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 (Stone Town) 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 (a name also
used of Dutch colony the Moluccas, now part of Indonesia). 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
(Chami 2006). 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 (Zanzibar, Mafia) 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 (Juma 2004). 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 (mostly Yemen), the Persian
Gulf region
of Iran (especially Shiraz), 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 (known as the Mwenyi Mkuu or Jumbe),
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
The Old Fort of Zanzibar built in the late 17th century by the Omanis to
defend the island from the Portuguese.
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. With an excellent harbor and no shortage of fresh water, Stone Town
(capital of Zanzibar) became one of the largest and wealthiest cities in East
Africa. With the coming of Omani rule, there occurred a forced land
redistribution as all of the most fertile land was handed over to Omani
aristocrats who enslaved the African farmers who worked the land. Every
year, hundreds of dhows would sail across the Indian Ocean from Arabia, Persia
and India with the monsoon winds blowing in from the northeast, bringing iron,
cloth, sugar and dates. When the monsoon winds shifted to the southwest in
March or April, the traders would leave, with their ships packed full of
tortoiseshell, copal, cloves, coir, coconuts, rice, ivory and slaves.
The Arabs established garrisons at
Zanzibar, Pemba, and Kilwa. The
height of Arab rule came during the reign of Sultan Seyyid Said (more fully, Sayyid Said bin Sultan al-Busaid), 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 (1834/5–1870), his sixth son,
became the Sultan of Zanzibar,
while the third son, Sayyid Thuwaini bin Said al-Said, became the Sultan of Oman.
Accounts by visitors to Zanzibar often
emphasize the outward beauty of the place. The British explorer Richard Francis Burton described Zanzibar in 1856 as:
"Earth, sea and sky, all seemed wrapped in a soft and sensuous
repose...The sea of purist sapphire, which had not parted with its blue rays to
the atmosphere...lay looking...under a blaze of sunshine which touched every
object with a dull burnish of gold". Adding to the beauty were the
gleaming white minarets of mosques and the sultan's palaces in Stone Town,
making the city appear from the distance to Westerners as an "Orientalist" fantasy brought to
life. Those who got closer described Stone Town as an extremely
foul-smelling city that reeked of human and animal excrement, garbage and
rotting corpses as garbage, sewage and bodies of animals and slaves were all
left out in the open to rot. The British explorer Dr. David Livingstone when
living in Stone Town in 1866 wrote in his diary: "The stench arising from
a mile and a half or two square miles of exposed sea beach, which is the
general depository of the filth of the town is quite horrible...It might be
called Stinkabar rather than Zanzibar". Besides for the pervasive
foul odor of Stone Town, accounts by visitors described a city full of slaves
on the brink of starvation and a place where cholera, malaria and venereal
diseases all flourished.
Of all the forms of economic activity on Zanzibar,
slavery was the most profitable and the vast majority of the blacks living on
the island were either slaves taken from East Africa or the descendants of
slaves from East Africa. The slaves were brought to Zanzibar in dhows,
where many as possible were packed in with no regard for comfort or
safety. Many did not survive the journey to Zanzibar. Upon reaching
Zanzibar, the slaves were stripped completely naked, cleaned, had their bodies
covered with coconut oil, and forced to wear gold and silver bracelets bearing
the name of the slave trader. At that point, the slaves were forced to
march nude in a line down the streets of Stone Town guarded by loyal slaves of
the slavers carrying swords or spears until someone would show interest in the
possession. A captain from a ship owned by the East India Company who
visited Zanzibar in 1811 and witnessed these marches wrote about how a buyer
examined the slaves:
"The mouth and teeth are inspected, and
afterwards every part of the body in succession, not even excepting the
breasts, etc, of the girls, many of whom I have seen examined in the most
indecent manner in the public market by the purchasers...The slave is then made
to walk or run a little way to show that there is no defect about the feet;
after which, if the price is agreed to, they are stripped of their finery and
delivered over to their future master. I have frequently counted twenty or
thirty of these files in the market at one time...Women with children newly
born hanging at their breasts and others so old they can scarcely walk, are
sometimes seen dragged about in this manner. They had in general a very
dejected look; some groups appeared so ill fed that their bones seemed as if
ready to penetrate the skin".
Every year, about 40, 000-50, 000 slaves
were taken to Zanzibar. About a third went to work on clove and coconut
plantations of Zanzibar and Pemba while the rest were exported to Persia,
Arabia, the Ottoman Empire and Egypt. Conditions on the plantations were
so harsh that about 30% of the male slaves died every year, thus necessitating
the need to import another batch of slaves. The Omani Arabs who ruled
Zanzibar had in the words of the American diplomat Donald Petterson a
"culture of violence" where brute force was the preferred solution to
problems and outlandish cruelty was a virtue. The ruling al-Busaid family
was characterized by fratricidal quarrels as it was common for brother to
murder brother, and this was typical of the Arab aristocracy, where it was
acceptable for family members to murder one another to gain land, wealth,
titles and slaves. Visitors to Zanzibar often mentioned the "shocking
brutality" which the Arab masters treated their African slaves, who were
so cowed into submission that there was never a slave revolt attempted on
Zanzibar. The cruelty which the Arab masters treated their black slaves
left behind a legacy of hate, which exploded in the revolution of 1964. 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 (19 km) wide strip along most of the coast of the African Great Lakes, stretching from Cape
Delgado (now
in Mozambique) to Kipini (now in Kenya), 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 (which, also holding sway over the Shebelle region
in Somalia's interior, was at its zenith). 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.[28]
Zanzibar was famous worldwide for its
spices and its slaves. During the 19th century, Zanzibar was known all over the
world in the words of Petterson as: "A fabled land of spices, a vile
center of slavery, a place of origins of expeditions into the vast, mysterious
continent, the island was all these things during its heyday in the last half
of the 19th century. 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. (David Livingstone estimated
that 80,000 Africans died each year before ever reaching the island.) 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. Under strong British
pressure, the slave trade was officially abolished in 1876, but slavery itself
remained legal in Zanzibar until 1897.
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. One of the most famous palaces built
by the Sultans were the House of Wonders, which is today one of Zanzibar's most
popular tourist attractions.
British influence and rule
A Zanzibar marketplace, around 1910. A British colonist
can be seen in the middle, wearing a linen suit and a Pith helmet.
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 (not colony), and the Caprivi Strip (in
what is now Namibia) part of German South-West Africa. British rule through a
sultan (vizier) 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
Navydestroyed 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 (essentially governors). One of the more appreciated reforms
brought in by the British were the establishment of a proper sewer, garbage
disposal system and burial system so that the beaches of Zanzibar reeked no
more of bodies, excrement and garbage, finally eliminating the foul smell of
Stone Town, which had repulsed so many Western visitors.
Independence and revolution
Ceremony marking the 40th anniversary of the Zanzibar Revolutionin 2004.
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 organized and led the
revolution with his followers on the island. Sheikh Abeid Amani Karume was
named president of the newly created People's Republic of Zanzibar and Pemba. Several thousand ethnic Arab
(5,000-12,000 Zanzibaris of Arabic descent) 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
Main article: History of Tanzania
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.