Long before his unmistakable mustache, macro concerts and unforgettable songs like 'Bohemian Rhapsody', Freddie Mercury - vocalist of the legendary British band Queen - was Farrokh Bulsara, a child born eighty years ago on the paradisiacal Tanzanian island of Zanzibar in the Indian Ocean.
His British naturalization certificate, preserved by the National Archives of the United Kingdom, leaves no doubt about origin: Farrokh Bulsara was born on September 5, 1946 in Stone Town, capital of the Sultanate of Zanzibar.
Mercury's official website states that he came into the world in the Government Hospital on the island, then under British rule.
The Bulsara were Parsis, descendants of the Zoroastrian community that emigrated from Persia to India centuries ago and whose members began to settle around 1845 in Zanzibar.
Although small in number, the Parsis made their mark in East Africa as important merchants and professionals (lawyers, doctors, accountants). Bomi Bulsara, Mercury's father, worked as a treasurer for the British colonial administration.
Farrokh was thus born at a great cultural crossroads of the Indian Ocean. Not in vain, UNESCO describes Stone Town as "a Swahili commercial city where for more than a millennium African, Arab, Indian and European elements merged."
That was the first landscape seen by someone who decades later would become one of the most universal figures in rock, although a good part of his childhood was spent far from Africa.
Mercury went to study in India at the age of eight, at St. Peter's school in Panchgani (west), and returned to Zanzibar at the age of sixteen, after completing his studies, before the history of the island changed abruptly.
Zanzibar Revolution
Zanzibar gained independence from the United Kingdom in December 1963 and just a month later, on January 12, 1964, a revolution overthrew Sultan Jamshid of Zanzibar. The violence especially affected the Arab population and also pushed many residents of Asian origin to leave the archipelago.
The records of the British National Archives already place Farrokh in 1964 in the English town of Feltham (today part of London), where his family fled.
He was 17 years old. Zanzibar was left behind; ahead, London, the art and graphic design studios, the name change and, shortly after, Queen. But eight decades after its birth, the island preserves the beginning of that history.
On the central street of Kenyatta Road, in Stone Town, the Freddie Mercury Museum has been operating since 2019, installed in a house where the Bulsara family lived and converted into a pilgrimage 'sanctuary' for Queen devotees who visit the island.
It is the first museum dedicated entirely to the singer and maintains an official collaboration with Queen Productions, the band's corporate management and copyright collection entity, which has provided photographs.
The museum, small but very visual and colorful, reconstructs that origin with family photographs of Farrokh Bulsara, images of his childhood in Zanzibar, a copy of his birth certificate from the Zanzibari Government and display cases dedicated to his subsequent rise to fame.
Outside, the windows display photos of the singer; Inside, portraits, projections of performances, Queen music and replicas of iconic costumes - such as the yellow jacket he wore on the group's 'Magic Tour' in 1986 - accompany one of the central pieces of the tour: a black piano that the artist played in his childhood.
The museum, which includes materials linked to the Bulsara family, reproduces some famous quotes from Mercury, such as: "I'm not going to be a star. I'm going to be a legend."
Brian May's dream
In search of the vocalist's Zanzibari origin, Brian May, Queen's guitarist, traveled to the island in 2019 on a visit that he described as "a pilgrimage."
Accompanied by his wife, Anita Dobson, and with the help of Mercury's sister Kashmira, May toured his former classmate's school and childhood home in Stone Town.
"This is something I've dreamed of doing for many years," he wrote on Instagram at the time, remembering Mercury as "a little boy with big dreams" and "a shy boy" with whom Queen shared "the impossible vision of making music that would change the world."
Zanzibar's relationship with one of her most famous sons, however, was not always comfortable. In 2006, when he would have turned 60, Muslim leaders protested against a tribute party organized on the island, questioning it about the singer's homosexuality and lifestyle.
While Montreux (Switzerland), the city where the singer lived, celebrates his eightieth birthday with a gala this Saturday, Zanzibar preserves another part of Freddie Mercury, the one that existed before the stage.
