People have lived in Zanzibar for 20,000 years.[citation needed] 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, 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 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 - a practice that is still in place to this day. The third pillar of the economy was slaves, which gave the Zanzibar slave trade an important place in the Indian Ocean 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. 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 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 in 2001.
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People have lived in Zanzibar for 20,000 years.[citation needed] The earliest written accounts ofZanzibar began when the islands became a base for traders...
Zanzibar is an insular semi-autonomous region which united with Tanganyika in 1964 to form the United Republic of Tanzania. It is an archipelago in the...
The Sultanate ofZanzibar (Swahili: Usultani wa Zanzibar, Arabic: سلطنة زنجبار, romanized: Sulṭanat Zanjībār), also known as the Zanzibar Sultanate, was...
Zanzibar City or Mjini District, often simply referred to as Zanzibar (Wilaya ya Zanzibar Mjini or Jiji la Zanzibar in Swahili) is one of two administrative...
existed in the Sultanate ofZanzibar until 1909. Slavery and slave trade existed in the Zanzibar Archipelago for thousands of years. When clove and coconut...
sultans ofZanzibar (Arabic: سلاطين زنجبار) were the rulers of the Sultanate ofZanzibar, which was created on 19 October 1856 after the death of Said bin...
coastal archipelago ofZanzibar. The former was a colony and part of German East Africa from the 1880s to 1919 when, under the League of Nations, it became...
to the overthrow of the Sultan ofZanzibar and his mainly Arab government by the island's majority Black African population. Zanzibar was an ethnically...
(Swahili for 'old town'), is the old part ofZanzibar City, the main city ofZanzibar, in Tanzania. The newer portion of the city is known as Ng'ambo, Swahili...
The flag ofZanzibar (Swahili: Bendera ya Zanzibar, Arabic: علم زنجبار) was adopted on 9 January 2005. It is a horizontal tricolour of blue, black, and...
The Zanzibar leopard is an African leopard (Panthera pardus pardus) population on Unguja Island in the Zanzibar archipelago, Tanzania, that is considered...
In January 1964 during and following the Zanzibar Revolution, Arab residents ofZanzibar were targeted for violence by the island’s majority Black African...
The Battle ofZanzibar was an encounter between the German Kaiserliche Marine and the British Royal Navy early in the First World War. While taking on...
This is a list of the heads of government ofZanzibar, an semi-autonomous region of Tanzania. The office of Chief Minister (later changed to Prime Minister)...
Ship Glasgow was a royal yacht belonging to the Sultan ofZanzibar. She was built in the style of the British frigate HMS Glasgow which had visited the...
Zanzibar Archipelago located on Unguja Island, Zanzibar, Tanzania. It is approximately 5 kilometres (3.1 mi) south ofZanzibar City, the capital of Zanzibar...
United Kingdom made a number of plans to intervene in response to the Zanzibar Revolution. The operational constraints of sending troops over such long...
passengers, sank off the coast ofZanzibar. The ferry was travelling between Unguja and Pemba, two islands off the coast of mainland Tanzania, when it capsized...
cities of Malindi, Inhambane and Sofala and the island-states of Mombassa, Pemba, Zanzibar, Mafia, Comoro and Mozambique (plus numerous smaller places)...
presented as a Christian anti-slavery crusade. In 1886, while Tippu Tip was in Zanzibar, a dispute arose between Tippu Tip's fort at Stanley Falls (modern-day...
African population of the coast of what is now Tanzania. This coast had been leased, under protest, to Germany by the Sultan ofZanzibar in 1888. The rebellion...
1874–1927) was the sixth Sultan ofZanzibar. Sayyid Khalid bin Barghash Al-Busa'id was born on 1874 in Zanzibar, the second son of Barghash bin Said (Arabic:...
The Zanzibar Guarantee Treaty was signed on March 10, 1862, in Paris, France, between the colonial empires of France and Great Britain. The result was...
This is a survey of the postage stamps and postal historyofZanzibar. Zanzibar is a semi-autonomous part of the United Republic of Tanzania, in East Africa...
the leader of the Zanzibar Revolution in 1964. This revolution overthrew Sultan Jamshid bin Abdullah and led to the proclamation ofZanzibar as a republic...
Zanzibar was the first country in East Africa to introduce the steam locomotive. Sultan Bargash bin Said had a seven-mile railway constructed from his...
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