Maplewood History:  From Charlemagne to Nellie Bell

As the long-time historian of our small town, Maplewood MO, the unfamiliar might think that I have to dig hard to keep coming up with new info for my blog posts.  After all, I have over 500 posts on this site alone.  Not to mention the posts I made on a couple of other sites before I moved here in 2013.  Well, think again.

Folks send me a lot of stuff!  The internet is responsible.  They begin to search for their own family history.  From one of my posts, they discover that they’re descended from a family that once lived in Maplewood.  We connect and I often get covered up.

Don’t get me wrong.  It’s fascinating and I love it.  Quite often, when I first look it over, I am absolutely baffled on how to edit their collection.  So I pick the low hanging fruit, the documents and photos that seem most important, and get them posted first.  But I am left with a large trove of pretty cool stuff that I am certain a lot of my readers would find interesting.

What follows is the contents of just one document that I was sent by Ryan Parnas, historian of the Silence and Bell families.  This is certainly the longest text document that I have ever posted.

Descent from the Henderson Barons

( 742 –  814) Charlemagne, King of the Franks

( 773 –  810) Pepin, King of Italy

( 797 –  818) Bernard, King of Italy

( 815 –  ???) Pepin, Count of Vermandois

( 849 –  907) Herbert I, Count of Vermandois

( ??? –  943) Herbert II Count of Vermandois

( 915 –  987) Adalbert I of Vermandois

( 953 – 1015) Herbert III of Vermandois

( 979 – 1045) Otto of Vermandois

(1028 – 1080) Herbert IV of Vermandois

(1120 – 1124) Adelaide of Vermandois  (Last Member of the Caroligian dynasty)

(1085 – 1131) Elizabeth of Vermandois

(1120 – 1178) Ada de Warenne

(1152 – 1219) David, Earl of Huntingdon

(1199 – 1251) Isobel of Huntingdon

(1215 – 1295) Robert de Brus, 5th Lord of Annandale

(1243 – 1304) Robert de Brus, 6th Lord of Annandale

(1274 – 1329) Robert I of Scotland

(1303 – 1332) Robert Bruce

(1318 – 1348) Thomas Bruce

(1340 – 1403) Robert Bruce

(1373 – 1403) Edward Bruce

(1396 – 1449) Robert Bruce

(1420 – 1488) Alexander Bruce

(1450 – 1483) John Bruce

(1472 – 1513) Robert Bruce

(1505 – 1530) Robert Bruce

(1530 – 1600) Alexander Airth Bruce

(1560 – 1650) Marion Bruce

(1578 – ????) William Menteith

(1604 – 1653) Margaret Menteith

(1625 – 1676) William Henderson

(1655 – ????) John Henderson

(1676 – 1755) William Henderson

(1698 – 1770) William Henderson

(1746 – 1833) Elizabeth Henderson

(1778 – 1855) Joseph Bell

(1826 – 1905) David Henderson Bell

(1857 – 1937) John Harvey Bell

(1898 – 1972) Nellie Frances Bell (wife of Charles Samuel Silence)

 

In Zanzibar by William Dalrymple 

Featured Hotel in Stone Town

236 Hurumzi

“A rambling Zanzibar townhouse, well-run and full of character, with restaurant, The Towerhouse, enjoying spectacular views.”

Price from: USD 185.00

When I was a teenager growing up in Edinburgh, one of my favourite haunts used to be the mock-medieval corridors of the old Scottish Portrait Gallery. It was a dark, rambling, badly-lit Victorian pile, but at the time its ponderous gloominess appealed to my over-developed taste for the Gothic. From the outside with its pinnacles and quatrefoils, the gallery resembled a cathedral. But if it looked a little intimidating from without, inside, through its great tiered Gothic portal, you entered a strange and seductive world.

There never seemed to be any other visitors about. Instead, as the rain pattered on the skylights above, you wandered alone through a histrionic parade of tartan-clad clan chiefs, each defiantly gripping his claymore and heavy leather shield; opposite, near the sad full-length portrait of Mary Queen of Scots awaiting her execution, clan pipers piped soundless laments while gaunt reformers in black robes glared out of their frames at the frivolous aristocracy around them. It was all a rich diet for an adolescent’s fancies already well fed on Sir Walter Scott; yet as the months went by and the Edinburgh skies darkened with the chill of mid-winter, it was not the kings and queens and clan chiefs that became the cause of my repeated visits.

Instead, I came to be fascinated with a primitive seventeenth century canvas depicting two exotic-looking women, tucked away in a small alcove on the first floor. It was a painting unlike any other in the gallery. The lady on the left had long, dark luxuriant hair, full lips and eyes like black olives; on her head perched a jewelled coronet. To her right sat a beautiful bear-breasted black girl with a long ostrich neck ringed with three strings of pearls. Two more seed pearls hung from her ear lobes while a white silk hairband restrained her curly hair. Behind the two women was painted a galleon in full sail, racing away from a large palace overlooking the shore of a tropical island.

The picture looked as out of place in the Edinburgh gallery as one of the kilted clan chiefs might have looked in the Arabian Ocean. Yet the canvas was painted in Scotland, and the puzzle of its existence was partly explained by the painting’s inscription which referred to another portrait hanging nearby, that of Sir John Henderson, a plumed royalist soldier from the period of the English Civil War. The inscription was badly faded but appeared to read as follows:

“Sir John Henderson of Fordel, travelling in his youth through several parts of Asia and Africa from ye year 1618 to ye year 1628, was delivered into slavery by a Barbarian in Zanquebar on the coast of Africa. There a princess of that countrie falling in love with him, even to the renouncing of her religion and country, contrived the means of both their escape and getting aboard a ship trading up ye red sea landed at Alexandria where she died, whose picture John Henderson caused take with her black maid after their own country habit. From ye original picture at Oterston by W Frier, 1731.”

The beautiful African princess rescuing the enslaved traveller and eloping with him, only to die herself in a foreign port far from home: it was the most wonderful and tragic story I had ever heard. That winter the Princess of Zanzibar (could any title be so romantic?) fascinated me. The inscription left so many questions unanswered: How had Sir John come to be enslaved on a distant tropical island? How had the princess and he communicated? How had they escaped? Why had the princess died? Where was she buried? Where was the original painting by the Alexandrian artist, referred to in the inscription? Was it all true? I read voraciously in the libraries, but as much as I tried to research into the life of my princess, I kept coming against a brick wall. Nothing seemed to be known about her, not even her name. Moreover the original painting was clearly long lost. But I persisted, and gradually an intimation of what might have been the true story emerged from the shadows of the seventeenth century.

Zanzibar, I learned, was a small tropical island off the coast of Tanzania, to which it now belonged. Historically however it was linked with Arabia, and over the centuries it had been dominated by a succession of Arab dynasties from Oman. Thanks to its rulers’ connections with the bazaars of the Levant, Zanzibar had grown rich as a centre of export for slaves and ivory brought from the interior of the African continent, as well as from its own produce- cloves- with which the island was supposed to be strongly scented to this day.

At the time of the elopement, the King of Zanzibar was allied with the then formidable Portuguese Empire, in the seventeenth century Britain’s greatest enemy and fiercest competitor for the trade of the East. It was therefore not unlikely that an English or Scottish ship coming ashore would be taken into custody and its sailors captured or enslaved, just as the inscription on the painting had indicated. Indeed I found a reference to the East India Company clipper Union landing on the island in 1609, only to have two of her crew killed by the inhabitants and a third carried off as a prisoner to the Imperial Portuguese headquarters at Goa. Moreover, various documents in the possession of the Henderson family filled in the outline inscribed on the painting. Sir John Henderson had indeed made it back from his travels in 1628- but soon afterwards joined the English Civil War on the losing side and was again captured and imprisoned. After “his health and means had been exhausted by his long imprisonment” he was allowed to retire to Denmark where he died on the 11th of March 1650. None of his personal papers seemed to have survived, but I did find one more reference to Sir John’s Zanzibari adventures. A sermon of 1714 dedicated to one of his descendants contained the following passage in its preface:

“John Henderson went abroad in his Youth, and travelled thro’ most of the Countries of Christendom; he also followd the Military Way, and had Command in some war in Africa, where after a Defeat he was taken Prisoner by the Cannibals; and when ready to be devoured by them he was ransomed by a Lady, whose Picture you have in your family, drawn with a Coronet upon her head; and in the ground of it is painted a Landskip representing his deliverance.”

Cannibals: it was getting better by the minute: the stuff of fantasy- the world of Robinson Crusoe, Captain Hook and Long John Silver- suddenly come to life. But there, with that odd preface to a sermon, the trail ran tantalisingly out. There seemed no good reason to doubt the story, yet there was nothing more to prove or disprove the beguiling inscription on that strange picture. I determined one day to visit Zanzibar and continue the detective work into my princess there.

It was twelve years before an opportunity to do so finally presented itself. Last January, as snow clogged the roads of Southern Scotland, I finally boarded the plane to Dar es Salaam, the capital of Tanzania.

Dar is a bad start. It combines, as nowhere else I’ve ever seen, the worst features of a drab Eastern Block capital and a dismal Third World shanty town: the long empty avenues of the former leading into the teaming chaos of the latter. I spent only a single morning in the town, and as soon as I could, caught ship to Zanzibar.

The boat passed out of the harbour and immediately things began to get better. Soon all we could see of the African coast was a fringe of bottle palms; to sea, the horizon ahead was divided by the butterfly sails of fishing dhows. Scarcely less exotic were my travelling companions on ship, a very different crew from the jean-clad hustlers and hucksters of the mainland. Beside me sat a pair of heavily bearded maulvis in indigo-blue jallaba shifts. They sat wrapped in prayer, mumbling occasionally from their Korans. In front two women in long black dresses were nursing babies, identical gold studs glinting from each of their nostrils. The skin colour of the passengers was dark cafe-au-lait, several shades paler than the espresso-coloured inhabitants of the mainland, a witness to centuries of intermingling between Zanzibar’s Arab rulers and their local wives, slaves and concubines.

The crossing took nearly four hours and it was late evening by the time we chugged into view of the Zanzibar coast. As the first minarets of Stone Town rose from the sea ahead of us, the sun was already sinking into the lisping ocean behind. Yet despite the fading light, the closer we got the more impressive became the features of the Zanzibar seafront. The blur and ache of white resolved itself into a wide sweep of whitewashed buildings, a panorama of arches, lattices and crenulations, extending from the turrets of the old fort to the left, through the classical balustrades of the New Palace and the House of Wonders in the middle, to the slope-roofed warehouses, slave barracks and consulates on the right. We chugged on in towards the harbour area, our speed reduced now to a barely perceptible drift as we spliced through a thicket of dhows, their design unchanged in a single detail since the great Arab traveller Ibn Battuta sailed these seas in the early fourteenth century. I was delighted: this was exactly the sort of Arabian Nights port I had always imagined my princess ruling over.

I was woken from my thoughts by a sudden bustle. We were already among the port’s wooden jetties and soon I was pushing slowly up a gang-plank against a counter-flow of porters scrambling down in the opposite direction. I fought my way onto dry land, had my passport stamped, and found a place in a clapped out 1950’s Chevrolet masquerading as a taxi.

Before long we were heading down a narrowing funnel of streets so tightly packed that it would have been easy for someone on the top floor balcony one side of the street to shake the hand of his neighbour on the opposite side. Through thickly carved doorways you could catch brief glimpses of courtyards festooned with washing and dark figures gathered around fires. Above, looking down from the top stories of the houses, you could see the outlines of large veiled women with kohl-darkened eyes staring down over latticed balustrades, disappearing occasionally to slap a toddler or suckle an infant. Outside in the streets groups of leathery old men in shifts sat chewing quat, the mildly addictive herbal sedative which Arab fishermen like to secrete in the pouches of their cheeks, making their faces bulge like rabbits. Cats squalled in the gutters; a mullah called to prayer from a minaret. The half-light of the stars and haphazard street lights added to the mystery of the place. That night I went to bed like a child on Christmas Eve, scarcely able to wait for the morning.

Morning came- like the night before it- with the call to prayer and the slap of bare feet on flagstones, as the faithful headed off towards the Stone Town mosques. I ate a breakfast of fresh mangoes in a trelissed courtyard at the back of the hotel, then headed out through the thick weave of alleys.

The word insular derives from the Latin word for island, and most islands become just that: inward-looking, self-sufficient and self-absorbed. But Zanzibar has never been like this. It has always been filled with merchants, pilgrims and travellers, has always been a staging post on the way to somewhere else. For this reason it has always looked outwards and it is on the seafront, not in the heart of the bazaar, that the grandest houses can still be seen. Emerging from the whitewashed labyrinth of the Stone Town I found myself looking straight onto a pair of large nineteenth century buildings, both built immediately against the flat blue planisphere of the sea. One of the houses was a haphazard collection of outbuildings gathered around a square blockhouse, like a clutch of chicks around a mother hen; to its left was a slightly grander structure with a line of pilasters and a triangular pediment over the gateway.

Neither building was particularly remarkable looking, but between the 1850’s and the 1870’s these ramshackle old British and American consulates became bridgeheads for the Western investigation, exploitation and, finally, conquest of Africa. During that brief period Zanzibar quite suddenly became the focus of the world’s attention as the consulates became the launching pad for a succession of attempts to penetrate the unmapped interior of the African continent, and there to search for the mythical source of the Nile. From the British consulate went forth the expeditions of Burton, Speake and Grant, followed a few years later by that of David Livingstone. From the American consulate went the rescue expedition led by Sir Henry Morton Stanley of the New York Herald. In these buildings stores were massed, porters collected and equipment unpacked and tested. Here successive consuls examined the blank spaces on their African maps trying to work out where the various explorers might be after they had failed to return on schedule from their different expeditions.

Today both consulate have been turned into government offices and neither is officially open to the public. Yet when I walked in and began looking around, no one stopped me and I was allowed to wonder undisturbed among the bureaucrats, searching for hints of the building’s former history. The interiors of both consulates turned out to be a lot less pukka than their pompous exteriors might have suggested, with somewhat wobbly-looking ceilings constructed out of lines of split tree-trunks laced with white chunar plaster (the same process is still employed in roofing the grander huts of the villages of Zanzibar). Yet despite this, both consulates were rather attractive buildings: cool and breezy, with intricately carved banisters and fine teak panelling. The rooms of the British Consulate were arranged around a shady central courtyard in the middle of which an old Victorian safe lay rusting, the badge T WHITFIELD AND CO., MANUFACTURERS, LONDON still stamped on its front door. Later, in the Zanzibar museum, I found an 1880 photograph of the interior taken from this courtyard. In those days the verandah was lined with long-armed wickerwork planter’s chairs. Thickly-bearded portraits of former consuls filled the walls, and finely-worked tribal carpets overlay the wooden floors. The interior was the epitome of restrained colonial good taste, and to cap it all, through the open windows you could see across the length of the harbour to the endless expanse of white sand and palm trees beyond. There must have been worse postings than British Consul at the Court of the Sultan of Zanzibar.

Yet despite being lodged in such agreeable quarters, few of the great Victorian travellers seemed to have liked Zanzibar, and the reason for this is not hard to locate in their journals. Though Zanzibar was then both picturesque and relatively prosperous, the source of that wealth lay in the slave trade, the shadow of which cast a gloom over all the Zanzibari streets. Slaves were everywhere. They wandered through the lanes, the domesticated ones half-heartedly performing errands for their masters, the newer arrivals chained naked to posts around the market, half mad with maltreatment, suffering and starvation. Thomas Smee, the commander of the British ship Ternate came to Zanzibar in 1811 and was horrified by what he saw:

“The show,” he wrote sarcastically, “commences about four o’clock in the afternoon. The slaves, set off to best advantage by having their skins cleansed and burnished with cocoa-nut oil, their faces painted with red and white stripes which is here esteemed elegance, are ranged in a line, commencing with the youngest, and increasing to the rear according to size and age. At the head of this file, which is composed of all sexes and ages from 6 to 60, walks the person who owns them; behind and on each side, two or three of his domestic slaves armed with swords and spears serves as a guard. Thus ordered the procession begins, and passes through the market place, the owner holding forth in a kind of song the good qualities of his slaves, and the high prices that have been offered for them. When any of them strikes a spectator’s fancy the line immediately stops, and a process of examination ensues, which, for minuteness, is unequalled in any cattle market in Europe… I observed that they [the slaves] had in general a very dejected look; some groups appeared so ill-fed that their bones seemed as if ready to penetrate their skins. From such scenes one turned away with pity and indignation…”

During the period of the great explorers, the biggest slave trader on the island was Mohammed bin Sayed, an Arab-Swahili half-caste known as Tippu Tib after an eye disease which made him blink. Scholarly and distinguished-looking, he made a most unexpected slaver. Nevertheless this man was responsible for a succession of bloody armed raids deep into the African interior which resulted in hundreds of thousands of innocent villagers being transported in yokes to Zanzibar. Slaves herded from the interior could be supplemented by hundreds more acquired from other traders in the Zanzibar bazaars for around ?3 a head, then sold on in the souks of Persia and Arabia for anything up ?30 a slave. The profits were vast. Little capital was needed to set up as a slaver (the slaves were fed as little as possible and in the heat of summer allowed only one pint of water per head) and a single successfully shipped boatload of humans- packed in a thousand to a single dhow, with decks only 18″ wide- could pay off a lifetime’s debts.

Tippu Tib alone owned 10,000 slaves and seven slave-labour clove plantations, and the wealth he amassed is still indicated by his palace which lies a short walk along the seafront from the consulates. It is a vast, rectangular stone-built structure, five storeys high, entered through a huge double-doorway reached by a long flight of marble steps, and surmounted by a superbly intricate carved tympanum sculpted into a tree-of-life pattern. Yet- astonishingly- this splendid building is today a tenement, split into a series of flats occupied by poor refugee families from neighbouring islands, so that now as you stand to admire what is arguably the most magnificent doorway in East Africa, little boys in rags trip past you carrying water to their families upstairs in a succession of battered-looking buckets.

The transformation of Palazzo Tippu Tip from a palace into what must be the most magnificent squat in all Africa took place at the time of the Revolution of 1964. In a few days Zanzibar’s blacks rose up and took violent revenge for centuries of humiliation and oppression at the hands of the Arabs. The island’s Omani ruling class were arrested, tortured and executed; the humbler class of Arabs were massacred in the streets. In all perhaps 20,000 lost their lives in the course of a single month. The old Arab palaces, left empty for a month of two, were gradually occupied by the poor and landless. Zanzibar became a Marxist Republic, the clove industry was nationalised and the Sultan Hospital was renamed are Vladmir Illych Lenin.

In a cafe near the seafront I chatted to Harun bin Nu’man, a distant relative of the old ruling family. He had been at school in England, he said, when the Revolution took place and so had survived the bloodbath, but in the violence he lost his father and sister as well as two uncles and two first cousins. He was full of nostalgia for the old Zanzibar that had been swept away in 1964:

“In the old days everything was much better,” he said as he sipped his mint tea. “The streets were so clean: at the crack of dawn the sweepers would be out so that by the time you got up everything would be sparkling. The floorboards in the hospital were so well polished that you used to skid on them. And the manners! Everyone used to be so courteous. The court set the tone, and everyone would try to keep up. Twice a day the old Sultan used to ride through the town in his red Rolls Royce and everyone would salute. We had so much pomp and ceremony, and everyone was part of it. Now all that has gone. There is no discipline now. And as for the old palaces, the squatters who occupied them can’t even begin to maintain them. They don’t mend the windows and they cook their food on the carved wooden surfaces. They are slowly destroying our heritage.”

“But aren’t things improving now?” I asked.

“The mood is very upbeat now,” he conceded. “There is a gradual reawakening. All the skilled middle class who fled in 1964 are beginning to come back. There is no longer any discrimination against Arab blood. Things are slowly but definitely getting better.”

It has taken a full thirty years for Zanzibar to throw off the Marxist legacy of 1964 and some things will never recover: thanks to a disastrous experiment with state-owned collective farms, for example, the clove industry is virtually dead and cannot now be privatised again. But the V.I Lenin Hospital has survived (now rejuvenated and known by the politically neutral name of the Coconut Palm Infirmary), and a major restoration project is underway in Stone Town to preserve the finest of the old palaces before they crumble into the dust. Visitors to Zanzibar are now welcomed rather than restrained (as happened in the aftermath of the Revolution), and it is no longer assumed that anyone inspecting the buildings of Stone Town is necessarily doing so at the behest of the CIA. Hotels for backpackers have proliferated- parts of Stone Town are beginning to look like an African Goa- and one or two really good restaurants and hotels have also come up, notably Emerson’s, the labour of love of a New York psychiatrist who came to Zanzibar four years ago, had a mid-life crisis, and decided to stay on.

In most parts of the world today the traveller tends to get a sneaking feeling that he has arrived a generation too late: there may be nice survivals of old glory, he thinks, but if only he had got there before the skyscrapers, the flyovers and twenty-five thousand other tourists beat him to it, it would all be nicer still. In Zanzibar, by contrast, the traveller is rewarded with that rare feeling that for once he has got there in time. The island has been sensitively cleaned up since the Marxist excesses of the mid-Sixties and Seventies, but it has not yet been wrecked by Western development, and tourists are still a relative rarity. There may well have been a better time to explore Zanzibar, but as you sit in a seafront cafe in the cool winter sun, watching the waves lap against the line of old Arabian palaces, you cannot help feeling that Zanzibar must now be cleaner, nicer, friendlier, more accessible and more beautiful than it has been at any time for the last thirty years.

“Even the ghosts are happier,” replied Harun when I said this to him. “For thirty years the ghost of Sultan Jamshed the Legless has been haunting the Old Palace, the House of Wonders. Several of the Revolutionaries tried to move in but Sultan Jamshed scared them all away. Now that we have returned to a democratic system of government, Sultan Jamshed seems to have found peace. No one has reported seeing him since we had the elections four years ago.”

The following day, on Harun’s advice, I hired a car and a driver and set off to the South West tip of the island, to Kizimkazi, the oldest village in Zanzibar.

During the upheavals of the Sixties, the Swahili revolutionaries who overthrew the Sultan’s regime told their followers that they, the blacks, were the true natives of Zanzibar and that the Arabs were just an arriviste bunch of colonialist adventurers: like the British and Portuguese they were in Zanzibar but not of Zanzibar. Kizimkazi gives the lie to that bit of racial propaganda. The mosque in the village there is the oldest building in East Africa, dating from early eleventh century, and its architecture is unambiguously Omani-Arab. The implication is clear: there have been Arabs on Zanzibar for at least a millennium, as long in fact as anyone can prove or remember. But there was also another non-historical reason for visiting the village. Harun’s mention of the ghost of Sultan Jamshed the Legless had alerted me to Zanzibar’s folk lore, and when I had quizzed him further he had told me that Kizimkazi was a centre of the island’s Uganga, or White Magic:

“Despite all the upheavals we have had on Zanzibar the people have never lost their traditions and superstitions,” he said. “We are all great believers in spirits and there are still many witch doctors all over Zanzibar. They organise dances and gatherings to whip up the spirits, then go into trances. The good ones are very powerful healers. When you are in Kizimkazi look up Musa Shaban. He’s famous throughout the whole island for his healing powers.”

Before setting off I paid a brief visit to the Zanzibar Museum and there found ample evidence of what Harun had said. In a case at the back of the main hall I found a whole collection of Uganga items, many of which came from the area around Kizimkazi. It was a wonderfully exotic collection of odd and ends, in which the real and the spirit world mingled effortlessly: charms to make the wearer invisible to witch doctors were placed beside charms to cure conjunctivitis; amulets containing magic incantations to reduce high fevers sat next to wooden beads which would make the wearer “vomit profusely whenever he was approached by an ill-intentioned witch”. Several items were more sinister such as the “cows horn with two bells fastened onto either end, containing roots and a dogs nose, used in exorcising devils” or the bottle in which “a mexico (or evil spirit) is said to have been imprisoned and buried to harm passers by. It was unearthed,” so the inscription recorded, “in a shomoo (or devil hunt) at Kizimkazi”.

I left Stone Town soon after lunch, just as the town’s menfolk were heading back to their houses to take their afternoon siesta. The road led through the same colonial suburbs you see wherever the British imposed their rule during the late nineteenth century: before leaving town we juddered along an avenue, past the cricket pitch and the old neo-classical courthouse with its neat bougainvillaea bushes, past the botanical garden and the golf course and the blue corrugated-iron club house. We emerged into the country to find ourselves amid an open expanse of coconut palms, interspersed with the odd clove and nutmeg tree, banana palm and cinnamon bush. Every so often we would pass a man selling mangoes under a makeshift palm-frond shelter.

After about thirty kilometres the country began to get drier, with open scrub taking the place of the palm plantations. Then, quite suddenly, the tarmac gave up so that we found ourselves bumping along a strip of white coral rag. Apart from us the road was completely deserted.

Kizimkazi was a small settlement of mud huts, backing onto a wide sweep of white sand. It was low tide and in the far distance, perhaps a full mile away, lay the distant glint of the sea. The mosque stood on a grassy bank just above the high-water mark. Two fisherman in Bermuda shorts sat mending their nets on the walls of the graveyard; one went off to fetch Musa Shaban, while his friend opened up the mosque and stood at the back as I looked around.

The mosque was small and old and wonderfully primitive. Like an ancient Anglo-Saxon church, its walls were thickly-built and its wooden roof was supported by three great cross-beams which rested on squat octagonal pillars running down the centre of the mosque. The mihrab arch was cusped into the same trefoil shape as the club-symbol on a pack of playing cards, while the capitals were carved with a band of kufic commemorating the building of the mosque eight hundred years previously.

“It was built by Mr. Kizim many years ago,” said an old man who had come up behind me without my noticing. He was very old and very toothless and he walked with the aid of a stick. “Mr. Kizim came here by the sea before all the other Arabs. He was a magician. In the village we tell many stories about him.”

“Are you Musa Shaban?” I asked.

“Yes,” replied the old man. “I am.”

I told him I had met Harun in Stone Town.

“You know Harun do you?” said Musa Shaban, now peering closely at me. “Come with me. Let me show you something.”

Musa Shaban led me out the mosque and down onto the sand. As we walked large white sand crabs scuttled away to their holes, whiskers waving. Ahead of us a strange outcrop of skull-shaped coral rose from the edge of the beach, partially obscured by the roots and branches of the bushes which had grown up on top of it. Onto some of the branches were tied brightly coloured threads and ribbons.

“Look,” he said. “You see that cave?”

I nodded.

“We have a story in the village,” he said. “When Mr. Kizim built this mosque it is said that the people who used to live here, the Shirazi people, were very angry as they had a different religion. They tried to kill Mr. Kizim, but he prayed to Almighty Allah and ran down to the beach. When he got to this rock, the coral opened and admitted him. He never came out. Some people say he is still in there living in an underground palace, and they come to pray to him to ask for children or blessings. The sheiks of the mosque frown and shake their heads and say it is bad to pray to a rock, but,” and here the old man cackled with laughter, “if ever they have some problem they are the first to come here.”

Musa Shaban led me back from beach, past the mosque and through the village. When we arrived at his hut he indicated that I should sit down on the rope-bed on his verandah while he disappeared inside. A few minutes later he reappeared with a cardboard canister. He shook it and out slipped an old parchment roll. The writing on it was in a very spidery form of Arabic:

“The story of Mr Kizim is written on this parchment,” said Musa Shaban. “But no one here knows how to read it any longer. Scholars have come here and made copies, but even they cannot make any sense of this writing.”

Later, when I went to the Zanzibar archives they confirmed Musa Shaban’s story. They had indeed taken the roll and made a photocopy, but the script was written in a very archaic form of Arabic and to date no one had satisfactorily translated it. As we chatted about the village’s history, I questioned Musa Shaban about his healing abilities: was it true that he had supernatural powers, I asked?

“I can cure,” he replied matter of factly. “Sometimes when the hospital has failed, people come to me and I am able to help them. But I specialise in exorcism, in curing demon possession. If someone has a spirit in their head I call my rohani [spirit-servant] and she talks to the other spirit and orders her to leave.”

“How did you acquire your rohani?” I asked.

“Many years ago I was walking home at night through a farmyard when the spirit jumped out of a chicken and possessed me. I got iller and iller, took a fever and began to have hallucinations. Luckily my father was a witch doctor and he worked a special spell on the rohani which trapped her. At first she was his servant, but since he died she has been at my disposal.”

“Can you see her?” I asked.

“Certainly, ” replied Musa Shabani without elaborating.

I persisted: “What does she look like?” I asked.

“She looks like a beautiful Arab girl,” said Musa Shabani, “although she speaks Swahili like a girl from the mainland, from Dar-es-Salaam. I can even touch her: she is solid. Her name is Subiani. When I call her she comes immediately.”

“Could you use your spirit to make yourself rich?”

“No,” replied Musa Shabani. “I must use her only for healing. If you misuse her powers and anger her she can take revenge- put you in hospital for a week or something.”

“So you have to humour her?”

“Oh yes,” said Musa Shabani. “Subiani is very bossy: like a wife or a school teacher. She demands many concessions.”

“What do you mean?”

“She says: ‘you must not drink alcohol, smoke marijuana, or sleep with other women. You must pray five times a day, keep your house clean and be clean yourself.’ If you do not do what she says she can give you punishment.”

“But in return for all this she protects you?”

“Yes. Last year another witch doctor got jealous of my powers and cast a spell on me. He sent a spirit which came and attacked me and I fell very ill. But Subiani told me the problem was coming from this other man and threw out the other spirit. She recited to me a special verse from the Koran which I wrote down and placed in an amulet. Since then I have not once fallen ill.”

“So has Subiani made you the most powerful Witch Doctor on the island?”

“No, no, no,” replied Musa Shabani. “There is one other much more powerful witch doctor. He is Juma Khamis of Nungui. He died last year but still people are scared of him and of his sons.”

“What could he do?”

“He never failed. He could make prophecies and they would always come true. He could fly and disappear. He could make himself invisible or take the shape of a dog. If he bit you, you died that day. There was no way back. Nothing could save you.”

“And people still believe in this?” I asked.

“Certainly.”

“Even the young people.”

“Especially the young people,” said Musa Shabani. “Before they were doubting but now many are coming back to the old religion.The people of Zanzibar have always been very sceptical. No one in Zanzibar believed it when the Americans claimed to have gone to the moon. They said: ‘How can anyone go there: the moon is the House of God.’ But now everyone believes that it is true.”

The old Witch Doctor tapped his stick of the ground thoughtfully:

“The fact that people do not believe something,” he said, “does not mean that it is not true.”

Zanzibar was so diverting that I had been on the island for nearly a week before I remembered my original quest: the search for the Arab princess on the picture in Edinburgh. Somewhat guiltily I caught a cab to the Zanzibar archives determined to sort out the question once and for all.

I told my tale to the librarian and together we spent a morning searching in all the reference books. There was nothing: the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were well-documented periods of Zanzibar’s history, but for the early seventeenth century there was virtually no surviving records. Nevertheless there was one substantial document from the mid-nineteenth century which did shed a bright light on my story. For it seemed as if history had almost repeated itself. In the early 1850’s, about two hundred years after the events recorded on the inscription of the painting, another Zanzibari princess, Sayyida Salme, had again succeeded in eloping with a Westerner. The difference was that this second princess had made it back to her husband’s North European home- in this case Germany- and had achieved sufficient celebrity to write her memoirs. Published in German in 1886, they had been forgotten for a further century until in 1993 they had been rediscovered by a Leiden professor and translated into English. What was most extraordinary was that the Princess had been born and brought up in the harem palace at Mtoni, six miles North of Stone Town. It was the oldest palace in Zanzibar, said the archivist, and almost certainly the same building as that in which Sir John Henderson’s lover had once lived.

The memoirs were an extraordinary document, and probably amount to the most detailed insider’s account ever given of an Arab harem. Sayyida Salme’s mother had been a fair skinned Circassian slave girl who had been captured by slavers when very young and had arrived in the Zanzibar harem at the age of seven; later, at adolescence, she rapidly became the Sultan’s favourite concubine, and Sayyida was the product of this union. This brought both mother and daughter great favour, but also the jealous hatred of the Sultan’s barren chief wife, the Omani princess Azze bint Sef who ruled the harem with a rod of iron:

“In spite of the Princess’s small size and plain appearance, she possessed an unbelievable power over my father, so that he always willingly submitted to her arrangements. Towards the other wives and their children she was always extremely imperious, haughty and pretentious. Luckily for us she had no children for their tyranny would certainly have been unbearable.”

The harem was a large establishment and contained slave girls from many different races, each of whom tended to demand her own national dishes:

“At Bet il Mtoni meals were cooked in the Arab as well as the Persian and Turkish fashion. The various races were living together and the most fascinating beauties as well as their opposites were abundantly represented. But among us [Arabs] only the Arab fashion [of dress] was permitted and among the negroes the Swahili one. When a Circassian woman arrived in her clothes of ample shirts, or an Abyssinian one on her fantastic attire, within three days she had to lay aside everything to wear the clothes assigned to us.”

My favourite part of the book- and the most interesting with regard to my childhood princess- was however the description Sayyida Salme gave of the palace’s physical appearance. It sounded idyllic, like something from a fairy tale or an Orientalist fantasy:

“Bet il Mtoni lies on the sea coast. It lies in a most delightful scenery well hidden in a grove of magnificent coconut palms, mango trees and other giants of tropical vegetation. The river Mtoni ran through the numerous pools in the palace and discharged behind its walls into the splendid animated inlet which separates the island from the African mainland. The number of rooms in the palace was limitless and I can recall the spacious bathing houses and the Turkish steam bath whose architecture was unequalled in Zanzibar. These baths were enjoyed by all the inhabitants of the house and many of us would stay there for many hours praying, sleeping, working, reading and even eating and drinking. In the courtyard nearby peacocks, gazelles, guinea fowls, flamingoes, geese ducks and ostriches roamed about in perfect liberty and were cherished and fed by young and old.”

At that point the Archivist casually mentioned that the ruins of Bet il Mtoni still survived, a little to the North of the Stone Town suburbs. Barely waiting for him to finish his sentence, I was out of the room and into the taxi. Soon we were heading along the coast, past groves of mango trees and the occasional banyan rising up from the fertile soil on the edge of the sea.

And then I saw the palace: even in its ruins it was unmistakably the same structure as that depicted in the background of the Edinburgh picture. Against the blazing white sand of the beach, a square structure rose up from behind a fringe of casuarina trees, its position exactly as depicted on the canvas. You walked into a courtyard lined with Saracenic arches rising from polyhedral capitals. Beyond lay the semi-domes of the old bathhouses; the steam room was built as an octogon and in one round pleasure pond their now grew five blue water lillies. It must once have been magnificent, but all was now neglected and ruinous: roots spiralled over the corniches; thorns grew from the floor; rubble and piles of fallen plaster lay everywhere. Some of the outbuildings had collapsed so badly that only the pillars survived, springing up in the middle of a nearby palm grove like a group of prehistoric obelisks. Everywhere the fittings had been ripped out and the jungle had moved in. I opened the notes I had taken from Sayyida Salme’s memoirs, and standing there in the ruins I read about the life that had once been led in the harem: of the eunuchs and the odalisques; of the children growing up in the back of the palace, and how they would hunt for ostrich eggs then present them to the head cook who would reward them with sweets; of the visits of the old Sultan and how he used to stand on the balcony, walking up and down, deep in thought, as he looked out onto the Arabian Ocean.

Here then was where my princess must have been born, where she must have grown up and where eventually she must have planned her successful elopement. I walked down the pitted steps of the palace and out onto the sand of the beach. I imagined the princess gathering up her robes and getting into the dingy which would carry her, Sir John and their maidservant up the Red Sea to Egypt.

I looked out to sea, half expecting to see the galleon still waiting there. In the distance the butterfly sails of the fishing dhows were still crossing and recrossing on the horizon. But beyond that, I could see nothing.

William Dalrymple is an active historian and author.  Much thanks to Ryan Parnas for locating this very interesting painting and Dalrymple’s story to accompany it.

I am optimistic about the future.  I think this year a change is gonna come.

Happy New Year!

Doug Houser        January 3, 2026

 

 

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