Zanzibar Swingers

I’d say that Wimbledon is as good an excuse as any to post the above photo of three young Swahili women with tennis racquets. I came across it while researching a post about Kanga, the cloths many African women wear that are printed with sayings.

Now I guess this might be called a match made on Google, because by some weird coincidence, shortly after finding the Zanzibar maidens, I came across their unlikely partners (across time and space) for “mixed-triples” in the photo below. It was taken in 1943 in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, where these young men were secretly processing the uranium-235 used the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima. 

But back to Tanzania, here are a few photos from the Zanzibar National Archive. 

A Makunduchi girl with coir ready to be spun into rope.