Zanzibar: The Name Casts a Spell

by Pam Mandel

Liv Fun: Vol 1 – Issue 4

It took about eight weeks to prepare for my trip to East Africa. I had to send my passport off for a visa and get a lot of shots. There were a few odds and ends that I needed. Extra-strength bug repellent. Sunscreen. The right hat; one that would not blow off in the safari rig. While running these errands, I’d tell people what I was up to and where I was going. A flight to Nairobi. Over land into Tanzania. Then, for the last few days of the trip, Zanzibar.

The reaction was always the same — 100% of the time. I would say the word “Zanzibar,” and whomever I was talking to would breathe in, almost the same kind of breath you take when you set a perfect, fragrant dessert on the table. They would gasp, just slightly, and then lean back and stare past the top of my head. “Zanzibar,” they would echo. “Zanzibar …” And they would drift into silence while I watched them disappear into their own ideas of that place.

It was the name of the place that made me want to go there in the first place. Before I started to prepare for the trip, I knew nothing of Zanzibar. Really, nothing. I’m not sure that I could have found it on a map if you’d asked me to. I’d have looked, I think, in the Persian Gulf and been wrong. I’d have thought we were talking of Madagascar, another place with a name that makes my focus shift to that imaginary map where every place has a name that sounds like a mix of music and honey and red dirt. It didn’t matter that I did not know the place; the name was enough to make me want to go there. Zanzibar! Of course I wanted to go. I had said it out loud.

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Liv Fun

by Leisure Care
Winter 2012
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