History of Zanzibar
| History of Tanzania |
|---|
| Timeline |
| Pre-colonial period |
| Colonial period |
| Modern history |
| Tanzania portal |
People have lived in Zanzibar for 20,000 years. The earliest written accounts of Zanzibar began when the islands became a base for traders voyaging between the African Great Lakes, the Somali Peninsula, the Arabian Peninsula, Iran, and the Indian subcontinent. Unguja offered a protected and defensible harbour, 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 Region.
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, and an Arab elite that ruled over the Bantu general population. Plantations were developed to grow spices; hence, the moniker of the Spice Islands (a name also used for the 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. This practice continues in the 21st century.
The third pillar of the economy was slaves, which gave the Zanzibar slave trade an important place in the Indian Ocean slave trade. This was the Indian Ocean equivalent of the better-known Triangular Trade across the Atlantic Ocean. 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, the British Empire gained control of Zanzibar. 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 by the black majority, led to the formation of the People's Republic of Zanzibar. That April, the republic merged with the mainland Tanganyika, or more accurately, was subsumed into Tanzania, of which Zanzibar remains a semi-autonomous region. Recent decades in Zanzibar have seen political violence related to contested elections, with a major massacre taking place in 2001.