When most of the Western world was still sunk in
the darkness of the Middle Ages, Zanzibar was
already a meeting place for traders from the
great Oriental cultures – China, Persia and
Arabia. It nestled in the middle of a mercantile
civilisation, stretching from Somalia in the
north down the coast of East Africa to
Mozambique in the south. This kingdom and its
inhabitants were known as the Swahili – the
people of the coast.
They traded gold, ivory and cloth with visitors
from across the Indian Ocean, built handsome
stone houses and had well developed systems of
government. Envoys, merchants and even pirates
from as far away as Japan and Russia came to
Zanzibar and its environs in sailing ships,
blown across the seas by the northeast monsoon
and returning, their holds laden with trade
goods, on the southwest wind.
The first Europeans to ‘discover’ Zanzibar were
the Portuguese, who arrived in the late 15th
century. In keeping with their conduct in the
rest of their empire, they had little interest
in the place beyond keeping it out of the hands
of their enemies. They built a fort or two,
introduced the sport of bullfighting to Pemba,
and added a few choice words to the Swahili
language. In fact, the Portuguese words still in
use in Kiswahili give a fairly good impression
of how the Portuguese spent their time here:
Meza - table. Mvinyo - wine. Pesa - money.
Chief among the trade visitors to Zanzibar were
the Omani Arabs, who had developed one of the
most powerful navys in the Indian Ocean, the
centre of a thriving sea-going commercial
empire. The sultans of Oman accrued immense
wealth by mounting slave trading expeditions
into the African interior, shipping their
captives back to the Persian Gulf and selling
them as household servants or plantation
labourers. It was Zanzibar which became the hub
of this commercial empire, a handy storehouse
for slaves fresh from the interior, who could be
confined on the island until the ships which
were to transport them north were made ready.
In 1828 the flagship of Sultan Seyyid Said, one
of Oman’s most powerful and influential rulers,
landed at Zanzibar. The Sultan had previously
been too busy defending Oman against its many
would-be conquerors to visit the island in
person, but he was enchanted by what he saw. In
contrast to the dry, rocky desert of Oman,
Zanzibar was green, lush and filled with sources
of fresh water. More importantly, it had
strategic advantages – safe, defensible and
close to the African mainland, the source of his
wealth. In 1840 Said moved his entire household
to Zanzibar and declared it the new capital of
his empire. Said and his many relatives and
associates built numerous palaces, bath houses
and country manors on the island, and introduced
the commercial farming of cloves, sugar and
other crops. Said’s empire went from strength to
strength, fuelled all the time by the flow of
miserable humanity that marched in chains from
the regions of the great lakes and beyond, to be
sold for ever higher prices in the great slave
market in the middle of Stone Town.
But it couldn’t last. By 1890, the British had
put an end to the once-great empire of the Omani
sultanate. Through a combination of bribery,
diplomacy and the odd judicious naval
bombardment, Britain abolished the slave trade
in East Africa and ultimately declared Zanzibar
a protectorate. The then Sultan, Ali, became a
British vassal, and between them Britain and
Germany carved up the Sultan’s domains, which
had once stretched as far inland as Lake Malawi.
Although the sultans remained nominally on the
throne, their power was ended and their wealth
used up.
The era of the British on Zanzibar, which saw
the slave market destroyed and an Anglican
cathedral built in its place, lasted until 1963,
when power was formally handed back to the Omani
sultans. But the reign of the new sultan was
short-lived, he was ousted in 1964 by a violent
revolution, and today lives quietly on the south
coast of England.
After the revolution the new Zanzibari
government joined with the post-independence
government of mainland Tanganyika to form a
single state, renamed Tanzania. Zanzibar was run
along socialist, single-party lines by the new
revolutionary government, and received political
support and financial aid from countries such as
Bulgaria, East Germany and China. However in the
1980s the first presidential elections took
place and Zanzibar’s economy slowly became less
state-controlled, with some private sector
enterprise permitted. The first half of the
1990s saw the rise of a multi-party system of
government and the development of Zanzibar’s
newest industry – tourism.
Zanzibar’s most famous son – Freddie Mercury
Freddie Mercury, whose real name was Farouk
Bulsara, was born in Stone Town, Zanzibar, on
September 5th, 1946. Freddie’s parents belonged
to the Parsee faith, the ancient Zoroastrian
religion originating in Persia. Many Parsees
emigrated to India during and after the Arab
conquest of Iran, resulting in a sizeable Parsee
population, and many travelled to Zanzibar to
work for the British government. Freddie lived
in Zanzibar until the age of seven (spending
some of his early years in the building that is
now the Zanzibar Gallery shop on Kenyatta Road).
At seven he was sent to boarding school in
India, returning to Zanzibar occasionally until
his parents emigrated to the UK before the
revolution of 1964. Freddie went to art school
in England and eventual rock stardom with his
band Queen, becoming the world’s best known
Asian pop singer before his untimely death from
an AIDS-related illness in 1991. Today fans from
across the world visit Zanzibar to pay tribute
to his musical genius.
