During a recent swing through Zanzibar's Stone Town (a UNESCO Heritage Site), I happened upon this sign outside one of the houses:
Residence of the famous Arab trader Hamed B. Muhammad Al-Marjebi (Tipu Tip) who built up a large trading empire in the Eastern Congo in the 19th Century. With Belgian Colonization of the Congo he returned to Zanzibar where he acquired many clove plantations and built his house. He died in Zanzibar in 1905 and is buried nearby.
Considering that the sign seems to have been placed on the house by UNESCO, I found it notable for its evasiveness and contribution to revisionist history and general ignorance.
Tipu Tip was indeed famous. His men led Henry Morton Stanley to Dr. Livingstone. According to Charles Miller in The Lunatic Express, Stanley described Tipu Tip in glowing terms:
He was a tall, black-bearded man of negroid complexion, in the prime of life, straight, and quick in his movements, a picture of energy and strength. He had a fine, intelligent face . . . the air of a well-bred Arab and [was] courtier-like in his manner . . . . I came to the conclusion that he was a remarkable man, the most remarkable man that I had met among the Arabs, Wa-Swahili and half-castes in Africa.
(p. 49.) But Tipu Tip was not merely famous for his good looks, wit and manners, nor were his clove plantations the source of his notoriety. Rather, in Miller's words, Tipu Tip
was the Rockefeller-Croesus of the slave industry; the wealth he amassed in the quarter century during which he milked a region half the size of Europe of its people will never be measured. (The volume he handled, though, is suggested by the size of his caravans; some consisted of two thousand porters and one thousand armed guards.) . . . . [Tipu Tip] was always prepared, of course, to field any questions designed to shame his profession. A favorite rejoinder to missionary critics was that Abraham and Jacob had been slave owners. Once, when a European reproached him for rescuing an African village from a cannibal raid and then enslaving his beneficiaries, he shrugged his shoulders and replied: "Which would you rather be, a slave or a meal?"
(p. 49-50.)
While I appreciate that no one has ever accused UNESCO staff of cracking a book, I nonetheless charge the agency with the responsibility to do enough research to call a slave trader a slave trader. What's the point of a "World Heritage Site" if the stink of that heritage's shit is perfumed over with cloves by the time visitors arrive?
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