Paradise lost

The hotel next door to us has just changed hands to become an all inclusive italian resort, complete with animateurs and a terrible shit disco. And it's all private property now. Yup, I can no longer cross their patch of beach to go to work, i gotta walk around their property. The masai security guards are evidently unhappy about this unAfrican custom they're being asked to enforce and sheepishly ask you to leave - it seems to go against every bone in their body to take land that belongs to everybody and make it into the private domain of ignorant and spoilt tourists.

But all along, the beach it's the same story. Local artists who scrimp a living in their shacks along the beach are being told at gunpoint to clear off or see their livelihood burnt down. No reason given but evidently these locals who have lived on this beach for generations are a "nuisance" to the tourists who want to fly halfway across the world in order not to leave their hotel. Greedy developers are hungrily eyeing their land, which legally belongs to everyone but as is so often the case, will soon come under the relentless steps of privatisation and "free market capitalism." Some paradise.

Driving around the island has really made me realise how out of control the development is here. Zanzibar is being carved up into small sections of walled concrete, locals being driven from their traditional homes. In Jozani forest, a local nature reserve, I learnt that if every tourist who comes to Zanzibar eats just one lobster or crab, that's 63,000 crabs or lobsters a year. How long is this sustainable? Everyday I see reefs being agressively overfished as the demand for seafood escalates but noone's thinking about tomorrow.

You could argue that tourism is good for the economy and sure, a lot of people do find employment in the tourist trade. Driving around the more touristy spots, you could be forgiven for thinking that Zanzibaris enjoy a reasonable standard of living: houses are well built from bricks, not just wooden shacks. But stray off the path a little and you'll find farmers struggling to make a living. As we learnt on a tour of a local spice farm, not too long ago Zanzibar was self-sufficient and bountiful, noone paid for food, you just went to the fields and took your fill. Now on the ill-thought out advice of the World Bank, farmers are told to grow only export crops, the price of which is being driven down and down by unfair free market policies. I was invited to a local home in the village here in Kendwa last night, to the house of the well-to-do old man - I was surprised to see that even here, in a village which does much better than most from the tourist trade, not a single house had electricity or running water.

The average waiter here makes about $100/month, working 10 hour shifts, 6 days a week. Meanwhile wealthy hotel owners and frequently foreign investors watch the money flow into their hands. It's the vacuum cleaner effect of deregulated capitalism, sucking the wealth out of an area and making people trespassers on their own land.

Okay, so that's my rant. Rebuttals welcome.