Glimpse - Your Stories from Abroad

Walking down a quiet road on the northern periphery of Zanzibar City, Gordon, Helen, and I were clearly out of place. We were three young, sweaty, white Americans looking for the headquarters of Zanzibar’s radical opposition party, the Civic United Front (CUF). There, we hoped to interview Ismail Jussa Ladhu, a higher-up in the party.

I caught the attention of a well-dressed man walking past us. I asked him, in English, “Excuse me, could you please tell us where the CUF (pronounced “cuff”) office is?”

“Coffee? No coffee here,” he told me.

I decided to try out my freshly acquired Swahili. “CUF iko wapi?” (“Where is CUF?”)

“No coffee. Coffee over there.” He pointed back toward the center of town. “You want Internet?”

The four of us looked in confusion at one another. I pulled my phrasebook from my back pocket and located the word for “office.” “CUF office?” I asked. I spelled it out for him: “C-U-F.”

“Oh, CUF. Why you want to go there?” He shook his head and pointed us in the direction of the office.

Part of his surprise most likely stemmed from the fact that CUF is not known for its love of Western tourists. The party’s anti-Western graffiti is widespread throughout the streets of Zanzibar and in recent years, its efforts to usurp control from the ruling Chama Cha Mapinduzi (CCM, The Revolutionary Party) have been met with violent repression. Since the union of Tanganyika (today’s mainland Tanzania) and the islands of Zanzibar to form Tanzania in 1964, CCM and its predecessor parties have ruled the nation.

However, international observers unanimously agreed that the 1995 and 2000 Zanzibar elections were corrupt, and many agreed that CUF actually represents the majority of the Zanzibari electorate.

We had been sent to the CUF headquarters by Ali Saleh, an independent radio and print journalist. Since we were searching for insight into government corruption, Saleh had suggested that we meet the CUF leadership for ourselves.

We knew we had found the right place when we arrived at a two-story building completely covered with posters for the CUF presidential candidate.

As we stepped into the building, one young man greeted us with an odd look and some questions and then ran off to find his boss. Other men came out into the entryway to look at us, offering uncomfortable smiles and inquisitive looks. We just kept smiling and nodding and trying not to attract too much attention. Finally, we were taken to a room full of ancient-looking computers, where we were told to wait for Ladhu.

After about half an hour, CUF volunteers led us up some stairs and into a roomy office with a bookshelf filled with radical political literature, including Chairman Mao’s biography and Enver Hoxha’s Imperialism and the Revolution.

The first surprise was Ladhu’s shirt: a starched, white short-sleeved polo with an embroidered HSBC logo. Having passed through the United Kingdom on my way to Tanzania, I recalled seeing the same logo emblazoned atop a mammoth London skyscraper and then again on countless ATMs across the city. The shirt didn’t quite seem to fit with the bookshelf. Either way, Ladhu was an extremely welcoming and educational host. As it turned out, he had received a law degree from the University of Hull in England before coming back to his native Zanzibar to work for CUF. After telling him about our study abroad program, we decided to pop the big question: What does your party really stand for?

“First and foremost," he said, "we stand for free markets.”

Our jaws dropped.

“But we don’t want investment from the West. We want it from the East. We want to see Zanzibar become the Hong Kong of East Africa, with investments coming in from across the Arab world.”

And thus began our lesson in Zanzibar’s history and geography á la CUF. My head was spinning as we emerged from the building a while later, attracting yet even more bewildered looks from passers-by. For people like Ladhu, I realized, what we might interpret as anti-Western sentiment was not really about demeaning the West, but rather about elevating the East.

As we chatted outside the CUF headquarters, a taxi zipped up behind us, stopping with a jolt in a small cloud of dust. The face of a rather disturbed and anxious-looking man quickly appeared from behind the tinted window that he was rapidly rolling down by hand.

“This is not a hotel!” he blurted at us with an urgent tone of almost motherly concern. “Where you wanna go? No accommodation here! Get in the taxi.”

Apparently, we weren’t the only ones concerned about the CUF’s apparent dislike of the West. But now I felt a bit more at ease.