Light — how we perceive the world around us — is an integral, emotive architectural element. Access to light is enhanced and limited in an architectural capacity globally, with architects of expensive tropical dwellings celebrating sunny vistas with expansive glazing, while a wide range of art galleries reject light in its natural form, eliminating it in adherence to the sensitive exhibit requirements of art pieces. Light in an architectural and urban sense is also highly symbolic, evident in the many metropolises of our world, but where this symbolism takes on an interesting dimension is in the archipelago of Zanzibar.
Zanzibar’s urban fabric houses, to say the least, an assortment of architectural styles, influences, and approaches, many of these interlinked. The Stone Town area in Zanzibar City is world-famous — a UNESCO World Heritage Site, and a settlement of historical cultural and economic exchange. The Ng’ambo area is less of a household name, home to the city’s newer buildings, with a sprawling history of its own, but a history that is very much intertwined with that of Stone Town. Within these two urban nodes are examples of the many narratives created through light, or a lack of it, in an architectural context — some of the power, some of the repression, and some of the mundane and everyday.
By the mid-19th century, Zanzibar was a wealthy state. It served as a hub for international commerce, where maritime routes linking to India and the Persian Gulf were taken full advantage of, merchants trading in cloves, ivory — and enslaved people. As Zanzibar continued to grow into a commercial empire, with wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, Stone Town had, for its time, the components of a modern city. Oil streetlights were installed by 1870, and by 1906, imported electric lights were an unmissable feature in Stone Town. The Sultan of that period — Barghash bin Said — wholly embraced and propagated this as a marker of modernity, as royal buildings were illuminated utilizing a nearby power station, and artificial light, powered by electricity functioned as a symbol of progress and prosperity.
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Carlo Scarpa: The Master of Sculpture and LightThe eclectic architectural style of Stone Town’s Christ Church Anglican Cathedral is a popular draw for tourists, topped by a distinctive barrel-vaulted roof. Completed in 1879, this place of worship is connected to exploitation and agony — as it sits on the site of what was the island’s largest slave trading market. The remnants of a slave-trading era are present there today, and what is immediately apparent in these remnants is how the absence of light amplified human physical and psychological suffering.
The slave cellars, now below a guesthouse, were where enslaved people were forced in for days at a time, in advance of being sent out to the auction block. The low roof heightened a stifling, suffocating, atmosphere, and crucially the lack of light — with only small rectangular slits pierced through the walls — must have magnified a disorienting state. This limiting of light is deliberately carceral, a spatial approach of ruthless mistreatment that was part and parcel of the Indian Ocean Slave Trade.
Moving from the oppressive into the domestic, the architectural typology of Zanzibar City, specifically in Ng’ambo, features the gentle, accommodating, limiting of daylight — where the threshold between public and private space is made clear by the provision of a baraza, that takes the form of a stone bench or a recess in a dwelling. Some of these recesses create what is essentially a covered balcony, where harsh sunlight is repelled, and privacy is maintained in what functions as an extension of a house’s internal spaces, and what can be interpreted as a version of a mashrabiya.
Shops, of course, do not have this covered balcony condition, as enterprises looking to invite the public. Stores that have appropriated the residential typology feature the welcome overhang of a corrugated iron roof, delineating between the street that is open to the elements, and attempting to provide a comfortable environment for the many conversations that make up a transaction.
Zanzibar is, in effect, a microcosm of the many meanings we draw from how light is spatially deployed in urban centers. Light as innovation and development, resisting the night sky; light — the absence of it — in service of subjugation; light — the mild restriction of tropical sun — in service of communal comfort.
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