like Zanzibar usually have the community’s history tied to it. In Stone Town, the story is no different of the Catholic and Anglican cathedrals which many Zanzibaris and East and Central Africans reckon with.
Although there are no traces of it anymore, Catholicism in Zanzibar, began with Portuguese monks who built a chapel on the location which now serves as the Old Fort.  
According to its current parish priest, Rev. Fr. Cosmos, the monks were there until the Arabs came, introduced Islam and kicked them out along with traders and foreigners who were in Zanzibar at the time.
“There were no Christians here until the 1700s when the Franciscans came. Nevertheless, they didn’t do much because they found the situation unfavourable,” he said.
Adding that “In 1860, the Holy Ghost Fathers came after learning of the possibility of starting a mission here and then they would later go on to the mainland. The superior of the fathers went to Rome and got the permission of the Vatican.
“They went to the Reunion where there were already missionaries and brought a group of six fathers and sisters. They had to report to the Sultan stating their mission that they had come as friends and wanted to evangelise to the people as well as build hospitals and schools,” Fr. Cosmos said.  
Chronicling the history he said, the Sultan was happy and commended the good job of the missionaries, if this were their purpose. They were housed by the Sultan for almost six years without doing any evangelization or familiarisation.
But in 1863 they began gradually opening small stations and freeing slaves and putting them in a special house where they were taught catechism. This was how they got the first Christians, some of whom were sent to Pemba.
In 1867 they divided themselves. Some remained in Zanzibar and another group went to Bagamoya on Tanzania mainland which is now under the diocese of Mogoboro. The new converts built a church there, evangelized the people and then moved to the interior. The few missionaries who stayed behind, started developing the area.
Fr. Cosmos said: “The buildings we live in (father’s house and other structures on the premises not the church building) belonged to the Arabs. The missionaries bought them from them and were in very good terms with the Sultan.”
The place where the cathedral currently stands was a graveyard which was demolished to erect the church. There were talks at some point of a French dispensary built, but, according to Fr. Cosmos, there is no trace of it. The construction went on until 1898 when the first mass was celebrated on Christmas night by the bishop of The Reunion.
There was gradual progress while battling the problem of getting more missionaries to come and work on the island because of how hot the weather was. “But the missionaries managed and from here went to Pemba, to a place called Dongomi in Chaki Chaki,”Cosmos told our reporter.
“To keep the freed slaves, they built small shelters. At the time the church in Chaki Chaki was open; there was another station in Wete in the north which was opened as a new station. With the small stations in Pemba, Chaki Chaki, Wete and here and Mahonda, Matuci, the missionaries felt it was necessary to open small stations to cater for the growing population,” the priest said.
In 1966 Zanzibar got an apostolic administrator from Moshcin who later became the bishop of that diocese, Joseph Sipendi.
In 1980 it became a diocese but before that the faithfuls depended on Nairobi, Mombasa, Darussalam, Morogoro where the bishop was the administrator of Zanzibar until 1973 when Rome pronounced that Zanzibar had become an Apostolic administration and appointed the late Monsignor Bernard administrator in 1963. He became its first bishop and ruled until 1997 when another, Augustine Chao a Spiritan, was appointed.
The diocesan priest explained that constructions originally began in 1862 as stated in some documents. “The area was cleared and foundation started but the Sultan told them to stop as he was also trying to study and understand them,” he said: adding that, “in a nine year-period there was nothing.”
The design of the church was based on that of the Marseilles Cathedral, in France with both bearing semblances as they were designed by the same architect.
Still evident in the building are murals and other works done in alliance with the Romanticism art of movement the century. Even as renovations were ongoing in the building when our reporter visited, it was clear how care was being taken to preserve these original masterpieces.
On the premises of the Anglican Cathedral of Christ Church, the slave chambers still give the chills as one enters into the almost unaired room at the basement of what used to be a dispensary attached to the church, but now is St. Monica’s guest house.  
According to a tour guide, slaves were kept there for two days with no water, light, food or toilet facilities. In one room there were usually fifty men stashed at any point in time and in another, 75 women and children. There were 15 such rooms of which two have been preserved for memory. After the two days, the slaves were taken to the slave market which was where the church stands today.
British explorer, David Livingston came to Africa in search of the source of the River Nile and got lost. He found himself in Tanzania’s Ndege Town where he found Arabs collecting and selling slaves; whereas at about the same time in Europe and America, slave trade had been abolished. He went to England to appeal at the Oxford and Cambridge universities. The institutions formed an organization, the University Mission to Africa (UMTA) with an aim to campaign for the end of slave trade and introduce Christianity.
One of the missionaries who came with the group was Bishop Edward Steere. He liberated slaves and did translations of the Bible and dictionary from English into Swahili He was an architect and engineer. At the same time, the British sent as delegation to the Sultan of Zanzibar to sign a peaceful treaty to end slave trade with Zanzibar becoming a part of the British Protectorate and the second was to sign a treaty and go to war.
According to the guide: “With the British then a world super power, the Sultan knew he couldn’t go to war with them. He opted for the peaceful treaty which officially ended the slave market in June of 1873. But there were still clandestine activities until 1907 when it finally came to an end in Zanzibar.”
Arabs were lured to Zanzibar for purposes of trade as Zanzibar was a major business hub in the area and still is today. Other reasons they came were for herbs/spices, climatic conditions.
The church’s altar itself was the platform upon which slaves were displayed and auctioned off. The red tiles signify the blood of the so many slaves sold off there.
Marked on the marble tiled ground in circular shape at the altar, is what used to be the site of the ‘Whipping Tree’ before the church was built. Slaves would be brought to the whipping tree and whipped by a slave master.
“The whip used by the masters was often a tail from a stingray,” tourists were informed. Those who cried out from the whipping were priced lower than those who bore the pain. They were sent to Madagascar, Seychelles, Mauritius, India, Persia and Oman to work in the colonies, plantations. Men mostly worked in the fields; women were used as sex machines and children for house chores.
The tour guide informed that slavery in Zanzibar began from the 15th century with the Portuguese. After them, the Arabs from Oman took over.
The guide told our reporter that “All slaves brought to Zanzibar were from Central and East African countries like Congo, Malawi, Zimbabwe, Zambia, Rwanda, Burundi, Tanganyika, and Mozambique amongst others.
“Zanzibar was a big slave market and a major trading centre. Slaves were collected in various ways. Slave dealers would go into villages and attack people there and enslave the ones they caught. Also, local chiefs gave away their subjects and the criminals amongst them. They also sold off those they had captured from rival communities.”
Slaves went by foot and in chains from Central Africa to the East Coast, while carrying luggage, food supplies, animal skin, ivory and other materials. Those who couldn’t walk for long, rather than being set free were tied up to trees in the forest where wild animals ravaged them.
This was a warning to other slaves against pretending that they were too tired to walk. Upon arrival in Zanzibar, they were kept in the slave chambers at the now Anglican Church.
The slave market was surrounded by small huts. This is the area on which the altar in the cathedral stands. This was a centre of slave trade in the 19th century.
A note displayed on a board at the Cathedral said: “Slaves relieved themselves in slop buckets or rubs, which were emptied over the side of the ship. Dr. Alexander Falconbridge, who worked as a surgeon on several ships wrote: “It often happens that those who are placed at a distance from the buckets, endeavoring to get them, tumble over their companions in consequence of their being shackled… in this situation, unable to proceed and prevented from to the tubs of human urine to proceed and prevented from going to the tubs… they ease themselves as they lie.”
Tour material at the Cathedral informed that Arab slaves themselves caught tribesmen. They took away strong, healthy people and killed the weak ones. Arab slaves made long and difficult journeys into East Africa. They killed elephants and got much profit from selling ivory in Asia.
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Another tour material on the board at the museum said: “Once the slave trading dhows were intercepted by the British, the slaves were taken aboard the British ships, the traders arrested or chased away, and the dhows were usually burnt.
Instead of releasing the former slaves back to Zanzibar, where the British claimed that they would be recaptured, they were taken to Seychelles, former British slave colonies 1000 miles east into the Indian ocean. Here the rescued slaves became ‘apprentices’ for six years, working for the British land owners on the plantations for no wages. After six years they were free to earn their own money.
At the church, there is a ‘Livingston’s cross’, so called because the crucifix was made for the tree trunk marking his death site and also the spot where his heart was buried in Zambia before his body was taken to England.
According to the guide: “The procession was by foot from Zambia to Bagamoyo, 75kilomrtres from Darussalam, and then to Zanzibar for onward journey to England.” The journey of the mummified body took 11 months.
Pillars signifying the 12 apostles were erroneously placed upside down and have been left that way since then.
The pipe organ from London which was used in the church from 1880 is still in use today. There are only two of such British pipe organs in Africa; one in Zanzibar and a second at St. George Cathedral, Cape Town, South Africa.
Red coppers from Zambia carried faces of famous preachers and prophets from the old testament of the Bible, with their names written in Swahili.
The grave of Bishop Steere who built the church is behind the altar. Steere died of heart attack two years after completing his mission.
The church has a tower with a clock which was given by the then Sultan of Zanzibar, Said Bargash, when Steere went to seek his permission to build the church. It is recorded that while the construction of the church was ongoing, the Sultan warned that the towers shouldn’t be built higher that his palace.
The first service in the church was held on Christmas Day of 1877 without a roof. Three years after this, the church was completed.
Outside the building, is a sculptural representation of how an entire family would be taken into captivity with the artist, Antony Gormley using actual chains used at the time to hold slaves.