Bawe Island: The Snorkelling Stop With a Telegraph Past

The island

Bawe is a small island in the Zanzibar Channel west of Stone Town, about 1.1 kilometres long and 400 metres wide, north of Chumbe. Its distance from town is given variously as five kilometres and as ten; measured from published coordinates it is around six.

On the standard island circuit out of Stone Town it is the snorkelling stop, with Changuu supplying the ruins and the tortoises and a sandbank supplying the lunch. The reefs in this archipelago are shallow, easy and accessible, and Zanzibar’s marine conservation guide describes them as in relatively good shape with high live coral cover — while noting elsewhere that, compared with Chumbe, the unprotected reefs here carry lower cover. Both things are true at once, and they describe the trade-off between an easy reef and a protected one.

The cable station

Bawe’s history is industrial rather than imperial-picturesque, and it is the reason to look at the island as more than a swimming stop.

Sultan Barghash bin Said, who reigned from 1870 to 1888, granted the island to the Eastern Telegraph Company, which used it as an operating station for the submarine telegraph cable linking Zanzibar to Seychelles and Aden. The arrangement was extended by Sultan Khalifa bin Said in 1889, and houses were built to accommodate the staff.

Two details attached to that account in widely copied sources are wrong and worth not repeating: the grant was nineteenth-century, not eighteenth, and the company at the 1889 extension was still the Eastern Telegraph Company — the name Cable and Wireless dates from 1929.

There is a physical corroboration of the cable operation in the water nearby. Zanzibar’s marine conservation guide lists among the wrecks of this area The Great Northern, a British steel cable-laying ship built in 1870, which sank on New Year’s Eve 1902 off a reef beside the Pange sandbank. A second wreck, formerly a Royal Navy lighter, lies at about thirty metres right next to Bawe.

Protection, and a number that is wrong twice

Bawe sits in the Changuu-Bawe Marine Conservation Area, which covers the islands off Zanzibar town, was surveyed in 2009 and gazetted in 2014, and is run by the Department of Marine Conservation. It was created at the request of local residents worried about unregulated fishing, pollution and weak enforcement.

Its area is published as both 118.2 and 162.9 square kilometres within the same regional assessment — and 162.9 is also the figure that assessment gives for a different conservation area further north, which suggests a copying error rather than a genuine dispute. The smaller figure is the one in its own summary table. The same assessment judges management effectiveness at this young area to be low.

In March 2025 a total fishing ban was declared covering the whole coast of Bawe, in collaboration with the resort now on the island, with docks built so that displaced artisanal fishers could reach grounds outside the protected zone. Reporting described this as the country’s sixth marine protected area; the conservation area had in fact existed since 2014, so what is new is the fishing rule, not the designation.

Visiting

The island now carries a private resort. Snorkelling trips from Stone Town reach the reef around it as a matter of routine, and daily boat transfers to these islands are long established. Whether non-guests may now land on the beach could not be established from any authority — so treat the reef as the thing you are going for, and do not assume the sand. Bawe is not on Zanzibar’s register of gazetted historical sites, though Changuu, Chapwani and Chumbe all are.

The snorkelling guide and the sandbank and island hopping guide cover the circuit.

Common questions about Bawe