Brief history of Zanzibar

People have lived in Zanzibar for 20,000 years. Their proper history starts when the islands became a base for traders voyaging between the African Great Lakes, the Arabian Peninsula, and the Indian subcontinent. Ungula 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.

It was once a Portuguese empire for nearly 200 years and later in 1698 fell under 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.

The 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 and since it was an island country in the Indian Ocean, off the coast of Tanganyika; today it forms part of Tanzania.