Changuu
Encyclopedia
Stone Town
Stone Town also known as Mji Mkongwe is the old part of Zanzibar City, the main city of Zanzibar, in Tanzania, as opposed to Ng'ambo . It is located on the western coast of Unguja, the main island of the Zanzibar Archipelago...
, Unguja
Unguja
Unguja as mentioned in The Periplus of the Erythraean Sea is the largest and most populated island of Zanzibar, in Tanzania.-Geography:...
, Zanzibar
Zanzibar
Zanzibar ,Persian: زنگبار, from suffix bār: "coast" and Zangi: "bruin" ; is a semi-autonomous part of Tanzania, in East Africa. It comprises the Zanzibar Archipelago in the Indian Ocean, off the coast of the mainland, and consists of numerous small islands and two large ones: Unguja , and Pemba...
. The island is around 880 yards (804.7 m) long and 250 yards (228.6 m) wide at its broadest point. The island saw use as a prison for rebellious slaves in 1860s and also functioned as a coral
Coral
Corals are marine animals in class Anthozoa of phylum Cnidaria typically living in compact colonies of many identical individual "polyps". The group includes the important reef builders that inhabit tropical oceans and secrete calcium carbonate to form a hard skeleton.A coral "head" is a colony of...
mine. The British
United Kingdom
The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern IrelandIn the United Kingdom and Dependencies, other languages have been officially recognised as legitimate autochthonous languages under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages...
First Minister
First Minister
A First Minister is the leader of a government cabinet.-Canada:In Canada, "First Ministers" is a collective term that refers to all Canadian first ministers of the Crown, otherwise known as heads of government, including the Prime Minister of Canada and the provincial and territorial premiers...
of Zanzibar, Lloyd Mathews
Lloyd Mathews
Sir Lloyd William Mathews KCMG, CB was a British naval officer, politician and abolitionist. Mathews joined the Royal Navy as a cadet at the age of 13 and progressed through the ranks to lieutenant. He was involved with the Third Anglo-Ashanti War of 1873–4, afterwards being stationed in...
, purchased the island in 1893 and constructed a prison complex there. No prisoners were ever housed on the island and instead it became a quarantine
Quarantine
Quarantine is compulsory isolation, typically to contain the spread of something considered dangerous, often but not always disease. The word comes from the Italian quarantena, meaning forty-day period....
station for yellow fever
Yellow fever
Yellow fever is an acute viral hemorrhagic disease. The virus is a 40 to 50 nm enveloped RNA virus with positive sense of the Flaviviridae family....
cases. The station was only occupied for around half of the year and the rest of the time it was a popular holiday destination. More recently the island has become a government-owned tourist resort and houses a collection of endangered Aldabra Giant Tortoise
Aldabra Giant Tortoise
The Aldabra giant tortoise , from the islands of the Aldabra Atoll in the Seychelles, is one of the largest tortoises in the world....
s which were originally a gift from the British
United Kingdom
The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern IrelandIn the United Kingdom and Dependencies, other languages have been officially recognised as legitimate autochthonous languages under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages...
governor of the Seychelles
Seychelles
Seychelles , officially the Republic of Seychelles , is an island country spanning an archipelago of 115 islands in the Indian Ocean, some east of mainland Africa, northeast of the island of Madagascar....
.
History
Changuu is named after the SwahiliSwahili language
Swahili or Kiswahili is a Bantu language spoken by various ethnic groups that inhabit several large stretches of the Mozambique Channel coastline from northern Kenya to northern Mozambique, including the Comoro Islands. It is also spoken by ethnic minority groups in Somalia...
name of a fish which is common in the seas around it, though it is shown as Kibandiko Island on some older maps, but this name is no longer used. The island was uninhabited until 1860s when the first Sultan of Zanzibar, Majid bin Said
Majid bin Said of Zanzibar
Sayyid Majid bin Said Al-Busaid was the first Sultan of Zanzibar. He ruled Zanzibar from October 19, 1856 to October 7, 1870....
, gave it to two Arab
Arab
Arab people, also known as Arabs , are a panethnicity primarily living in the Arab world, which is located in Western Asia and North Africa. They are identified as such on one or more of genealogical, linguistic, or cultural grounds, with tribal affiliations, and intra-tribal relationships playing...
s who used it as a prison for rebellious slaves prior to shipping them abroad or selling them at the slave market in Zanzibar's Stone Town
Stone Town
Stone Town also known as Mji Mkongwe is the old part of Zanzibar City, the main city of Zanzibar, in Tanzania, as opposed to Ng'ambo . It is located on the western coast of Unguja, the main island of the Zanzibar Archipelago...
. Zanzibar became a British
United Kingdom
The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern IrelandIn the United Kingdom and Dependencies, other languages have been officially recognised as legitimate autochthonous languages under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages...
protectorate
Protectorate
In history, the term protectorate has two different meanings. In its earliest inception, which has been adopted by modern international law, it is an autonomous territory that is protected diplomatically or militarily against third parties by a stronger state or entity...
following the 1890 Heligoland-Zanzibar Treaty
Heligoland-Zanzibar Treaty
The Heligoland-Zanzibar Treaty of 1 July 1890 was an agreement between the United Kingdom and the German Empire concerning mainly territorial interests in Africa.-Terms:...
with Germany
Germany
Germany , officially the Federal Republic of Germany , is a federal parliamentary republic in Europe. The country consists of 16 states while the capital and largest city is Berlin. Germany covers an area of 357,021 km2 and has a largely temperate seasonal climate...
, this resulted in the appointment of a British First Minister
First Minister
A First Minister is the leader of a government cabinet.-Canada:In Canada, "First Ministers" is a collective term that refers to all Canadian first ministers of the Crown, otherwise known as heads of government, including the Prime Minister of Canada and the provincial and territorial premiers...
, Lloyd Mathews
Lloyd Mathews
Sir Lloyd William Mathews KCMG, CB was a British naval officer, politician and abolitionist. Mathews joined the Royal Navy as a cadet at the age of 13 and progressed through the ranks to lieutenant. He was involved with the Third Anglo-Ashanti War of 1873–4, afterwards being stationed in...
, in October 1891. Mathews purchased Changuu from its Arab owners on behalf of the Zanzibar government in 1893 with the intention of building a prison upon it. The prison was to have housed violent and recidivist
Recidivism
Recidivism is the act of a person repeating an undesirable behavior after they have either experienced negative consequences of that behavior, or have been treated or trained to extinguish that behavior...
criminals from the part of the African mainland which was then under the jurisdiction of Zanzibar. Despite the prison buildings being completed in 1894, causing the island to become known commonly as "Prison Island", the facility never housed prisoners.
The British authorities were concerned by the risk of disease epidemics affecting Stone Town, then East Africa
East Africa
East Africa or Eastern Africa is the easterly region of the African continent, variably defined by geography or geopolitics. In the UN scheme of geographic regions, 19 territories constitute Eastern Africa:...
's main port. To combat this threat Changuu was turned into a quarantine
Quarantine
Quarantine is compulsory isolation, typically to contain the spread of something considered dangerous, often but not always disease. The word comes from the Italian quarantena, meaning forty-day period....
island serving all of the British territories in East Africa. The old prison was converted into the facility's hospital and in 1923 the island was officially renamed Quarantine Island. Quarantine cases would be taken from the ships and monitored on the island for between one and two weeks before being allowed to progress with their journey. The main disease that was monitored was Yellow Fever
Yellow fever
Yellow fever is an acute viral hemorrhagic disease. The virus is a 40 to 50 nm enveloped RNA virus with positive sense of the Flaviviridae family....
. Ships typically only arrived in East Africa during the period running from December to March and so the island was usually empty of quarantine cases for a large part of the year. During the empty period the island became a popular leisure resort for European people and local residents of Zanzibar. A building, known as the European Bungalow, was built in the late 1890's to cater for the holiday makers although the number of visitors had to be limited as the only freshwater on the island was rainwater stored in underground tanks. Large pits on the island remained from earlier coral mining for use as a construction material and these pits were cleaned out and used as swimming pools. A new complex of quarantine buildings was erected in the south-west of the island in 1931 which gave an improved quarantine capacity of 904 persons.
Giant tortoises
Seychelles
Seychelles , officially the Republic of Seychelles , is an island country spanning an archipelago of 115 islands in the Indian Ocean, some east of mainland Africa, northeast of the island of Madagascar....
sent a gift of four Aldabra Giant Tortoise
Aldabra Giant Tortoise
The Aldabra giant tortoise , from the islands of the Aldabra Atoll in the Seychelles, is one of the largest tortoises in the world....
s to Changuu from the island of Aldabra
Aldabra
Aldabra, the world's second largest coral atoll, is in the Aldabra Group of islands in the Indian Ocean that form part of the Seychelles. Uninhabited and extremely isolated, Aldabra is virtually untouched by humans, has distinctive island fauna including the Aldabra Giant Tortoise, and is...
. These tortoises bred quickly and by 1955 they numbered around 200 animals. However people began to steal the tortoises for sale abroad as pets or for food and their numbers dropped rapidly. By 1988 there were around 100 tortoises, 50 in 1990 and just seven by 1996. A further 80 hatchlings were taken to the island in 1996 to increase the numbers but 40 of them vanished. The Zanzibar government, with assistance from the World Society for the Protection of Animals
World Society for the Protection of Animals
The World Society for the Protection of Animals is an international non-profit animal welfare organization and also a federation of such organisations and active in over 150 countries with more than 1000 member societies.- Organization :...
built a large compound for the protection of the animals and by 2000 numbers had recovered to 17 adults, 50 juveniles and 90 hatchlings. The species is now considered vulnerable
Vulnerable species
On 30 January 2010, the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species identified 9694 Vulnerable species, subspecies and varieties, stocks and sub-populations.-References:...
and has been placed on the IUCN Red List
IUCN Red List
The IUCN Red List of Threatened Species , founded in 1963, is the world's most comprehensive inventory of the global conservation status of biological species. The International Union for Conservation of Nature is the world's main authority on the conservation status of species...
by the International Union for Conservation of Nature. More tortoises, mainly juveniles, continue to be brought to the island from other locations for conservation. There is a dedicated foundation on the island which looks after the tortoises' welfare. Visitors are able to observe and feed the tortoises.