Various fruits and plants from our visit to Mr. K's Spice Plantation in Zanzibar, Tanzania.
My colleague, Dr. Siro Masinde, and I were in Tanzania last week for a series of workshops at local JSTOR participants as well as the eLearning Africa Conference, a conference we have attended for many years now. The conference itself was productive and served to highlight the progress being made throughout Africa in terms of creating cultures of knowledge production, particularly in the development of open educational resources (OERs), mobile learning for public health, literacy, and lifelong learning. For African higher education in particular, JSTOR plays a large role in this progress.
The workshops we conducted at three different locations helped illustrate the leaps and bounds in which Tanzania (and much of East Africa) is growing in terms of connectivity and online activity. With six of the world’s fastest growing economies, much of Africa has pinned their development hopes (at least parts of them) on the bandwidth and the availability and equitable access of online resources. Tanzania has made significant investments towards this end and the workshops helped illustrate that for both Siro and I. We conducted workshops at
- The State University of Zanzibar: a relatively new university specializing in Education, Arts, and Computer Science
- University of Dar es Salaam: originally the University of East Africa (along with the University of Nairobi in Kenya and Makerere University in Uganda) and part of the University of London, it is now the largest and most prestigious university in Tanzania
- International School of Tanganyika: an International Baccalaureate School
Inspecting vanilla at the spice plantation, Zanzibar.
While we were there, we had a chance to visit one of the spice plantations that Zanzibar is justifiably famous for. Zanzibar is full of these plantations and they are stunning to see in person as there are just endless fields of cloves, ginger, cinnamon (actually a bark), pepper, saffron, vanilla, and more. The Zanzibar spice industry has been a major player on the world spice scene for centuries now and local Zanzibaris are well versed in their culinary and medicinal uses. To learn more about Zanzibar and the spice trade, see some of the following:
- Martin, P. (1991). The Zanzibar Clove Industry. Economic Botany, 45(4). Retrieved from http://www.jstor.org/stable/4255387
- Correll, D.S. (1953). Vanilla-Its Botany, History, Cultivation, and Economic Import. Economic Botany, 7(4). Retrieved from http://www.jstor.org/stable/4255387
- Letter from Sir John Kirk to Sir Joseph Dalton Hooker; from the Political Agency, Zanzibar; 13 April 1872. Retrieved from http://plants.jstor.org/visual/kadc1930
