-Duck 'n Fiddle: Goodbye Zan - Hello Sumatra

Duck and Fiddle: Goodbye Zan – Hello Sumatra

By Murray Stewart

With Marco imprisoned in Zanzibar’s ancient slave port of Stone Town, events over the next few months are difficult to authenticate due to linguistic hurdles and virtually no documentation at all. However, fragments of anecdotes and snippets of skinner have been strung together to make some sense of it all.

But we do know that Marco, Captain Phillips, and the eye-patched interpreter Napoleon were moved into the Palace’s staff quarters – next to the harem of sultry seductresses and teenage boys. The Sultan swung both ways apparently.

Anyway, he obviously enjoyed these foreigners’ ‘intellectual’ company, because he loved hearing tales of their exploits and adventures abroad, and soon an unspoken bond developed between them.

Marco recounted his sighting of the Flying Dutchman near the Cape of Storms, and his stay-over in Nice Nè with forest-dwellers who smoked exotic herbs and had pet elephants. He also mentioned his encounter with King Shaka, who’d presented him with a vuvuzela. But he obviously kept mum about the Kruger Millions, wallowing in the shallows of the Lawrence O’Marks harbour.

To the Sultan, and all who handled it, the vuvuzela remained an enigma. You couldn’t play it like a flute, and it was useless as a drinking straw, so they decided it was probably part of a hookah pipe, and the Sultan lost no time in experimenting with his own exotic herbs.

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