Stone Town, Zanzibar
The Carved Doors of Stone Town, and What They Say
A Zanzibari door was commissioned before the house behind it was built. Read the frame and you know who the family was, where their money came from, and what they wanted you to think as you waited to be let in.
Visitors photograph the doors of Stone Town more than anything else on the island, and almost nobody is told what they are looking at. This is a pity, because a Zanzibari door is not decoration applied to a house. It is a document. It was commissioned first, carved by a named craftsman over months, and the house was then built around it — which tells you immediately where the family put its money and what it wanted the street to know.
Two traditions, and how to tell them apart
Walk one alley and you will pass both of the town’s door traditions in fifty metres, and once you can separate them you cannot stop seeing it.
The older is the Omani, or Arab, door: a square frame with a heavy rectangular lintel across the top, deep geometric and floral carving running down the jambs, and often an inscription cut into the lintel. The carving is dense but the shape is severe. These are the doors of the merchant families who came with the Omani sultanate, and the oldest surviving examples in the town run to the middle of the nineteenth century.
The younger is the Gujarati, or Indian, door, and the giveaway is the arch. Where the Omani door has a straight lintel, this one has a semicircular head above it, usually carved as a fan or a peacock. The leaves fold back in several panels rather than swinging as two slabs, and there are often small square panes set into the upper half. These arrived with the Indian trading community later in the century, and they are lighter, more ornamental, and built for shopfronts as much as houses.
The house is the frame for the door, not the other way round. A family who lost its money kept the door and let the roof go.
The brass studs, and the elephants that were never here
The first thing anyone asks about is the brass. Rows of heavy conical or pointed studs, sometimes with long spikes, set into the leaves in a grid. The story every visitor is told is that they were to stop war elephants battering the door down.
That story is imported, and it is worth being straight about it. The studded door is an Indian form, and in the fortified cities of Rajasthan and Gujarat the spikes did have that function. There have never been war elephants on Zanzibar. What crossed the water was the style, not the purpose. On this island the studs were always about display — brass was expensive, imported, and had to be polished by somebody, which is exactly the point a merchant wanted to make to the street.
Reading the carving
The motifs are a mixture of Islamic, Indian, and Swahili coastal vocabulary, and they repeat often enough that you can start to read them on your second afternoon.
What the frame is telling you
- A chain carved along the outer edge of the jamb: security, the household under protection. It is the most common border on the older doors.
- The lotus, usually at the base of the jamb: an Indian motif for prosperity and fertility, and a reliable sign of a Gujarati hand at work or an owner trading with one.
- Fish along the frame: abundance and fertility, and on this coast, quite literally where the money came from.
- The date palm: the most Omani of the motifs, and a wish for plenty. On the grandest doors it climbs the entire jamb.
- An inscription across the lintel: usually a Quranic verse, often with the year the door was made, in Arabic numerals. This is the closest thing the town has to a title deed.
The proportions carry information too. A very wide door on a narrow alley was a statement of confidence, because it cost the owner interior floor space he could not spare. A high threshold — the step you keep tripping over — kept monsoon water and street dirt out of the courtyard, and the higher it is, the older the house is likely to be.
What is happening to them now
Counts of how many carved doors survive in the old town vary depending on who is doing the counting and what they are willing to call a door, and you will hear numbers from a few hundred to well over a thousand. What is not in dispute is the direction of travel. Salt air, termites, and the collapse of coral-rag buildings around them take a handful every year, and doors have been removed and sold out of the country to be hung in hotels and private houses elsewhere.
There is a working trade of carvers still in the town, and some of what you see on the street is recent — a good new door in the old idiom, made by someone whose grandfather made the one across the alley. I am not sniffy about those. A tradition that is still producing is in better health than one being conserved behind glass.
What I would ask, if you take one thing from an afternoon of this: photograph the whole door, frame and threshold and all, rather than a detail of the brass. The detail is the postcard. The frame is the sentence.