If my circumstances had not been so dire — or rather, if my circumstances had been drier — I might never have found myself at the Zanzibar Curio Shop.

At first glance, the store did little to distinguish itself from other trinket purveyors besieging the tangled lanes of Stone Town, the historic quarter on the coast of Unguja, Zanzibar’s main island: “Hakuna Matata” T-shirts obscured the facade and tourists browsed souvenirs. In any other city, I’d breeze past. But sodden from the fury of a downpour, feigning interest in refrigerator magnets seemed a small price to pay for shelter.

“If you want to see the real history of Zanzibar, you have to come upstairs,” said Murtaza Akberali, who, with his brother, runs the store their father opened in 1968. And so I followed him through a portal to Zanzibar of yore: Hand-carved wood-and-brass trunks teetered against one wall; vintage cigarette ads from India and political posters from Tanzania formed a retro pastiche on another. The ceiling was an inverted necropolis of timeworn lanterns and teapots suspended from the rafters. Cameras and African tribal busts were jumbled in some nooks; others were orderly archives of domestic ephemera: a wall of grandfather clocks; a cluster of rusting keys, likely belonging to earlier iterations of the brass-studded doors I’d been compulsively Instagramming all over Stone Town. I flipped through bundles of black-and-white Indian matrimonial headshots, the subjects’ bouffants, curlicues of eyeliner and flared pants suggesting a 1960s provenance. In one room, I paused before a glass cabinet of daggers glinting with bejeweled and mother-of-pearl hilts.