on dressing like a Pemban woman

By “dress like a Pemban” I mean I wear a long dress to the ankles or nearly so, with sleeves usually hitting my elbows. The dress is large. One dress I bought here I’m sure could fit three of me inside. My friend assured me it fit me perfectly. “And it’ll still fit you when you get fat; you’re way too skinny.” (For the record, I’m in a good place on height-for-weight scales.) These dresses are so large and so strangely patterned that Justin commented, “They are almost ugly enough to be cool. Almost.” When I told him I’ll be giving away my ugliest dresses, he looked at me blankly, trying to figure out exactly which ones are the ugliest. They certainly are not flattering by American standards. But in Pemba, they are all the rage in house-clothes fashion.

Whenever I leave the immediate neighborhood, I also don a buibui and mtandio. The buibui is an ankle-length, long-sleeved, loose-fitting, black gown that every adult Muslim Pemban women wears. (Anyone not Muslim is from the mainland, and therefore not considered Pemban.) The styles have changed over the years I’ve been coming to Zanzibar. From snaps down the front, to a more risqué, sheer type with only one snap, exposing the dress underneath, to a pull-over-the-head type. In 2004 the pull-over and the open one combined into one style, with a decently modest layer underneath, but a free-flowing sheer layer on the front. This is the kind I wear. But, alas, that style is old, and now the style is a one-layered pull-over, but with decorations—colorful embroidery, beads, reflective plastic “jewels”—near the bottom and the wrists. I just can’t keep up.

The mtandio is a large bolt of cloth that is wrapped around the head a couple times and secured with a needle (if you’re from the city and can afford it) or by tucking one end in around the cheek or chin. They generally cover the whole head, as well as the neck and shoulders, leaving the face exposed. But the styles change for these too. They’ve gone from all black, to sleek and colorful, to flowing and multi-colored. The ones in style now cover not just down to the shoulders, but the whole upper body. I have a couple of these, ones that are cut from the same fabric as the dresses I bought here. I have other head coverings from the Middle East which, when I wear those rather than mtandio people comment that I dress like an Arab.

Why I wear these clothes, given that I'm not a Muslim and I could easily dress like the other wazungu do in Western clothes, is a little harder to explain. I'm still trying to figure it out myself, and weigh the pros and cons. One thing is for sure: most of the people here love that I dress like they do. And another thing: in the hot months of January and February, these layers are going to be hot.