People have lived in Zanzibar for 20,000 years. History proper starts when the
islands became a base for traders voyaging between the African Great
Lakes, the Arabian peninsula, and the Indian subcontinent. Unguja offered a
protected and defensible harbor, so although the archipelago had few
products of value, Omanis and Yemenis settled in what became Zanzibar City as
a convenient point from which to trade with towns on the Swahili Coast. They
established garrisons on the islands and built the first mosques in the African
Great Lakes. During the Age of Exploration, the
Portuguese Empire was the first European power to gain control of Zanzibar, and
kept it for nearly 200 years. In 1698, Zanzibar fell under the control of the
Sultanate of Oman, which developed an economy of trade and cash crops, with a
ruling Arab elite and a Bantu general population. Plantations were developed
to grow spices; hence, the moniker of the Spice Islands. Another major trade
good was ivory, the tusks of elephants that were killed on the Tanganyika
mainland - a practice that is still in place to this day. The third pillar of
the economy was slaves, which gave Zanzibar an important place in the Arab
slave trade, the Indian Ocean equivalent of the better-known Triangular Trade.
The Omani Sultan of Zanzibar controlled a substantial portion of the African
Great Lakes coast, known as Zanj, as well as extensive inland trading routes.
Sometimes gradually, sometimes by fits and starts, control of Zanzibar came
into the hands of the British Empire. Part of the political impetus for this
was the movement for the abolition of the slave trade. In 1890, Zanzibar
became a British protectorate. The death of one sultan and the succession of
another of whom the British did not approve later led to the Anglo-Zanzibar
War, also known as the shortest war in history.
The islands gained independence from Britain in December 1963 as a
constitutional monarchy. A month later, the bloody Zanzibar Revolution, in which
several thousand Arabs and Indians were killed and thousands more expelled and
expropriated, led to the Republic of Zanzibar and Pemba. That April, the
republic merged with the mainland Tanganyika, or more accurately, was
subsumed into Tanzania, of which Zanzibar remains a semi-autonomous
region. Zanzibar was most recently in the international news with a January
2001 massacre, following contested elections.
Prehistory Zanzibar has been inhabited, perhaps not
continuously, since the Paleolithic. A 2005 excavation at Kuumbi Cave in
southeastern Zanzibar found heavy duty stone tools that showed occupation of
the site at least 22,000 years ago. Archaeological discoveries of a
limestone cave used radiocarbon techniques to prove more recent
occupation, from around 2800 BC to the year 0. Traces of the communities
include objects such as glass beads from around the Indian Ocean. It is a
suggestion of early trans-oceanic trade networks, although some writers have
expressed pessimism about this possibility.
No cave sites on Zanzibar have revealed pottery fragments used by early and
later Bantu farming and iron-working communities who lived on the islands
during the first millennium AD. On Zanzibar, the evidence for the later
farming and iron-working communities dating from the mid-first millennium AD
is much stronger and indicates the beginning of urbanism there when
settlements were built with mud-timber structures. This is somewhat earlier
than the existing evidence for towns in other parts of the Swahili Coast, given
as the 9th century AD. The first permanent residents of Zanzibar seem to
have been the ancestors of the Hadimu and Tumbatu, who began arriving from the
African Great Lakes mainland around 1000 AD. They had belonged to various Bantu
ethnic groups from the mainland, and on Zanzibar they lived in small villages
and failed to coalesce to form larger political units. Because they lacked
central organization, they were easily subjugated by outsiders.
Early Iranian & Arab rule Ancient pottery demonstrates existing
trade routes with Zanzibar as far back as the ancient Sumer and Assyria. An
ancient pendant discovered near Eshnunna dated ca. 2500-2400 BC. has been traced
to copal imported from the Zanzibar region.
Traders from Arabia, the Persian Gulf region of Iran, and west India probably
visited Zanzibar as early as the 1st century AD. They used the monsoon winds
to sail across the Indian Ocean and landed at the sheltered harbor located
on the site of present-day Zanzibar Town. Although the islands had few
resources of interest to the traders, they offered a good location from which
to make contact and trade with the towns of the Swahili Coast. A phase of urban
development associated with the introduction of stone material to the
construction industry of the African Great Lakes littoral began from the 10th
century AD. Traders began to settle in small numbers
on Zanzibar in the late 11th or 12th century, intermarrying with the
indigenous Africans. Eventually a hereditary ruler, emerged among the
Hadimu, and a similar ruler, called the Sheha, was set up among the Tumbatu.
Neither had much power, but they helped solidify the ethnic identity of their
respective peoples. The Yemenis built the earliest mosque in
the southern hemisphere in Kizimkazi, the southernmost village in Unguja. A
kufic inscription on its mihrab bears the date AH 500, i.e. 1107 AD.
Villages were also present in which lineage groups were common.
Portuguese rule Vasco da Gama's visit in 1499 marked the
beginning of European influence. In 1503 or 1504, Zanzibar became part of the
Portuguese Empire when Captain Ruy Lourenço Ravasco Marques landed and
demanded and received tribute from the sultan in exchange for peace. Zanzibar
remained a possession of Portugal for almost two centuries.
Later Arab rule In 1698, Zanzibar became part of the
overseas holdings of Oman, falling under the control of the Sultan of Oman. The
Portuguese were expelled and a lucrative trade in slaves and ivory thrived, along
with an expanding plantation economy centring on cloves. The Arabs
established garrisons at Zanzibar, Pemba, and Kilwa. The height of Arab
rule came during the reign of Seyyid Said, who in 1840 moved his capital from
Muscat in Oman to Stone Town. He established a ruling Arab elite and
encouraged the development of clove plantations, using the island's slave
labour. Zanzibar's commerce fell increasingly into the hands of traders
from the Indian subcontinent, whom Said encouraged to settle on the island.
After his death in 1856, his sons struggled over the succession. On April
6, 1861, Zanzibar and Oman were divided into two separate principalities. Sayyid
Majid bin Said Al-Busaid, his sixth son, became the Sultan of Zanzibar, while the
third son, Sayyid Thuwaini bin Said al-Said, became the Sultan of Oman.
The Sultan of Zanzibar controlled a large portion of the African Great Lakes
Coast, known as Zanj, as well as trading routes extending much further across the
continent, as far as Kindu on the Congo River. In November 1886, a
German-British border commission established the Zanj as a ten-nautical
mile wide strip along most of the coast of the African Great Lakes, stretching
from Cape Delgado to Kipini, including Mombasa and Dar es Salaam, and several
offshore Indian Ocean islands. However, from 1887 to 1892, all of these mainland
possessions were lost to the colonial powers of the United Kingdom, Germany,
and Italy, with Britain gaining control of Mombasa in 1963.
In the late 1800s, the Omani Sultan of Zanzibar also briefly acquired nominal
control over parts of Mogadishu in the Horn region to the north. However, power
on the ground remained in the hands of the Somali Geledi Sultanate. In 1892,
Ali bin Said leased the city to Italy. The Italians eventually purchased the
executive rights in 1905, and made Mogadishu the capital of the newly
established Italian Somaliland. Zanzibar was famous worldwide for its
spices and its slaves. It was the Africa Great Lakes' main slave-trading port,
and in the 19th century as many as 50,000 slaves were passing through the
slave markets of Zanzibar each year. Tippu Tip was the most notorious slaver,
under several sultans, and also a trader, plantation owner and governor.
Zanzibar's spices attracted ships from as far away as the United States, which
established a consulate in 1837. The United Kingdom's early interest in
Zanzibar was motivated by both commerce and the determination to end the slave
trade. In 1822, the British signed the first of a series of treaties with
Sultan Said to curb this trade, but not until 1876 was the sale of slaves
finally prohibited. Zanzibar had the distinction of having
the first steam locomotive in the African Great Lakes, when Sultan Bargash
bin Said ordered a tiny 0-4-0 tank engine to haul his regal carriage from
town to his summer palace at Chukwani. British influence and rule
The British Empire gradually took over; the relationship was formalized by the
1890 Heligoland-Zanzibar Treaty, in which Germany pledged, among other
things, not to interfere with British interests in Zanzibar. This treaty made
Zanzibar and Pemba a British protectorate, and the Caprivi Strip part
of German South-West Africa. British rule through a sultan remained largely
unchanged. The death of Hamad bin Thuwaini on 25
August 1896 saw the Khalid bin Bargash, eldest son of the second sultan,
Barghash ibn Sa'id, take over the palace and declare himself the new ruler. This
was contrary to the wishes of the British government, which favoured
Hamoud bin Mohammed. This led to a showdown, later called the
Anglo-Zanzibar War, on the morning of 27 August, when ships of the Royal Navy
destroyed the Beit al Hukum Palace, having given Khalid a one-hour ultimatum
to leave. He refused, and at 9 am the ships opened fire. Khalid's troops
returned fire and he fled to the German consulate. A cease fire was declared 45
minutes after the action had begun, giving the bombardment the title of The
Shortest War in History. Hamoud was declared the new ruler and peace was
restored once more. Acquiescing to British demands, he brought an end in
1897 to Zanzibar's role as a centre for the centuries-old eastern slave trade by
banning slavery and freeing the slaves, compensating their owners. Hamoud's son
and heir apparent, Ali, was educated in Britain.
From 1913 until independence in 1963, the British appointed their own
residents. Independence and revolution
On 10 December 1963, Zanzibar received its independence from the United Kingdom
as a constitutional monarchy under the Sultan. This state of affairs was
short-lived, as the Sultan and the democratically elected government were
overthrown on 12 January 1964 in the Zanzibar Revolution led by John Okello,
a Ugandan citizen who invaded Zanzibar with British trained Ugandan soldiers
from the mainland. Sheikh Abeid Amani Karume was named president of the newly
created People's Republic of Zanzibar and Pemba. Several thousand ethnic Arab
and Indian civilians were murdered and thousands more detained or expelled,
either their property confiscated or destroyed. The film Africa Addio
documents the violence and massacre of unarmed ethnic Arab civilians.
The revolutionary government nationalized the local operations of the
two foreign banks in Zanzibar, Standard Bank and National and Grindlays Bank.
These nationalized operations may have provided the foundation for the newly
created Peoples Bank of Zanzibar. Jetha Lila, the one locally owned bank in
Zanzibar, closed. It was owned by Indians and although the revolutionary
government of Zanzibar urged it to continue functioning, the loss of its
customer base as Indians left the island made it impossible to continue.
Union with Tanganyika On 26 April 1964, the mainland colony of
Tanganyika united with Zanzibar to form the United Republic of Tanganyika and
Zanzibar; this lengthy name was compressed into a portmanteau, the
United Republic of Tanzania, on 29 October 1964. After unification, local
affairs were controlled by President Abeid Amani Karume, while foreign
affairs were handled by the United Republic in Dar es Salaam. Zanzibar
remains a semi-autonomous region of Tanzania.
Lists of rulers = Sultans of Zanzibar =
Majid bin Said Barghash bin Said
Khalifah bin Said Ali bin Said
Hamad bin Thuwaini Khalid bin Barghash
Hamud bin Muhammed Ali bin Hamud
Khalifa bin Harub Abdullah bin Khalifa
Jamshid bin Abdullah = Viziers =
Sir Lloyd William Matthews, A.S. Rogers,
Arthur Raikes, Francis Barton,
= British residents = Francis Pearce,
John Sinclair, Alfred Hollis,
Richard Rankine, John Hall,
Henry Pilling, Vincent Glenday, 1946 to 1951)
John Rankine, Henry Steven Potter,
Arthur George Mooring, See also
Timeline of Zanzibar City References
External links Excerpt from: Race, Revolution and the
Struggle for Human Rights in Zanzibar by Thomas Burgess
Steere, Edward. Some account of the town of Zanzibar. London: Charles Cull.