Stephanie Hanes - Correspondent

It is easy to get lost in Stone Town. The narrow streets twist into dead ends and curl into Arabian courtyards; darkened alleyways open onto chaotic, pungent markets.

It is almost impossible, as a visitor, to know where you are at any given moment. You can see only forward and back. Peripheral vision, and any sense of direction, is blocked by the whitewashed 19th century buildings that rise escarpment-like from the streets.

But that's OK. It is part of the fun to go adrift in this old section of Zanzibar Town, the capital of Zanzibar, a cluster of islands off the Tanzanian coast.

As I wandered on a recent visit, women floated by in their colorful head scarves while men on scooters honked through pedestrians. Children ran past me – not the sad, begging children of some African capitals, but children at play, pushing tires with sticks or catching each other in tag.

I'd turn onto any labyrinthine street, and would find stalls of spices and cloth, or darkened shops filled with traditional Zanzibar chests, or a particularly spectacular wooden door, intricately carved with flowers and vines and dotted with brass studs from India.

Or I'd find a pile of rubble.

Stone Town was once the center of East Africa's spice and slave trade, a place where Indian merchants and Swahili kings and Omani sultans all lived, prospered, and fought. But much of the physical history that gives the city its magic – the lacy Indian balconies and hefty Arabian doors, the hidden interior courtyards and built-in stone benches – is in danger of falling apart.

Without constant upkeep, the limestone plaster over the coral-rock walls turns black and crumbles. The walls themselves are weak, and ceilings held up by rotting mangrove beams are sagging. Every now and then, a house will simply collapse, leaving a lot-sized pile of rubble to bake under the brutal sun. 

After the 1964 revolution, which overthrew the last of the sultans and combined Zanzibar with mainland Tanganyika to form Tanzania, the socialist government gave many of Stone Town's houses to groups of impoverished families. Many of these residents have not been able to afford upkeep – others have not bothered.

One day, my husband and I took a tour of sorts from Mahmud Shivji, who runs a Zanzibar preservation project for the Aga Khan, the spiritual leader of the Ismaili branch of Islam. The Aga Khan has long supported Islamic cultural preservation around the world.

Walking through the heat of midday, Mr. Shivji pointed out a once-majestic building that had collapsed next to a mosque, and another he said was failing. He seemed weary. His organization has renovated some houses, he said, as well as the building that now houses the posh Serena Inn, but there are always more crumbling.

The manager of our hotel, a renovated fairy-tale palace, was also glum about his city's prospects. He later told my husband he feared that in 50 years, a quarter of Stone Town's buildings could be gone.

That night, as the sun set over the Indian Ocean, the warm, pastel light hid the wounds on the 150-year-old buildings. Children's chanting from a Hindu temple mixed with the Muslim calls to prayer. A blessedly cool breeze blew from the harbor where boat lights were starting to twinkle, and through the darkening maze of streets.

The city seemed too vibrant to be threatened, I thought, too much a product of its past to let its history disappear.

I hoped Shivji and the hotel manager were wrong. As the final orange glow turned into darkness, I hoped the men on motorbikes and the women under their veils cared about moving Stone Town into the future without letting its past crumble away.

Correspondent - Stephanie Hanes

In our part of South Africa, most of the earth is brown these days, baked by an unceasing winter sun.

That dryness whizzed by as I drove from my home in Johannesburg to Thabazimbi, a small farming town about three hours northwest: Scrubby, earth-toned hills and gray-golden fields; red dust kicked up by trucks spitting black exhaust.

Every now and then, a splash of green would break the landscape, so bright that it almost shimmered neon. Those were the fields with water, owned by farmers with the state-of-the-art irrigation systems that force unforgiving South African soil into fertility.

I was driving to visit a "farm school," a public school on private farmland. These schools were built during apartheid by white farmers for the children of their low-paid black workers, and I was writing for the Monitor about the challenge of modernizing them in the new South Africa. (See story).

But as I tried to interview people for the story, the conversation often shifted away from children and education to the rugged, rich land that flew by my window.

To some, the well-tended soil is a constant reminder of how whites still control too much in this country 11 years after the official end of apartheid.

Others, mainly whites, fear the land is too valuable to be safe. They are sure the black government will steal it.

I got my first glimpse of the raw emotions surrounding land here during an interview with an Afrikaner farmer. (Afrikaners, the descendants of long-ago Dutch settlers, were the greatest proponents of apartheid.)

When I asked him about farmers' responsibility to improve decrepit schools on their land, he lashed out against the current South African government. Crumbling walls and unsanitary conditions? Those were simply excuses by the black-led government to steal sections of land, he said.

"Just look at Zimbabwe," he said grimly, evoking the local white nightmare. In that neighboring country, violent takeovers of white-owned farms helped bring on a chaos that is still raging.

Leaving the school children far behind in conversation, the farmer launched into a oft-repeated history lesson about how Afrikaners arrived in South Africa around the same time as the ancestors of the black population.

He never addressed the more recent history, when the apartheid government forced blacks off their land and prohibited them from buying property. Nor did he talk about the cheap black labor that helps make white-owned farms so bountiful.

This latter history consumes the land rights activists. Many of the farmers are unrepentant racists, they told me, and will never allow any black empowerment program. This is why they say land transfers need to happen now.

The calmest people I met while reporting were at the Thabazimbi school. The soft-spoken principal, Peter Mosito, did not offer any opinions on land reform. Instead, he spoke of how he has nurtured this primary school for decades, about his love for teaching, about the proud children who walk kilometers to get to class.

He was obviously bothered by disputes between his school and the farmer who owns the land upon which it sits. As the principal watched his students walk through the red dust into modular classrooms – the old school building had burned in a suspicious fire – he admitted quietly that he felt more persecuted than he did under apartheid. 

A young girl lowered her voice when asked about the farmer.

"He doesn't really like people," she said. "I mean, black people. He won't let us touch his fence."

She looked away.

I drove back to Johannesburg that day past the brown mountains and green fields, past the rainbows that form in the mist of irrigation equipment. But I was focused on the students, how they laughed and scampered like all pre-teens do, how they waved and grinned when I pulled my car out of their red dust school yard. I thought of how they are absorbing the bitter emotions that are part of the public debate about their school.

Maybe their future is tied to the fate of land ownership. But I wished that their future – and what they are learning now – sparked as much public emotion as concerns about the land.

“At first it (South Africa) seems a lot like the US, but every day you’ll find out more about how it’s not.” These words – spoken by an American friend on our first day here – have turned out to be hugely true.

Some impressions:

We've been in South Africa for more than a week now, and it's a bit less "exotic" than I expected. In fact, at least once a day my wife, Jen, and I say, "This could be L.A.!" With its 6-lane highways, mega-malls, palm trees, and sun-drenched days, "Joburg" is far more sophisticated and functional than I figured. It's a lot like Los Angeles, and a lot like America - at least on the surface.

Here's a picture of a highway near downtown Joburg.

ABRAHAM MCLAUGHLIN

For instance, in a big testament to globalization's spread - and the universality of teenage rituals - a Joburg mall was bustling with teens on a Friday night. Throngs of spikey-haired boys and midriff-baring girls were all eyeing each other. The movies, meanwhile, were straight from Hollywood - and only slightly out of date: Pirates of the Caribbean, American Wedding, etc.

But there definitely are differences. In fact, an American friend said to us on our first day: "It seems a lot like the US, but every day you'll find out more about how it's not."

For one thing, we hear Khosa, Zulu, Afrikaans, English, and some of South Africa's 7 other official languages. And instead of "Hi" people here say, "Howzit?" - as in "How's it going?"

More on the differences next week....

We've packed the essentials from our Boston condo - my wife's DVDs and onion salt, my omelette pan and rocking chair - and we're headed off on a big adventure. We're moving to Johannesburg, South Africa, for The Christian Science Monitor. I'll be reporting on the 49 countries of sub-Saharan Africa.

Jen is the real adventurer, though: She's never been to a developing country. And now we're moving to a continent full of them!

My overarching questions for reporting on Africa include: Can Africa - or parts of it - join the world's rush to globalization and greater wealth? Who should solve Africa's problems - outsiders or Africans themselves? And what can the rest of the world learn from Africa?

So come along as two American kids head off with not a lot of knowledge - but tons of curiousity - about our 800 million new African neighbors.

Check back once in a while for weekly blurbs about life on a grand continent....