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Stone Town, where Freddie Mercury was born.

On any well-organized trip, after going to Tanzania, you’re taken for a couple of days to the heavenly island of Zanzibar. There classes are still noticeable. The rich on their honeymoon are taken to the luxury spas in air-conditioned cars. Those who go to a camping site are crowded together in a van and driven to a collection of seedy cabins next to the spa. In the end, the sea doesn’t make any distinctions: it’s the same color for everybody, so things aren’t so bad. Still, all the others get here by plane. We, instead, wanting to feel integrated, took the local ferry, lurching from side to side and getting nudged by all the races in the world. It’s a madness we do not recommend in the least. Since we can’t stay still, we don’t lose a minute lying down on the hammocks. We’ve rented a vespa to travel around the island, like we were in a Fellini movie shot in the tropics or something.

Zanzibar is across from Tanganyika, a nation with which, despite having little in common, they decided to unite a few decades ago and form Tanzania. In fact, in spite of advertising themselves as one country, they are still two very different peoples, each one with its own parliament and government. The capital is also called Zanzibar, although everyone knows it by the name Stone Town. The jewel is a little neighborhood with narrow streets, palaces now difficult to see but famous because they were built with coral. The walls are so porous that air goes through them, keeping the interior cool in spite of the tropical heat. But that’s only the inside, because outside the streets are a mess. The ground is full of trash, and people lean against doorways without anything better to do than to pester tourists saying, “Jambo, jambo”.

It’s hard to believe they haven’t been told that the worst of all commercial formulas is to plague tourists. If half of the energy they spend harassing us was used cleaning the streets and whitewashing their houses, they would have a charming city, people would love to stay longer and spend more money. But no, these guys lie around like lions in the sun. The scene isn’t new. We’ve seen it in many places. In India, the excuse we were given was amazing: There are animals that eat from human scraps, because nature makes use of everything, and, therefore, if we were to stop throwing trash on the ground we would disrupt the food chain. To them, throwing their shit out the window is the ultimate in ecology. Fed up with stepping on excrements and pushy charlatans, Pedro stepped on a cardboard box and in a few seconds some locals approached to listen to his improvised lecture. Their answer, though logical, is appalling. There is a street cleaner for this. If he doesn’t do his job properly it’s his fault, not theirs.

We Westerners can do two things: either we look away because “we don’t have any right to judge their culture” or we tell them what we think, loud and clear, even though they might give us a dirty look. But not only do we not tell them what we think, we give them awards like UNESCO’s World Heritage. If it were up to us, we’d take it away from them because of the filth. Maybe then they would take care of the place like God, Allah or Vishnu says. And the day they do, we will be the first ones to vote for their being given award, primarily because here a king was born, or actually a queen. Freddie Mercury belonged to a caste of Indians descending from ancient Persians, the Parsis. Some of them settled in Africa in the 19th century, bringing with them customs even more eccentric than the singer’s costumes. When these people die, their corpses are not buried or cremated, but exposed on the roofs of their houses and devoured by ravens. If they do that with people they love, just imagine how they treat a tetrabrik or plastic bag. What they do is throw it out the window for the rats to eat. Hakuna matata and let others worry about cleaning up, because if UNESCO has given us an award, we must not be doing so badly.