Zanzibar City Research Articles

Effect of Nutrition Education Intervention on the Use of Micronutrients Powders for Children Aged 6-59 Months in Zanzibar City

The Micronutrient Powder (MNP) program in Tanzania, introduced by the Feed the Future Project in 2013, aimed to reduce the prevalence of micronutrient deficiencies among children under five years old. This study, conducted in Zanzibar City, where iron deficiency anemia is highly prevalent, assessed the effect of a Nutrition Education Intervention on the use of MNPs for children aged 6-59 months, focusing on hemoglobin levels and anthropometric measures. The study explored the potential of MNPs, coupled with proper education, to alleviate iron deficiency anemia and other nutrient deficiencies. The longitudinal study involved 363 mothers/caregivers and their children, with data collected at baseline, midline (4 weeks), and endline (8 weeks) using structured questionnaires that captured socio-economic and demographic information, nutrition-related data, and measurements of anthropometrics and hemoglobin concentrations. The intervention included individual counseling and the distribution of MNP brochures during clinic visits. Descriptive statistics, chi-square tests, and one-way ANOVA were performed using IBM SPSS Version 26. Results showed significant changes in several indicators post-intervention: moderate anemia in children decreased from 64.7% at baseline to 59.5% at endline, with marginal decreases in severe anemia and slight improvements in weight-for-height and weight-for-age indicators, though height-for-age remained largely unchanged. The ANOVA results revealed variations in hemoglobin levels correlated with MNP intake, with those receiving moderate MNP showing the highest mean hemoglobin levels. The study concludes that MNP distribution programs should incorporate educational components to enhance compliance and effectiveness. Future strategies should consider appropriate dosing and consistent intake tailored to community-specific needs, alongside more holistic public health nutrition programs that address food security, water, sanitation, and mainstream health initiatives for sustained child health improvement. Further research is recommended to explore factors affecting long-term adherence and the intervention's impact across different settings to inform more precise public health strategies.

Muslim political dissent in coastal East Africa: complexities, ambiguities, entanglements

ABSTRACT This article stages a comparative analysis of Muslim politics in coastal Kenya and Tanzania between 2010 and 2023. We explore parallels, discontinuities, and entanglements between different expressions of – and responses to – Muslim political dissent. Our insights are drawn from ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Dar es Salaam, Malindi, and Zanzibar City. We begin by investigating a sharp rise of militant jihadi activity across the region, examining responses by Kenyan, Tanzanian, and U.S. governments, as well as the perceptions of ordinary Muslim citizens. We then explore currents of Muslim civic activism, highlighting the different claims, sentiments, and memories that these movements invoke. Merging these discussions, we analyse episodes of civil unrest and violence that are associated with Muslim dissenters, but which are shrouded with uncertainty. We examine the shifting interpretive frames that Muslim residents apply to these events. We demonstrate how these uncertainties and framing practices, alongside state security strategies, impact the capacity for Muslims at large to engage in political dissent. Using our analysis, we argue that forms of Muslim political expression in coastal East Africa, though comparable and sometimes entangled, must be interpreted with close attention to the distinct experiences, demographic configurations, and political landscapes that characterise different (sub-)national contexts.

Modeling direct above-ground carbon loss due to urban expansion in Zanzibar City Region, Tanzania

Abstract Expansion of urban fabric on carbon storages is estimated to cause loss of 1.38 Pg of Above-Ground Carbon (AGC) in pan-tropics between 2000 and 2030. This would be approximately 5% of all emissions caused by tropical land use changes. Despite the significance of the phenomenon, these emissions are rarely measured, monitored, or addressed in climate change mitigation plans, especially in Sub-Saharan Africa. Therefore, we demonstrated a state-of-the-art approach predicting AGC loss of Zanzibar City Region under multiple alternative urban planning scenarios between 2013 and 2030. The AGC information was modeled based on field measured forest inventory sample plots and RapidEye satellite data from 2013, while the future urban expansion model was calibrated with data of happened expansion between 2004, 2009 and 2013, and geospatial independent variables influencing the expansion patterns. This model was then projected until 2030, while alternative urban planning scenarios were integrated to the model by modifying the geospatial variables. The combination of these two models indicates that 42,000 Mg or 15% of total AGC in Zanzibar City Region can be anticipated to be lost by 2030 due to urban expansion. Majority of the loss will take place in the agroforest and fruit tree plantations surrounding the city, while natural forest face limited impacts. None of the tested alternative urban planning scenarios significantly impact the loss of AGC compared to the business-as-usual scenario. Therefore, alternative policies and plans are seriously needed to address the issue in Zanzibar. These could include promoting urban densification, directing urban expansion to low carbon areas, improving soil carbon management, and preparing an urban forestry and greenery strategy. All in all, the study indicates that data and methods are available for monitoring and predicting the phenomenon in Sub-Saharan Africa. Research based on a comparable methodology should be produced from all the main cities in the region that are surrounded by significant carbon storages and facing high urban expansion rates to support climate change mitigation.

Modeling direct above-ground carbon loss due to urban expansion in Zanzibar City Region, Tanzania

Expansion of urban fabric on carbon storages is estimated to cause loss of 1.38 Pg of Above-Ground Carbon (AGC) in pan-tropics between 2000 and 2030. This would be approximately 5% of all emissions caused by tropical land use changes. Despite the significance of the phenomenon, these emissions are rarely measured, monitored, or addressed in climate change mitigation plans, especially in Sub-Saharan Africa. Therefore, we demonstrated a state-of-the-art approach predicting AGC loss of Zanzibar City Region under multiple alternative urban planning scenarios between 2013 and 2030. The AGC information was modeled based on field measured forest inventory sample plots and RapidEye satellite data from 2013, while the future urban expansion model was calibrated with data of happened expansion between 2004, 2009 and 2013, and geospatial independent variables influencing the expansion patterns. This model was then projected until 2030, while alternative urban planning scenarios were integrated to the model by modifying the geospatial variables. The combination of these two models indicates that 42,000 Mg or 15% of total AGC in Zanzibar City Region can be anticipated to be lost by 2030 due to urban expansion. Majority of the loss will take place in the agroforest and fruit tree plantations surrounding the city, while natural forest face limited impacts. None of the tested alternative urban planning scenarios significantly impact the loss of AGC compared to the business-as-usual scenario. Therefore, alternative policies and plans are seriously needed to address the issue in Zanzibar. These could include promoting urban densification, directing urban expansion to low carbon areas, improving soil carbon management, and preparing an urban forestry and greenery strategy. All in all, the study indicates that data and methods are available for monitoring and predicting the phenomenon in Sub-Saharan Africa. Research based on a comparable methodology should be produced from all the main cities in the region that are surrounded by significant carbon storages and facing high urban expansion rates to support climate change mitigation.

Spatial modelling of cumulative human pressure in the tropical coastscape of Zanzibar, Tanzania

Coastal landscapes and seascapes (‘coastscapes’) are under immense anthropogenic pressures emanating from multiple human activities. We applied spatial modelling to characterise the cumulative pressures in the coastscape of Zanzibar’s main island Unguja (hereafter Zanzibar), in the western Indian Ocean. We modified the European Union’s list of the human pressures in this context, conjointly covering Zanzibar’s marine and terrestrial environments. We applied a widely accepted algorithm for modelling cumulative human pressure. Spatial data were gathered from various sources and, where primary data were absent, model results were used as proxies. We used a hexagon lattice with a resolution of 0.5 km2 to map the anthropogenic pressures within the coastscape. Five typologies of coastscape were identified. A total of 283.55 km (68.86%) of the island’s coastscape is under moderate to high anthropogenic pressure, while the remaining 128.06 km (31.14%) is under low to moderate pressure. Cumulative human pressures are highest in the urbanised coastal areas, especially Zanzibar City, and in the growth zones. Principal components analysis was used to further explore the coexistence of separate human pressures and their contributions to the cumulative human pressure. Predominant pressures within the coastscape were litter, noise, the introduction of synthetic compounds, and inputs of organic matter. We recommend the use of these results for coastal-zone management in Zanzibar and for prioritisation of the management efforts.

Voices of torture survivors in Tanzania: A qualitative study.

No published research has been found on torture in Tanzania, but individual cases were documented by human rights organisations. The aim of this study was to explore the salient physical, mental and social effects of torture in the country, and help-seeking behaviour by giving voice to a group of torture survivors in Dar-es-Salaam and Zanzibar City (Zanzibar). This explorative qualitative study consisted of 14 semi-structured in-depth interviews (12 males, 2 females) of which eight took place in Dar-es-Salaam and six in Zanzibar. Informants were selected purposefully through a mix of snowball and convenience sampling. Both the Standards for Reporting Qualitative Research (SRQR) and the Consolidated Criteria for Reporting Qualitative Research (COREQ) were followed. Using the UNCAT definition of torture, all informants reported having been tortured within the past two years. The most common form of torture was beating with clubs to the joints. Other torture included, but was not limited to, gun shot, toenail removal and 'poulet roti'. The most common physical consequence was persistent pain. Psychological consequences included suicidal ideation and sleep problems. Most interviewees lost their jobs as a result of the torture incident, instigating a cascade of financial and social problems. The findings present informants' exposure to deliberate torture at the hands of public authorities. Informants confirmed their exposure to torture methods that had been previously reported by nongovernmental organisations. They also talked about exposure to more advanced, and previously undocumented, torture methods. Informants displayed a dire need for mental and physical health care, but had limited access to such care. Research is needed to better understand the magnitude, prevalence and context of torture in Tanzania.

Habitat Characteristics For Immature Stages of Aedes aegypti In Zanzibar City, Tanzania.

Aedesaegypti is the main vector for dengue, chikungunya, yellow fever, Zika, and other arboviruses of public health importance. The presence of Ae. aegypti has never been systematically assessed in Zanzibar, including its preferred larval habitats. In 2016 we conducted a cross-sectional entomological survey to describe the preferred larval habitats of Ae. aegypti in Zanzibar City, the main urban area of the Zanzibar archipelago. The surveys for container habitats were conducted for a 17-wk period beginning in January 2016. Immature stages (larvae and pupae) were collected, reared to adulthood, and identified to species. The positive and potential habitats were categorized on the basis of physical, biological, and chemical parameters. A total of 200 samples were collected, of which 124 (62.0%) were positive for immature stages of mosquitoes and 114 (92%) for Ae. aegypti larvae and pupae. Presence of vegetation (odds ratio [OR] = 2.11, 95% confidence interval [CI] = 1.19-3.74), organic matter (OR = 2.37, 95% CI = 1.21-4.60), inorganic matter (OR = 1.78, 95% CI = 1.01-3.13), and sun exposure (OR = 2.34, 95% CI = 1.24-4.36) were all significantly associated with the presence of immature stages of Ae. aegypti, suggesting that these conditions promote colonization of containers. Plastic containers supported 64% of the immature stages and produced approximately 50% of the pupae. Although immature counts were the highest in discarded artifacts, higher pupal counts were found in domestic water storage containers. Our observations suggest that effective control of Ae. aegypti in Zanzibar City must include improved solid waste management (collection and proper disposal of potential container habitats) and reliable supply of domestic water to minimize water-storing practices that provide larval habitats for Ae. aegypti.

Urban expansion in Zanzibar City, Tanzania: Analyzing quantity, spatial patterns and effects of alternative planning approaches

Rapid urbanization and urban area expansion of sub-Saharan Africa are megatrends of the 21st century. Addressing environmental and social problems related to these megatrends requires faster and more efficient urban planning that is based on measured information of the expansion patterns. Urban growth prediction models (UGPMs) provide tools for generating such information by predicting future urban expansion patterns and allowing testing of alternative planning scenarios. We created an UGPM for Zanzibar City in Tanzania by measuring urban expansion in 2004–2009 and 2009–2013, linking the expansion to explanatory variables with a generalized additive model, measuring the accuracy of the created model, and projecting urban growth until 2030 with the business-as-usual and various alternative planning scenarios. Based on the results, the urban area of Zanzibar City expanded by 40% from 2004 to 2013. Spatial patterns of expansion were largely driven by the already existing building pattern and land-use constraints. The created model predicted future urban expansion moderately well and had an area under the curve value of 0.855 and a true skill statistic result of 0.568. Based on the business-as-usual scenario, the city will expand 89% from 2013 until 2030 and will continue to sprawl to new regions at the outskirts of the current built-up area. Establishing new urban centers had the highest impact on directing urban expansion from the tested alternative planning scenarios. However, the impact of all scenarios was low and therefore also other planning solutions such as vertical development, urban growth boundaries, and gradual improvement of the informal areas should be considered in Zanzibar.

Producing a World of Remains in Indian Ocean Africa: Discrepant Time, Melancholy Affect and the Subject of Transport in Capital Art Studio, Stone Town, Zanzibar

ABSTRACTThis article reads a photographic studio and the visual archive compiled therein of the stone town of Zanzibar City. Capital Art Studio is analysed as negotiating the fraught interface between the Indian Ocean world and continental Africa in both the 1950s and again after the revolution in nationalist and neoliberal eras. The article explores the ways in which the studio produces discrepant temporalities to both the heritage industry currently reconstructing Stone Town and that emerging from other photographic studios of the postcolonial world, which extend surfaces for ludic forms of self-fashioning by which their subjects. In striking contrast, Capital Art Studio articulates a visual idiom that re-calls a time in which Zanzibar was an ‘island metropolis’ while simultaneously refusing the heritage industry’s consignment of this time to the past. This articulation and refusal is rendered through a visual idiom of transport or in the re-presentation of Stone Town as melancholy palimpsest. Both convey into a present framed by a neoliberal global order a past that was ambivalently both cosmopolitan and commodifying.

Peri-Urban Land Reform, Political-Economic Reform, and Urban Political Ecology in Zanzibar

The rapid urbanization of land in the peri-urban West District surrounding Zanzibar city in Tanzania has occurred during a 20-year period of political and economic reform, with related reforms in the land sector. Utilizing 2006 and 2007 interviews with officials and residents alongside document and archival research, this study examines two themes in relation to Zanzibar's most prominent program of contemporary land reform, a Finnish-funded project for the Sustainable Management of Lands and Environment (SMOLE). These themes entail: (1) the importance of the historical-cultural geography of peri-urban land dynamics for dual reform (simultaneous political and economic reform) processes in Africa; and (2) the critique of pro-poor, neoliberal land reform for the disjunctures between its rhetoric, actual planning practice, and the beliefs and practices of the peri-urban poor, wherein we discover a lack of participation, transparency, or democracy in the land sector. The article's broader aim is to contribute a detailed African case study to urban political ecology's efforts to argue for democratization of the construction of social environments.

Protecting Privacy in Foreign Fields

********** The one by whom the abject exists is thus a deject who places (himself), separates (himself), and therefore strays instead of getting his bearings, desiring, belonging, or refusing.... Necessarily dichotomous, somewhat Manichean, he divides, excludes, and without, properly speaking, wishing to know his abjections is not at all unaware of them. Often, moreover, he includes himself among them, thus within himself the scalpel that carries out his separations. Julia Kristeva, 1982 And you may find yourself in another part of the world And you may ask yourself well, how did I get here? Talking Heads, Once in a Lifetime, 1980 Privacy is an ambivalent and multifaceted question when fieldwork is conducted in Africa by a non-African scholar. Assuming that the researcher makes a conscious and political choice to live among the people whose thoughts, lives, and cultural practices are being studied, the first great difficulty appears to be protecting private space and a sense of self. Shortly, though, additional questions arise about the privacy rights of others in our conduct of research and our writing about it. Each side of the privacy issue is complicated. In this essay I examine privacy questions that I experienced on various projects in Tanzania and Malawi from 1991 to 2000, most of them in the city of Zanzibar. I start, as does fieldwork, by examining myself. A number of geographers have become captivated by the opportunities opened up to humanistic geographical inquiry by various modes of psychoanalysis (Pile 1993; Bondi 1999). I do not wish to sidestep these opportunities entirely, but I also do not want to make this essay entirely about what goes on in my head, as Julia Kristeva does in the lead epigraph, mainly because I hope I am a better storyteller than a psychoanalyst. Still, fieldwork for Western-trained academics is foremost a private, inner exploration. Kwame Anthony Appiah distinguished the general strategy of Western fiction writers from that of African writers, suggesting that westerners engage in a search for the whereas African writers embark on a search for a culture (1992, 74). His conception, generalized though it is, also works to differentiate the Western field-worker, as bourgeois intellectual individualist, from how he or she appears to the surrounding city-dwellers or villagers, as a new player in a social collective. Selfishness is inherent in individuated Western fieldwork in non-Western settings, an arrogant assumption that somehow one person develops explanatory powers. One quickly learns that selfishness must give way to a sharing, an open-ended identity enmeshed in a community. This giving way of self, however, also has its limits. Certainly I have felt there were parts of my soul that I needed to hold privately out of the field of play in fieldwork. To negotiate the boundaries between selfishness and selflessness addresses how I go about casting within [my]self the scalpel that carries out [my] separations as Kristeva put it (1982, 8). The literal translation of the Swahili word used to describe a white person, mzungu (pl. wazungu), is stranger. As one of two wazungu in the Kikwajuni ward of Zanzibar city in 1991 and 1992, the stranger label remained mine until I was known by my middle name, Andrew, by what sometimes seemed to be all 4,000 people in the ward. Children were especially fond of calling out Andrew! as I walked by or rode through the alleys on my bike, and I grew fond of their voices. In ordinary life identity is, to a considerable degree, a gendered performance (Butler 1997, 258). Although we cannot control entirely how those who see us performing interpret the performance, at most times what appears outwardly is an installation of what we inwardly deem an acceptable appearance, beyond our unconscious selves: It is an act. In foreign field experiences, totally immersed in another language, this can be a performance I feel I am watching, an out-of-body experience. …

Political ecology and urbanisation: Zanzibar's construction materials industry

In the 1990s, there has been a marked upsurge in scholarly and practical interest in the relationships between urban development and environmental protection in Africa. It is apparent that analyses which take simultaneous account of economic, political and environmental aspects of urban development issues are an essential and yet under-represented facet of this upsurge. This article argues for a regional political ecology approach to African urban environmental issues, as a means of addressing the intertwined impacts of neo-liberalism, democratisation and environmentalism in African cities. The construction and materials supply industry in Zanzibar city serves as an empirical referent.

A Stupendous Hammer: Colonial and Post-colonial Reconstructions of Zanzibar's Other Side

Ng'ambo is the historic Other Side of Zanzibar city. The last 50 years have brought two attempts to demolish Ng'ambo and replace it with spaces designed to express the dominance of the state. Differences at first appear to be large between colonial and post-colonial Zanzibar. Yet these reconstructions shared similar objectives, failures and consequences. This paper highlights commonalities between the two projects and ties them to three themes from the literature of colonial cities in Africa concerning colonial urban planning and its post-colonial legacy. These themes include: the bureaucratisation and centralisation of power; the manipulation of space as a means of fostering hegemony; and the alienation of residents from the planning process.

Making the Socialist City of Zanzibar

The urban-planning strategy of the revolutionary government for the Ng'ambo neighborhoods of Zanzibar City was dominated by a grand vision. Ng'ambo, which literally means Other Side, was slated to become the physical embodiment of the revolution's social experiment. However, the socialist grand vision fared no better in Zanzibar than did its weaker version on the Tanzanian mainland in creating an egalitarian urbanism. Specifically, I examine the attempted reconstruction of Ng'ambo as a vast public-housing project, which was the principal urban program and most enduring legacy of the revolutionary era (1964 to 1977). I contend that this program was not so much a means of bettering Ng'ambo for its residents as it was a way for revolutionary elites to define the area in their new ideological framework of understanding. Denied participation in official planning channels, Ng'ambo residents utilized their own customs and practices to remake the area as best they could, albeit under a set of authoritarian constraints. This study of the Zanzibari socialist experiment in its urban-geographical dimension contributes to the expanding literature on the political and ideological content of cultural landscapes (Western 1985; Constantin 1987; Roweis 1988; Duncan 1990). My interpretation of the Zanzibar cityscape differs from that in several previous studies (Martin 1978; Clayton 1981; Sheriff and Ferguson 1991). The premise is that it is necessary both to understand how the state has utilized space in tactics and strategies deployed through implantations, distributions, demarcations, control of territories and organization of domains (Foucault 1980, 77) and to examine how the residents of Ng'ambo used urban space in political and cultural expression. SOCIALIST URBAN PLANNING IN ZANZIBAR A practical question is whether the program of urban development for Zanzibar between 1964 and 1977 was really socialist. A socialist development program should have five characteristics: state ownership of means of production, absence of a free market for land and real estate, a centrally planned economy, effective one-party rule, and socialist goals prominent in public and state documents (Forbes and Thrift 1987, 2). The stress on common socialist goals in urban policy should involve both a redistribution of goods and services to create egalitarian cities and a decentralization of urbanization to prevent primate-city dominance of the urban hierarchy and to promote regional, rather than specific urban, growth. Socialist goals in the city have obviously varied somewhat according to regime, but the five listed above have broad application. According to these characteristics Tanzania was a marginal example of third-world socialism, because of the steep rise in overall urbanization and the tremendous growth of Dar es Salaam, the primate city of the country. This categorization of Tanzanian socialist experimentation dovetails with other, more detailed critiques (Hill 1975; Shivji 1976; Samoff 1979, 1982; Saul 1979; Coulson 1982). Under ujamaa, the collective term for Tanzanian socialist policies, urban policy called for the establishment of eight regional-growth centers to redistribute and balance development between urban and rural areas (Freund 1989). At best ujamaa was wishful thinking, and at worst a co-optation of socialism as a strategy through which the bureaucratic party elite controlled the economy for their own benefit (Shivji 1976; Mueller 1980). However, these critiques may not be relevant to Zanzibar. The mixture of autonomously derived policies that Abeid Amani Karume, the first president of Zanzibar, adopted seemingly hewed much more closely to the mainstream of socialist planning than was the case on the mainland. Centralized planning and proclamation of socialist goals were accomplished within a year of his taking power. The first postcolonial master plan for Zanzibar City was written by a planning team from the German Democratic Republic (GDR) in 1968; the second was produced by a team from the People's Republic of China. …

EUROCENTRISM AND AFRICAN URBANIZATION: THE CASE OF ZANZIBAR'S OTHER SIDE

ABSTRACTSA number of geographers have recently championed the struggle against Eurocentric theoretical categorizations in geographical research on African cities. At the same time, many whose work has concentrated on African urban geography have felt left out in the more abstract theoretical debates of their colleagues based in the West. I argue for the possibility of confronting Western bias and contributing to broader theoretical debates by creating theoretical constructs derived from the African experience. I develop my argument through an analysis of urban development in Ng'ambo, the African “Other Side” of Zanzibar city, and work toward the creation of meso‐level conceptual guides for understanding Ng'ambo's development derived from the ideas of Ng'ambo residents themselves.

An Exorcism in Zanzibar: Insights into Groups from Another Culture

Imagine, if you would, a bare concrete building in one of the less desirable areas of Zanzibar City. A woman is sitting on the earth in the middle of the main room, with a black cloth over her head and upper trunk. She is surrounded by a closely pressed crowd of women chanting and clapping sticks in rhythm to a ground bass from three musicians who are sitting by one wall. In front of her are a group of men who are more detached from the proceedings than the women, but who are also occasionally chanting and throwing in comments. One of the men appears to be in a trance with sweat standing out on his face and rigid muscles. He occasionally makes strange moaning sounds or whirls round in a striking, melodramatic gesture. Two or three of the other men take a more active part in leading the chanting from time to time, and one of them, who is sitting in front of the woman, addresses a string of sotto voce remarks to her, clicking away near her ears with what looks like a giant pair of scissors.

The General Strike in Zanzibar, 1948

This article examines a three-week long strike in Zanzibar City in August and September 1948. The strike began among labourers from the mainland at work in Zanzibar port, but spread to all African work-people in the City after an unsuccessful attempt to break the strike by the government. This attempt had led to a major demonstration and confrontation at the entrance to the port, violence being only narrowly averted.While at one level the strike was a Zanzibar sequel to the strikes of the previous year in Mombasa and Dar es Salaam, in Zanzibar there was additional significance in the fact that the City and Island's work-force were in very large proportion men from the East African mainland. Zanzibar's dependence on mainland labour had begun in the early decades of the twentieth century. In those years mainland labour had been particularly well-paid, by the standards of the time. By the late 1940s however, mainland labour in Zanzibar was as poor as, perhaps poorer than, its mainland counterparts. Besides, the political structure of the Protectorate aggravated sentiments of alienation since mainlanders were not regarded as permanent residents for whom the government should have any particular concern: nor were mainlanders represented in the legislature.Even after the strike was over the colonial authorities saw only a need for labour reforms rather than political re-structuring to accommodate mainlanders. The strike however had briefly united all Africans, indigenous and mainlander. When, a decade later, this unity of Africans, mainlander and indigenous, town and plantation labourer and peasant, was re-formed, revolution followed. As a portent, therefore, Zanzibar's strike is of particular significance.