Livingstone House

This guide to Livingstone House in Zanzibar City follows two very different chapters under one roof. Built around 1860 as a resting stop for Sultan Majid, it became a staging post where nineteenth-century explorers, including David Livingstone in 1866 before his final expedition, assembled caravans and loaded porters with grain, cloth and beads for the interior. Nearly a century later, the same building housed a colonial laboratory investigating why tens of thousands of clove trees were dying each year under a disease known only as Sudden Death. Stand where the porters once lined up for their daily grain ration before the column left.