PAPASI—SWAHILI SLANG to describe the men in Zanzibar who solicit foreign women for all kinds of services—tours, sex, food. The word “papasi” means “tick,” the kind that clings to your skin and sucks your blood and makes you sick.
It’s an unfortunate yet somewhat accurate term to describe the aggressive, relentless stalking of these men who won’t take no for an answer. They’ve convinced themselves that their livelihoods—and status—depend on it. They know you’re lost and promise to help you find your way through the labyrinth.
It took me years to understand my ex as an overgrown beach boy with a Finnish prison record. Every woman who gets entangled with a guy like this wants to believe that she’s the exception—and I was no different. I firmly believed, for a time, that what we had between us was love.
Our story began at a night market—he was sitting on a bench smoking a cigarette—and I was sitting on the grass with a soggy paper plate of seafood on my lap. We made eye contact. The next night, he greeted me as I was leaving a restaurant on the main tourist drag (King Fish & Chips, of course). I realized much later that he’d been waiting for me for hours by the entrance.
I followed him to a club that night to hear a woman sing taarab, the island’s signature lament. Why I trusted him to lead me through the zig-zag streets of Stone Town in the dark to this club on the outskirts of town is still beyond me. But he was, in his own way, relentless with quiet confidence and a bit of charm. I liked his long dreads, a softness in his demeanor, the insistence that he didn’t need anything from me.
Our lives intertwined in a messy knot after that. It took me years to unravel from the entanglement. I had to get the police involved—he found it hard to take no for an answer. I managed to move around the islands as a single woman but everyone still insisted on referring to me as the “wife of____” and it enraged me.
He stalked me, limp and all. He showed up drunk in a dirty white singlet, in a pair of Levi’s I’d bought for him from home, green flip-flops on his feet, asking for my forgiveness. He crashed motorcycles, appeared out of nowhere with gashes in his legs and scratches on his arms, his skin always reeking of beer, needing to speak to me.
My association with him filled me with shame, and I tried daily to reframe the situation as a victory—every time I clinked glasses on a palm-studded beach at a fancy restaurant with other foreign friends—feeling free of him. But as long as I stayed there he would never let me forget that I’d given him a chance and he clung to the idea of our connection until I eventually left.
Was my ex a papasi? I still think about that. He certainly took notes from the playbook, had grown up on the islands, knew how it all worked, what was at stake, which resources were available, from whom. He was a bit older than a classic “beach boi” when we met, so out of the range of the usual definition of one, but still, considering the way we met (me, tourist, him, local) and the way it ended (me, resident running, him, local, chasing), says a lot.
I was in my 30s when we met. Having had a series of failed loves in Chicago, I moved to Zanzibar during the most “fertile” years of my life and hid out in impossible relationships for the duration. I wasn’t ready for all the cultural scripts of home—marriage, children, a house. As much as I want to blame my ex for what unfolded between us, we were in a complicated play performed for centuries, and we were just two more actors on the island’s stage.
Anthropologists have studied the “intercultural othering” that occurs in these relationships—the messy webs of power, identity and tourism that creates these kinds of dynamics. I still want to believe that travel fosters cross-cultural understanding but we also know that it reinforces and solidifies dramatic imbalances that often leads to heartbreak, at the very least.
When I take inventory of the signs—the red flags—it’s easy enough to blame all the shenanigans between us on my ex. It’s taken me a long time to hold up the same scrutiny to my own sense of self that set the conditions for this kind of bond, rooted not in love but the desperate need to feel like I belonged.
It’s an unfortunate yet somewhat accurate term to describe the aggressive, relentless stalking of these men who won’t take no for an answer. They’ve convinced themselves that their livelihoods—and status—depend on it. They know you’re lost and promise to help you find your way through the labyrinth.
It took me years to understand my ex as an overgrown beach boy with a Finnish prison record. Every woman who gets entangled with a guy like this wants to believe that she’s the exception—and I was no different. I firmly believed, for a time, that what we had between us was love.
Our story began at a night market—he was sitting on a bench smoking a cigarette—and I was sitting on the grass with a soggy paper plate of seafood on my lap. We made eye contact. The next night, he greeted me as I was leaving a restaurant on the main tourist drag (King Fish & Chips, of course). I realized much later that he’d been waiting for me for hours by the entrance.
I followed him to a club that night to hear a woman sing taarab, the island’s signature lament. Why I trusted him to lead me through the zig-zag streets of Stone Town in the dark to this club on the outskirts of town is still beyond me. But he was, in his own way, relentless with quiet confidence and a bit of charm. I liked his long dreads, a softness in his demeanor, the insistence that he didn’t need anything from me.
Our lives intertwined in a messy knot after that. It took me years to unravel from the entanglement. I had to get the police involved—he found it hard to take no for an answer. I managed to move around the islands as a single woman but everyone still insisted on referring to me as the “wife of____” and it enraged me.
He stalked me, limp and all. He showed up drunk in a dirty white singlet, in a pair of Levi’s I’d bought for him from home, green flip-flops on his feet, asking for my forgiveness. He crashed motorcycles, appeared out of nowhere with gashes in his legs and scratches on his arms, his skin always reeking of beer, needing to speak to me.
My association with him filled me with shame, and I tried daily to reframe the situation as a victory—every time I clinked glasses on a palm-studded beach at a fancy restaurant with other foreign friends—feeling free of him. But as long as I stayed there he would never let me forget that I’d given him a chance and he clung to the idea of our connection until I eventually left.
Was my ex a papasi? I still think about that. He certainly took notes from the playbook, had grown up on the islands, knew how it all worked, what was at stake, which resources were available, from whom. He was a bit older than a classic “beach boi” when we met, so out of the range of the usual definition of one, but still, considering the way we met (me, tourist, him, local) and the way it ended (me, resident running, him, local, chasing), says a lot.
I was in my 30s when we met. Having had a series of failed loves in Chicago, I moved to Zanzibar during the most “fertile” years of my life and hid out in impossible relationships for the duration. I wasn’t ready for all the cultural scripts of home—marriage, children, a house. As much as I want to blame my ex for what unfolded between us, we were in a complicated play performed for centuries, and we were just two more actors on the island’s stage.
Anthropologists have studied the “intercultural othering” that occurs in these relationships—the messy webs of power, identity and tourism that creates these kinds of dynamics. I still want to believe that travel fosters cross-cultural understanding but we also know that it reinforces and solidifies dramatic imbalances that often leads to heartbreak, at the very least.
When I take inventory of the signs—the red flags—it’s easy enough to blame all the shenanigans between us on my ex. It’s taken me a long time to hold up the same scrutiny to my own sense of self that set the conditions for this kind of bond, rooted not in love but the desperate need to feel like I belonged.
