Halloween in Zanzibar

Today is Halloween, but there are no candles flickering in our jack-o-lantern, and we aren’t concerned that we forgot to get candy for the trick-or-treaters. Instead, it was a pretty uneventful day. My feeling of Halloween nostalgia has hit me somewhat unexpectedly. In thinking about holidays we’d miss this year, I didn’t think of Halloween, but this has been the first year in I don’t know how long that we haven’t carved a pumpkin, dressed up, celebrated with friends, or (more importantly) helped Oscar and Calvin to do these things.

Halloween is about spookiness in the U.S., but it is a pretty tongue-in-cheek, commercial spookiness. Here, there’s a little more seriousness about the supernatural, and to the few people who have asked us whether we celebrate Halloween, we’ve been hard pressed to explain: “Yes, it’s about ghosts and people dress up like scary things and decorate their houses with scary things, but we don’t really believe in it” (which seems strange for the inordinate amount of time and energy we put into the holiday). “Yes, we do cut up pumpkins and put them out and they rot, but they look really pretty and it’s fun to do and they’re not food pumpkins like the pumpkins here.” It’s just hard to translate on an island where there have been real-life highly publicized cases of albinos being killed for use in medicines, where people have been killed in recent memory under suspicion of being “Popobawa” (a Zanzibari version of a vampire), and where entire schools have been closed because of epidemics of “shetani” (ghosts) invading girls’ bodies. The supernatural is no laughing matter here, either for the people who believe, or for the people who are concerned about the effects on the living. And no one here would waste a whole pumpkin on a decoration.

So it’s been a pretty subdued Halloween this year. Today, while Brady and I were puttering around and doing weekend cleaning projects, the boys got inventive and created their own very small haunted house with some boxes. Boo!

What time is it?

I’m not a person known for having a fantastic sense of time. I usually get where I need to be, pretty much when I need to be there, but keeping track of time is something that requires my conscious effort.

In Zanzibar, I’m learning about time all over again. I’m not just talking about “Swahili time” (although I have on several occasions arrived punctually for public events, only to find that the event in question wouldn’t actually start until 40 minutes later). I’m talking about the fact that the day in Kiswahili officially is marked at sunrise (at around 6 AM, year round) and ends at sunset (at around 6 PM). So a meeting that might begin at, say, “8 AM” would be said here to begin “saa mbili asubuhi” (or at 2 in the morning).

Most of the time, when people are speaking in English, they give the English time, and in Kiswahili, Kiswahili time, so even though there is potential for constant confusion, we’ve only had one mishap with time since we’ve been here. Clocks here are mostly in English time, but it’s smart when looking at an unfamiliar clock to keep in mind the rough time you think it is—if the clock is off by 6 hours, it’s in Kiswahili time; if it’s way off, then it’s probably broken.

But every once in a while, I’m really confused, like today. This afternoon, before I made my usual Sunday afternoon/morning Skype call to my parents (on East Coast time, 7 hours behind us), I logged on to Facebook and noticed that a friend’s status reported that he was looking forward to an extra hour of sleep. A moment of panic—I hadn’t even thought about the time changing. What time is it? Do we spring forward or fall back? What season is it?

As it turns out, my Facebook friend is in London, where the time shift happens a week earlier than in the U.S. But in the process of thinking about this, I figured out why the math never works out for the time difference between Zanzibar (Greenwich Mean Time +3) and Tacoma (Greenwich Mean Time – 8), which should be 11 hours but has been only 10 when I’ve compared notes. Daylight savings time!! Zanzibar doesn’t change time, there being little point so close to the equator.

So although I’m miffed at the Brits today for disrupting my feeling of continuity with GMT, I’m excited about next week, when the math will be more predictable. What time is it? Look at your watch; if speaking in Kiswahili, subtract 6; if speaking on Skype, subtract 8 or 11 (next week). And be punctual, whatever that means.

What is communication?

This is a question I’ve been pondering—as per national mandate—in the Communication Skills course I’ve begun teaching at the State University of Zanzibar (SUZA). The course is for the 20 students who are working toward earning a one-year diploma in computer science this year. My students are part of the incoming student body at SUZA, comprising 613 students, 301 of whom are women.

It’s good to be back in the classroom, which I’m finding to be the most familiar place I’ve been in the two months I’ve been here. I have a syllabus, I make assignments, I explain things, we laugh, we ask questions, we explore—so much is the same.

But in the weeks leading up to the semester, I often felt panicky about teaching because so much seemed unfamiliar to me. Thinking about the “What is communication?” question has helped crystallize for me why that was.

At Puget Sound, communication happens very quickly, physically dispersed though the members of the campus community sometimes are (this post being a case in point). Months before the fall semester begins at Puget Sound, I can count on knowing what I am teaching, when my classes will meet, where they will be, who my students will be, and (often) what my students’ interests will be—especially if the students are ones I know from previous classes or are incoming advisees. Having that information, I can spend considerable time tailoring my courses to best match the evolving subject matter with the particular students and the physical classroom environment in which I’ll teach. Here in Zanzibar, I did not have most of this basic information until three days before classes began, a terrifying prospect for a planner like me. I’m not accustomed to teaching from a syllabus that has been written and approved by someone else, let alone the national government; however, I was grateful on the first day of class to have a few things that I didn’t need to hand-design.

I now realize how much of what feels natural to me as a teacher is dependent on everyone involved having continuous digital access. Here in Zanzibar, we have computers and Web sites and digital classroom aids, and so it seems like it should be possible to do things like send out mass informational e-mails and to have electronic course registration records; however, we don’t have reliable electricity and although there is high-speed Internet at SUZA, there is none in the homes and villages of most of the prospective students. Even e-mail addresses are rare here. There is no well-established campus e-mail domain at SUZA; faculty and staff here use free hotmail and gmail accounts, and many of my computer science students (likely the most tech-savvy students on campus) have never had the need or opportunity to get e-mail addresses until now. Without those basic communication routes, all kinds of information move slowly, from student applications to acceptance letters to student registrations to course teaching assignments to classroom assignments. Communication here does sometimes happen electronically, but it happens even more successfully face to face (as I learned when students in my class questioned whether communication can happen in e-mails because there is no real-time dialogue and because the addressee might not have Internet access).

Like much of East Africa, we at SUZA are at a liminal moment, between the oral , local culture of the past and the digital, global culture of the future. Although I never dreamed I’d be a member of a computer science department, I’m thrilled to be at this pivotal moment, as I teach English communication skills to my computer science students. Look out, world!

"Jambo" does not mean "hello."

I feel that I have (almost) truly arrived in Zanzibar now that I know how to exchange greetings like a civilized person. “Jambo,” I know now, does not mean “hello,” or at least not in any straightforward way. “Jambo” means, according to my Kiswahili/English dictionary, “1. thing 2. matter 3. affair 4. issue.” Indeed, at my first Kiswahili lesson, my tutor explained that when people use “-jambo” in a greeting in Kiswahili, it is always preceded by the negative form of the appropriate subject prefix. So, one might ask “Hujambo?” (Are you [singular] without troubles), and the correct reply—always, even if it’s not true—is “Sijambo” (“I am without troubles”). Here are some other possibilities:

Hamjambo? (Are you [plural] without troubles?)

Hatujambo. (We are without troubles.)

Watoto wako hawajambo? (Are your children without troubles?)

Hawajambo. (They are without troubles.)

Mume yako hajambo? (Is your husband without troubles?)

Hajambo. (He is without troubles.)

I list all of these possibilities to demonstrate that there is no one-size-fits-all greeting in Kiswahili, to show that there’s a lot of vocabulary to learn to get the greeting right, and to give a snippet of the kind of conversation that I have with people I know.

The more people I know in Stone Town, the longer it takes to walk through town—you can’t just say “hi” as you pass by. It is typical to go through several rounds of the –jambo exchange, with a few “Habari za. . . ?” (“How is your morning/work/family/day/etc.”) exchanges thrown in. If the person you are greeting is young and/or hip, there might also be an exchange of “Mambo vipi?” (Response: “Poa” or “Freshi”), but that’s just a different level of formality for the same kind of exchange—think the difference between “Hello” and “Hi.”

The typical greeting in town for any white person is “Jambo,” and that’s a complicated greeting, as you might imagine. It says, partly, that you’re not expected to be able to wade through the grammar necessary for a proper greeting, and partly that you’re a tourist. When I hear it, I always think of Henry Louis Gates on “Signifyin'.” In response, I always answer “Sijambo” now, and then I’ve got a new friend to greet every day.

I’m still struggling to slow down and accept the whole greeting exchange ritual. I like to walk fast, and I like to be friendly, but (as in America), I get impatient with the contentless “How-are-you-I’m-fine” exchanges when I have a destination to get to. In Stone Town, I’m learning to slow down and to pause a bit longer. The better my Kiswahili gets, the more I’m getting out of these exchanges, which can develop after a bit into “Sijambo. . . . Lakini. . .” (I am without troubles, but. . .). Then it starts to go somewhere—if the person I’m talking with is patient and if I’ve learned the vocabulary I need in order to understand what follows the “lakini.”

Today, though, I had a funny exchange in English. Zanzibaris like to practice their English, but the greetings are often strange (like, “Good morning!” at 4 PM). I think Zanzibaris have the same difficulty translating their greetings as I do. They expect every greeting to be a question that invites a reply—as “Habari za asubuhi?” (“How is your morning?”) does. So today, I had this exchange with someone walking in the opposite direction:

Him (at 2 PM): Good morning!

Me (in a hurry and also thinking I’ll bypass the time-of-day issue): Hello!

Him: Fine.

As I continued walking, I wondered, “What was that?” Was that an example of “Signifyin,'” or was it a banal communicative exchange?

Don’t even get me started on the second-most-common greeting for tourists: “Hakuna matata.”