Voyage of the Peace Corps: A Museum at the Parting of the Ways

There are museums on Zanzibar!  It is a great failing of a nation not to have good museums.  I believe this.  The House of Wonders was closed for construction, but the old palace, that is now The Palace Museum, it was open.  Surprisingly dingy and with disappointingly few things, but nonetheless, a museum.  I was most excited by the adorable little cannon in the entrance hall and the portrait of the Empress Elizabeth of Austria, whose assassination was a major plot point in the Georgette Heyer novel Envious Casca.

Isn't it cute?  

There were a few cool things, and a lot of portraits of either European rulers (apparently giving people your picture when you sign treaties is a thing) or the sultans.

The traditional saddle of the sultan is pink.  As it should be.

Because having mirrors in your chair leads to utility and comfort? 

Good-looking dead man with a sword. 

Seal of ex-princess Salme

Ex-Princess Salme

Princess Salme was a lady of great determination who ran away with a German guy, stopped being a princess, and wrote a tell-all memoir.  Good on her!  For those who don't live here, getting women to tell their stories can be difficult.  The older women will talk to me (sometimes) but in classrooms, female students often don't talk, cover their mouths with their hands or just talk so softly it's impossible to hear.

Side note: a really annoying thing about this culture is that loudness of speech seems to be directly correlated with social position.  Those who feel they have a more important position in the social hierarchy speak loudly, those who feel they have a less important position speak softly.  As a teacher this makes my job difficult.  Students are used to being essentially slaves, so if they speak in class at all I have to walk over and stand beside them in order to hear them.  Telling them to speak louder, in either English or Kiswahili, has to date been unsuccessful.  The women of my class speak even more quietly than the men of my class with one exception, but she's an exceptional lady with great confidence in herself and I love her.  In a Muslim society, women are supposed to be invisible, so part of that is that a lot of the Muslim women in my class just plain don't talk to me.    Respect to the Princess for telling her story boldly!

The palace itself was really lovely, being of open design with staircases.  I like staircases. We couldn't get into all the rooms because people were vacuuming.

I like staircases.

Anachronism!

This was really our last group activity, because Jaro was going back to Dar and then Germany, Ron and Katie were going back to Dar and then their village, and I was going on to Pemba.  So we got some other tourist to take a group photo.

Coming next: Wesley Snipes, giant bats, and bodily functions.