In this article:
Staying and living in Zanzibar Island is great fun. This is one of the most beautiful, uncrowded and welcoming islands. Time in Zanzibar can be a little bit confusing, although it makes a lot of sense. This article is very useful if you are visiting stone town, need to wait on a local dala dala or going to one of the activities on the island.
There is a surprising fact about the time in Zanzibar. The Swahili time has an offset of six hours to your watch! This is not like Persian time or Island time or whatever other cultures you might be familiar with that have a comically lax attitude towards punctuality.
When someone says that he or she will come up at 1 in Swahili they are coming at 7 PM. Or maybe 7 AM! The reason for this is that in Swahili – by referring to coastal African, not just the language – culture, the day starts in the evening.
Many traditions observe this rule, for example, in Jewish and Muslim culture: the day starts at sunset but for other non-Swahili cultures that follow this tradition, they do it only for the most important things like festivals and for the time of day they stay in sync with the rest of the universe.
This is not the Swahili people: In Tanzania, Kenya, Ethiopia and elsewhere in East Africa, people go by a daylight clock that is 12 hours long but that starts at 6 am in the morning. In Tanzania and Kenya, it is called Swahili time. In Ethiopia, they call it Ethiopian time.
Therefore, if you normally wake up at 6 AM, you say, “I usually wake up at 12 in the morning!” If you are meeting someone at 2 PM, you say, “I shall see you at 10 in the afternoon.”
This is how Zanzibar time works:
1 o’clock in the morning is 7 AM
8 o’clock in the afternoon is 2 PM
12 o’clock in the evening is 6 PM
5 o’clock at night is 11 PM
Zanzibar time trick
There is a trick to decipher this code: imagine drawing a line directly across a clock face then, 3 becomes 9, 4 becomes 10. If you are arranging meeting times, it is best to specify the time of day you would like to meet – morning, afternoon, evening, night – that way. Even if your numbers are off there are chances that you will still connect.
The craziest part
The craziest part is that no one changes their clocks to make life easier! They just look at their watch which says 10:00 on it and they will think in Swahili: “Okay it is 4 o’clock!” They are constantly doing arithmetic, subtracting or adding six.
You have got to get used to it, although it might take you a while.
