Zanzibar

• 1. Thirty-Eight Minutes

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  Zanzibar holds the record for the shortest war in history. On the morning of the 27th of August 1896, the Royal Navy destroyed the Beit al Hukum Palace on this Tanzanian island chain off the coast of East Africa. A cease-fire was declared 38 minutes later. The conflict is known as the Anglo-Zanzibar War.

  Its cause was a dispute over who would rule. Sultan Hamad bin Thuwaini, who was friendly to Britain, died on the 25th of August 1896, and rumours of poison followed. His successor, Khalid bin Barghash, did not have British approval. Khalid was overthrown, and the British placed Sultan Hamoud on the throne instead.

  How did a string of islands end up with British advisers watching over its sultan? Why does its name point to a black coast, and why were its cloves once famous worldwide? And how does a place that lost a war in under an hour now govern itself inside a larger country? The answers begin thousands of years before any warship arrived.

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• 2. Roots of the Swahili Coast

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  The name Zanzibar began as the Arabic zanjibār, which came from the Persian zangbâr. That compound joins zang, meaning black, with bâr, meaning coast, and it echoes the older name Sea of Zanj. Several place names share this origin. All of them point to a land of the blacks, a reference to the dark skin of the people who lived there.

  Tiny stone tools called microliths show that people have lived on Zanzibar for at least 20,000 years, since the start of the Later Stone Age. A Greco-Roman text called the Periplus of the Erythraean Sea, written between the 1st and 3rd centuries, mentions an island named Menuthias. That island is probably Unguja. Around the start of the first millennium, Bantu speakers settled both the islands and the neighbouring coast.

  At Fukuchani, on the northwest coast, excavators found a farming and fishing community that dates to the 6th century at the latest. A large amount of daub points to timber buildings. Shell beads, bead grinders and iron slag turned up as well. Imported pottery made up less than 1% of the pottery found, mostly from the Gulf and dated to the 5th to 8th century. Similar sites at Mkokotoni and Dar es Salaam suggest linked communities that grew on their own into a coastal maritime culture.

  Trade surged from the mid-8th century. By the close of the 10th century, Zanzibar ranked among the central Swahili trading towns. Persian, Indian and Arab traders came for gold, ivory and ambergris, then shipped them to Asia. Caravan traders from the African Great Lakes and the Zambezian Region came to the coast hoping for imported goods, above all Indian cloth. Before the Portuguese arrived, the southern towns of Unguja Ukuu and Kizimkazi and the northern town of Tumbatu led the exchange.

  The monsoon winds shaped family life. Asian men stayed on the coast for as long as six months while they waited for the right winds, and many married East African women. Almost all of these traders were Muslims, so their children took their father's ethnic identity, though matrilineal traditions stayed central.

  Digs at Pemba Island and at Shanga in the Lamu Archipelago show how the buildings changed. Houses were made of timber around 1050, then of mud with coral walls around 1150. By the 13th century people built in stone bonded with mud, and in the 14th century they began bonding stone with lime. Only wealthy patricians lived in stone and lime houses, whose strength allowed flat roofs. Most people stayed in single-story thatched houses much like those of the 11th and 12th centuries. Thomas Spear, John Middleton and Mark Horton argue that the style has no Arab or Persian elements and was entirely a local development.

  Today the Swahili language, though Bantu, contains Arabic loanwords. Most of them arrived in the 19th century, as Omani power grew.

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• 3. Portuguese, Then Omani

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  Vasco da Gama's visit in 1498 opened the age of European influence. In 1503 or 1504, Captain Rui Lourenço Ravasco Marques came ashore and received tribute from the sultan in exchange for peace. Zanzibar then remained a Portuguese possession for almost two centuries. At first it belonged to the province of Arabia and Ethiopia under a governor-general. Around 1571 it joined the western division of the empire and was run from Mozambique.

  The Portuguese hold was thin. When the English ship Edward Bonaventure visited Unguja in 1591, its crew found no Portuguese fort and no garrison. The Portuguese kept only a trade depot, where produce was gathered for shipment to Mozambique. Local affairs stayed with the island's own king, the predecessor of the Mwinyi Mkuu of Dunga.

  That changed in 1631, when the Sultan of Mombasa massacred the Portuguese residents there. Around 1635 Portugal built a fort on Pemba Island, which it had long seen as a troublesome launching point for rebellions in Mombasa. From then on the Portuguese appointed European governors. Trade suffered, and local power shrank. Swahili elites in Mombasa and Zanzibar responded by inviting Omani aristocrats to help drive the Europeans out.

  In 1698, Zanzibar came under the influence of the Sultanate of Oman. A brief revolt against Omani rule broke out in 1784. In the early 19th century, local elites invited Omani merchant princes to settle, and many Zanzibaris still stress that they themselves invited Seyyid Said, the first Busaidi sultan. Claiming a patron-client bond with a powerful family was a strategy used by Swahili coast towns from at least the fifteenth century.

  In 1832 or 1840, depending on the source, Said bin Sultan moved his capital from Muscat to Stone Town. After Said died in June 1856, his sons Thuwaini bin Said and Majid bin Said fought over the succession. His will split his lands in two, making Thuwaini the Sultan of Oman and Majid the first Sultan of Zanzibar. Charles Canning, 1st Earl Canning, Britain's Viceroy and Governor-General of India, eventually upheld the will.

  Until around 1890 the sultans controlled much of the Swahili coast known as Zanj, including Mombasa and Dar es Salaam. In October 1886, a British-German border commission shrank the Zanj to a strip of 10 mi along the coast, running from Cape Delgado to Kipini. Within a few years most of the mainland territory had been absorbed into German East Africa.

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• 4. Cloves and Captives

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  The clove tree comes from the Moluccan Islands, in what is now Indonesia. The Omani sultans brought it to Zanzibar in the first half of the 19th century, and plantations soon spread. The archipelago became famous worldwide for cloves and other spices. Locals sometimes call it the Spice Islands. Ivory was another major trade good, and Said bin Sultan encouraged traders from the Indian subcontinent to settle, so commerce slowly passed into their hands.

  A darker business grew beside the spice trade. During his 14-year reign, Majid bin Said built his power around the East African slave trade. The port of Malindi in Zanzibar City was the main outlet on the Swahili Coast for sending slaves to the Middle East. In the mid-19th century, as many as 50,000 slaves passed through it every year.

  Many of those captives came from Tippu Tip, a notorious Arab and Swahili slave trader and ivory merchant. He led huge expeditions, some 4,000 strong, into the hinterland. There, chiefs sold him their villagers at low prices. He made the captives carry ivory back to Zanzibar, then sold them in the slave market for large profits. Tippu Tip became one of the wealthiest men in Zanzibar, with multiple plantations and 10,000 slaves.

  Majid's brother Barghash bin Said succeeded him and improved the infrastructure of Unguja. Another brother, Khalifa bin Said, became the third sultan. He deepened ties with the British, which moved the archipelago toward abolishing slavery.

  The clove fortune did not last. Pemba Island was once the world's leading source, yet annual clove sales have fallen by 80 percent since the 1970s. A fast-moving global market and foreign competition hurt the trade. So did Tanzania's failed experiment with socialism in the 1960s and 1970s, when the government controlled clove prices and exports. Indonesia now supplies 75 percent of the world's cloves, while Zanzibar supplies 7 percent.

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• 5. Treaties and Protection

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  Captain Fairfax Moresby, the British consul in Muscat, pressed Sultan Said in 1822 to sign the Moresby Treaty. It was the first of a series of anti-slavery agreements with Britain. The treaty banned slave transport south and east of the Moresby Line, which ran from Cape Delgado in Africa to Diu Head on the coast of India. Said lost the duty he had earned on slave sales, so he encouraged the trade inside Zanzibar itself to make up the shortfall.

  In 1842 Britain told Said it wished to end the slave trade to Arabia, Oman, Persia and the Red Sea. The Royal Navy was meant to enforce the treaties by capturing dhows carrying slaves. But only four ships patrolled a vast stretch of sea. Vessels from France, Spain, Portugal and America kept carrying slaves anyway.

  Pressure finally worked in 1873. British consul Sir John Kirk threatened Sultan Barghash with a total blockade of Zanzibar. Barghash reluctantly signed the Anglo-Zanzibari treaty, which abolished the slave trade, closed all slave markets and protected freed slaves in the Sultan's territories.

  In 1890 the German Empire signed the Heligoland-Zanzibar Treaty with Britain. In it Germany agreed to "recognize the British protectorate over… the islands of Zanzibar and Pemba". The sultan stayed the ruler on paper, but the British Crown held formal control of military and foreign affairs. Britain also held informal control of domestic matters through the advisers it appointed. Prime Minister Salisbury explained the thinking behind this arrangement: "The condition of a protected dependency is more acceptable to the half-civilised races, and more suitable for them than direct dominion. It is cheaper, simpler, less wounding to their self-esteem, gives them more career as public officials, and spares them unnecessary contact with white men."

  From 1890 to 1913, traditional viziers stayed in charge under advisers sent by the Colonial Office. In 1913 Britain moved to direct rule through British residents, who were effectively governors.

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• 6. Revolution and Union

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  On the 10th of December 1963, the United Kingdom ended the protectorate over Zanzibar through the Zanzibar Act 1963. The islands became a constitutional monarchy under the Sultan, within the Commonwealth. The independence lasted a month. On the 12th of January 1964, the Zanzibar Revolution deposed Sultan Jamshid bin Abdullah, who fled into exile.

  A socialist government led by the Afro-Shirazi Party took over as the People's Republic of Zanzibar. More than 20,000 people were killed, mostly Arabs and Indians, and many survivors fled the country. The divide was long-standing. In the early 1960s the Shirazi, or Zanzibar Africans, made up approximately 56% of the population, while the Zanzibar Arabs, most of whom had come from Oman in the 1800s, made up approximately 17%.

  In April 1964 the republic merged with mainland Tanganyika. The new United Republic of Tanganyika and Zanzibar was soon renamed Tanzania, a blend of the two names. Zanzibar remains an autonomous region inside it.

  Today Zanzibar has its own Revolutionary Government, made up of a Revolutionary Council and a House of Representatives. The House has 81 members. Fifty are elected from constituencies for five-year terms, 10 are appointed by the President of Zanzibar, 15 hold special seats for women, and six serve ex officio. Five of them are then elected to represent Zanzibar in Tanzania's National Assembly.

  Sovereignty has been a sore point. On the 3rd of July 2008, Tanzania's Prime Minister Mizengo Pinda said there was "nothing like the sovereignty of Zanzibar in the Union Government unless the Constitution is changed in the future". Members of the House from both the ruling Chama Cha Mapinduzi and the opposition Civic United Front disagreed. They stood firmly behind Zanzibar as a fully autonomous state.

  The rivalry between those two parties has marked politics since the early 1990s. Contested elections in October 2000 led to a massacre on the 27th of January 2001. According to Human Rights Watch, the army and police shot into crowds of protestors, killing at least 35 and wounding more than 600. About 2,000 people temporarily fled to Kenya. Another contested election, on the 31st of October 2005, left nine dead after the Civic United Front claimed its victory had been stolen.

  Talks on a power-sharing accord suffered repeated setbacks. In April 2008 the Civic United Front walked away from the table. In November 2009, President Amani Abeid Karume met Civic United Front secretary-general Seif Sharif Hamad at the State House. It was the first time the party had recognized Karume as the legitimate president since multi-party politics began. On the 31st of July 2010-66.2 percent of voters adopted a constitutional amendment allowing rival parties to form governments of national unity.

  The second-placed party must now join a coalition with the winner. In December 2020, after disputed elections, ACT-Wazalendo joined a coalition with Chama Cha Mapinduzi. Hussein Ali Mwinyi has been president since the 1st of November 2020. Some scholars compare Zanzibar's autonomy to that of Hong Kong and call it an "African Hong Kong".

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• 7. Wildlife and Weather

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  Unguja is about 85 km long and 39 km wide, with an area of 1464 km2. A channel at least 36.5 km across separates it from the mainland. The island is mainly low lying, and its highest point reaches only 120 m. Sandy beaches ringed by coral reefs rich in marine life line its shores. Pemba Island is about 67 km long and 23 km wide, covering 985 km2, and its highest point is 95 m. A channel some 56 km wide divides it from the mainland.

  Zanzibar has a tropical monsoon climate. Strong sea breezes from the northeast monsoon, known as Kaskazi in Kiswahili, often cool the summer heat, especially on the north and east coasts. Rain falls in two seasons. The main peak comes in March, April and May with the southwest monsoon, called Kusi, and a smaller peak arrives in November and December. July is the driest month.

  Unguja's animals reflect its link to the African mainland during the last Ice Age. The Zanzibar red colobus, Procolobus kirkii, is one of Africa's rarest primates, with perhaps only 1,500 left. It has been isolated on the island for at least 1,000 years. It is recognized as its own species, with different coat patterns, calls and food habits from its mainland relatives. About one third of them live in and around Jozani Forest. The easiest place to see them is the farmland next to the reserve, where they are used to people and come close to the ground.

  The Zanzibar leopard is critically endangered, yet a camera trap showed a leopard in the Jozani area in June 2018. The island also shelters the recently described Zanzibar servaline genet, along with monkeys, bushpigs, small antelopes and African palm civets. There are no large wild animals. Deep channels isolate Pemba, whose fauna is more limited and includes the Pemba flying fox.

  Pressures are mounting. Plastic bottles, other plastics and cigarette butts litter the streets, beaches and ocean in the north, and medical equipment waste is a particular problem. Studies show that temperatures and wind speeds have risen sharply over the last 40 years. Together with shifting rainfall, these changes cause the seaweed crop to rot or be destroyed during harvesting.

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• 8. Island Life Today

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  In 1985-19,000 tourists visited Zanzibar. By 2016 the number was 376,000, and by 2025 it had reached 917,000. Government promotion drove the growth. Abeid Amani Karume International Airport can now serve up to 1.5 million passengers a year. The 2022 census counted 1,889,773 residents, growing at 3.8 percent a year, with 219,007 living in Zanzibar City.

  The people are mostly ethnic Swahili, with Arabs, Persians, Somalis and Indians among them. Their Swahili dialect, Kiunguja, has many Arabic loanwords and is regarded as Standard Swahili. The population is almost entirely Muslim, with a Christian minority of around 22,000. The Anglican Diocese of Zanzibar was founded in 1892, and Christ Church Cathedral was restored in 2016 for one million euros.

  Every July, the Zanzibar International Film Festival showcases the arts of the Swahili Coast, including the favorite local music, taarab. Singer Bi Kidude received a WOMEX award in 2005. Freddie Mercury of Queen, born Farrokh Bulsara, was born in Stone Town and fled to the United Kingdom with his family at 17, during the revolution. Abdulrazak Gurnah, born in Zanzibar in 1948, won the 2021 Nobel Prize in Literature. In 1973 Zanzibar launched sub-Saharan Africa's first colour television service, while mainland Tanzania waited until 1994 because President Julius Nyerere opposed television.

  On the roads, the only public transport is the privately owned daladala. The name comes from dala, meaning dollar, which in the 1970s and 1980s was five shillings, the fare to the nearest town. The trip to town cost one dollar and the return trip another. Buses leave when full rather than on a schedule.

  The sea crossings have been deadly. On the 10th of September 2011, the ferry MV Spice Islander I sank after leaving Unguja for Pemba. A government report first put the missing at 2,764. A presidential commission later reported 1,370 missing, 203 bodies recovered and 941 survivors, and blamed severe overloading. In July 2012 the MV Skagit capsized in rough seas near Chumbe Island with 447 passengers aboard. Overloading was again the cause.

  Because Zanzibar has no ground link to the mainland, a proposed 50 km Zanzibar Bridge has drawn attention. If built, it would be by far the longest bridge in Africa.

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