A guidebook published by Zanzibar’s colonial government in 1931 noted, “The population of the Protectorate (235,428) is one of the most cosmopolitan in the world and there are few races of which representatives may not be found in the two islands.”  For over a millennium prior to the 1930s, Zanzibar figured as a small part of a vast Indian Ocean world of trade, monsoons, and Islam that had fostered a nearly uninterrupted flow of goods and people across the sea and at least three continents. This world was multicultural and multilingual; it produced a number of diasporas and a patchwork of ethnic enclaves in islands and port cities along its ocean rim. Along the coast of East Africa, Arab and Persian merchants and settlers gradually assimilated into local Swahili-speaking society, which, though predominantly African in ancestry, was unique from societies of the interior due to its reception of peoples, ideas, and commodities from overseas. Michael Pearson expressed well the current scholarly consensus: “inland people” “moved to the coast, and there were subject to more foreign influences” than those “who remained inland.”  If anything was distinct about Swahili coastal towns, it was their cosmopolitanism.

The islands of Zanzibar were, until the beginning of the nineteenth century, a relatively insignificant portion of this Swahili-speaking chain of settlements.  In the next few decades, however, the islands were transformed when an Arab dynasty of merchant princes from Oman decided to make Zanzibar Town, which until then was little more than a fishing village, the capital of a sultanate that exercised political hegemony over the Swahili towns of the coast, as well as commercial dominance over much of the East African interior extending to the Great Lakes.  Through trade in slaves, spices, and ivory, Zanzibar Town became the largest and most powerful metropolis of the region.  The enormous influx of African, Arab, and Asian migrants, whether voluntary or involuntary, swamped Zanzibar’s indigenous population, some of whom lost their lands during the Arab conquest.  Zanzibar Town became East Africa’s leading trading emporium, and the islands led the world in the production of cloves, a tree crop grown for the most part on Arab-owned plantations sustained by African slave labor and South Asian credit. The new wealth of the era supported the consumption of the products and adoption of the cultural fashions of the Indian Ocean world.

British colonialism brought the abolition of slavery starting in the 1890s but not the eradication of inequalities.  Africans commonly remained as squatters on Arab-owned plantations or moved to villages on the margins of plantation society where they engaged in fishing and subsistence farming.  Many Zanzibaris experienced, on a very personal level, the close correspondence between identity and access to wealth, status, and opportunity in the islands.  The British accepted a social hierarchy in which the different economic roles performed by Zanzibar’s various communities were perceived to be natural and even complementary since, colonial officials maintained, each existed in various stages of enlightenment and civilization.

It is easy, however, to overstate such divisions within colonial Zanzibari society.  Allegiance to Islam was overwhelming, creating something of a spiritual brotherhood.   There were large numbers of poor Arabs and South Asians, as well as Africans who owned considerable numbers of clove trees.   Each of the communities also experienced its own sharp divisions; South Asians, for example, were Hindu, Sikh, Parsee, or members of semi exclusive Muslim sects such as the Ismaili and Bohora communities. Africans were divided by ethnic identity. Former slaves in both Unguja and Pemba sought inclusion in island society by acquiring land and by adopting the dress and manners of wealthier islanders.  They sometimes adopted ethnic markers, such as Swahili, Hadimu, and Shirazi, which obscured their slave origins and identified them as free and established members of coastal society; such markers also distinguished them from more recent African migrant workers from the mainland.  Zanzibar’s two principal islands, Unguja and Pemba, were also remarkably dissimilar: communal relations were more harmonious in Pemba than in Unguja.  In Pemba, longstanding cultural and economic ties, along with high levels of intermarriage, tended to diminish the importance of racial or ethnic differences, whereas, on Unguja, African grievances toward Arabs over land and labor were especially acute.  As a result, Africans in Unguja were more willing than those in Pemba to transcend their ethnic differences in order to oppose Arab political objectives.

Times, furthermore, were changing. The long-term trend in both islands was for Africans to improve their position gradually in the agricultural sector relative to Arabs, who commonly mortgaged their plantations to South Asian creditors, lived in continual debt, and were increasingly “peasantised.”  The gains made by African small landholders were not matched, however, by sizable gains in either education or employment in the colonial administration.  By the 1950s, Arabs and South Asians, aside from a few hundred British expatriates, dominated the civil service; and in the increasingly important sphere of Western education, Africans were dramatically underrepresented.  If colonial schools were the means by which many Africans sought to access the knowledge, skills, and positions of more urbanized and cosmopolitan communities, progress was slow and a matter of frustration.

Empires by their nature encourage cosmopolitanism, and the islands continued to receive migrants throughout the colonial era from around the Indian Ocean rim: mainlander Africans, Arabs, Goans, and Comorians.  Outside of Zanzibar Town, the British didn’t undertake any revolutionary schemes, satisfied for the most part to collect taxes, enforce the law, invest in public works, and manage the clove industry. Rural life was often slow and isolated. Life for town residents, however, was often a cosmopolitan feast of the senses: cafes offered African, Arabic, Indian, and Chinese dishes, and cinemas packed in audiences nightly to see everything from American Westerns to Egyptian dramas and Indian musicals.  Congolese music competed with calypso, jazz, Latin bands, taarab, Bing Crosby, and rock and roll.  Shops displayed imported and locally made items, enticing not only to islanders but to the increasing number of day tourists deposited on the streets by passing cruise liners.  Over a dozen newspapers appeared in Swahili, Arabic, English, and Gujarati, and they reported on the development of nationalist movements in India and other imperial outposts.  Under local pressure and in order not to fall behind the pace set by other territories, administrators in Zanzibar initiated a series of constitutional reforms that, within a few short years, extended the franchise and the principle of “one person, one vote” throughout adult island society.  In doing so, the British committed themselves to a course of democratic development that challenged the privileges of Zanzibar’s minority communities.