Africa House Hotel

This guide to Africa House Hotel in Zanzibar City centers on a locked upper-floor room, once the library of Zanzibar's English Club, founded in eighteen eighty-eight and open only to English residents and later other Europeans. Catalogue cards, a disconnected bakelite telephone and a china egg cup still sit as though the last member walked out mid sentence. It follows the shelves of biographies, novels and travel accounts left untouched since the nineteen sixty-four revolution, when the club's members fled and the state took the building over, and asks what an entire institution's meticulous library says about the island it sat on. Order a drink at the Sunset Bar below and consider that question.