Posted Monday, July 31, 2006; 20:00 HKT

As they wind their way back from the turquoise waters of the Indian Ocean, the narrow streets of Zanzibar's old Stone Town cut gorges between moldering palaces and crumbling apartment buildings. For the first few blocks (if such rough-and-tumble divisions can ever be called blocks), tourist paraphernalia fills the shadowy streets: shops full of dark wooden chests and old-fashioned wall clocks, piles of postcards and shelves of second-hand books propped up against walls. There are racks of T shirts featuring Tintin adventures that never were, and packs of cardamom and saffron and cloves from the farms that dot Zanzibar's interior.

Delve deeper into the labyrinth of alleyways, beyond the tourist shops and wonderful hotels in refurbished buildings, and you'll find a Zanzibar that at first glance has changed little in centuries. Local traders sell swelling mangoes, glistening starfruits and rich, green avocados. Cobblers cut leather to shape into shoes, carpenters chisel at wood and young men pull carts heaving with bags of rice and flour. The sound of boys reciting the Koran reverberates from inside a madrasah. "Sometimes it feels a bit like a museum," says Saleh Khames, a 54-year-old customs agent. "But there is change even here." A teenage boy flies past on a bicycle. "This one, this small boy prefers the flower to work," says Khames, holding an imaginary marijuana cigarette to his lips. He shakes his head. "The outside influence is sad sometimes. We like tourists but we don't like all they bring."

To hear Khames' lament you might think that globalization is something new to Zanzibar.

In truth, the islands have always been washed by outside forces. For centuries, the archipelago just off the coast of mainland Tanganyika—with which, in 1964, Zanzibar joined to form Tanzania in a sometimes uncomfortable union that many Zanzibaris feel frustrates their islands' development—was the third corner in a huge triangle of trade connecting Asia, Africa and the Arab Gulf states. Commerce brought people; from the 15th century on, Zanzibar was a melting pot of Africans, Arabs, Chinese, Europeans, Indians and Persians. When Marco Polo wrote about it, still centuries before Zanzibar's golden age, local merchants were already bartering "elephant teeth and ambergris" with the "many trading ships" that landed there. Slaves, spices and timber followed. By 1840 Zanzibar was so powerful that the Omani sultan moved his court there to get a jump on British, French and Portuguese rivals. Zanzibar was the Singapore of Africa.

Now a new wave of globalization is transforming Africa's entrepôt again. Zanzibar languished until the late 1980s, when Tanzania began liberalizing its socialist economy. Since then, the number of tourists visiting Zanzibar has more than doubled to 100,000 people a year. Spices remain Zanzibar's biggest earner but tourism, which accounts for a quarter of GDP, is fast catching up. Sometimes the two mix: spice farms offer tours on which visitors can dig up turmeric, break open nutmeg pits or pick cloves. "This is our gold," says tour guide Mohamed Mande, holding out a handful of delicate clove stalks. Even the dhow, the triangular-sailed wooden boat that once carried Zanzibar's treasure as far as China and still brings food and concrete from the mainland, has been reborn as a symbol of the new boom. An annual film-and-music festival that attracts a couple of thousand visitors every July is called the Festival of the Dhow Countries, in a nod to the shared trade and cultural links across the Indian Ocean. "It's a way to get back some of Zanzibar's lost prominence," says the festival's Furaha Piniel.

Zanzibar's opposition party, which wants greater autonomy for the islands, says globalization won't help Zanzibar unless the islands have the power to control their own destiny. The only thing stopping the islands transforming themselves into Singapore or Dubai, opposition figures argue, is the government in mainland Tanzania, which doesn't want them to grow. "If the world were free to come to Zanzibar directly we would be rich again," says Ali Mwalim Rashid, a Swahili and history professor at the State University of Zanzibar. "Globalization goes with internationalism, and if you're not known internationally as a separate country you can't decide your future."

Prosperity is nice to dream about, but dreams alone don't make it so. Part museum, part memory, positioned off the coast of economically poor Africa, the islands are unlikely to ever again dictate trade or lure a sovereign leader to set up home. Just like Marco Polo's home, Venice, the sea-set jewel is now a stop on the global tourist trail, its explorers arriving not in dhows but from around the world in jets. They, too, are travelers and traders. In Zanzibar, the world has always been just over the horizon.