Pemba Island
— — the green island the boats forget.
Not only on a wall.
“North of Zanzibar, smaller and quieter, hillier and greener. The island the Arab traders called Al-Jazeera Al-Khadra, the green one. Clove trees still cover the ridges. The Pemba Channel drops into reef walls divers come a long way to see. Most boats stop at Unguja and turn back. The ones that don't find this.
Pemba Island, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
The place, in three passes.
Pemba is the northern island of the Zanzibar Archipelago, about 50 km off the Tanzanian coast across the Pemba Channel. It runs roughly 67 km long and rises into low hills covered in clove and coconut. The administrative capital is Chake-Chake, with Mkoani and Wete the other principal towns. Pemba has been part of Tanzania since the 1964 union of Zanzibar and Tanganyika, and remains semi-autonomous under the Revolutionary Government of Zanzibar. Arab merchants knew it as Al-Jazeera Al-Khadra, the green island.
The Pemba Channel runs more than 800 metres deep between the island and the mainland, and the reef walls that drop into it bring divers from as far as Australia and South Africa. Misali Island, a small uninhabited islet off the western coast, is a marine conservation area with coral cover that remains unusually intact. Currents along the eastern shore are strong; the calmer west side holds most of the dive operators. The water reads clear blue-green, more transparent than the channels off Unguja.
Cloves were Pemba's principal export through most of the 20th century, and the island still produces a meaningful share of Tanzania's harvest. Drying mats lay out along village paths during the season; the smell carries on the wind. Pemba's hills hold more rain than Unguja, which is why the canopy stays dense longer into the dry season than on neighbouring islands. The Ngezi Forest Reserve on the northwest preserves a remnant of the indigenous coastal forest that once covered much of the island.