Zanzibar's history is a story of trading empires, a brief war, and a scattering of firsts — early cinemas, early cars, an early railway, and one of Africa's most ambitious public-health campaigns. Its place on the Indian Ocean trade routes, covered in our guide to Zanzibar as the spice island, shaped almost everything else that happened here.
1. The Diplomacy of Sayyid Said bin Sultan
In the early 19th century, Sayyid Said bin Sultan moved his capital from Muscat to Zanzibar and set about building a stable trading state rather than picking sides in Europe's wars. With the Napoleonic wars spilling into the Indian Ocean and European and American ships crowding its waters, Said pursued a policy of neutrality — trading with everyone, favouring no one — while keeping a navy strong enough to be taken seriously.
He worked closely with the British, who held major influence in India, cooperating against piracy in the Gulf of Oman, and built trading ties as far as China and as far south as the Comoros, Madagascar, Mauritius and Réunion. Zanzibar's harbours made it one of the busiest trading posts on the Indian Ocean.
He also courted European and American merchants directly. In 1840, his ship the Sultanah sailed to New York carrying gifts for the US president — an unusual diplomatic gesture for its time, and a sign of how far Said's ambitions for Zanzibar reached.
2. The Portuguese Arrival
The Portuguese reached Zanzibar in the early 16th century. In 1503, the Portuguese commander Ruy Lourenço Ravasco attacked the island, forcing local rulers to accept Portuguese overlordship and pay tribute — the start of a resented occupation that lasted roughly two centuries, until Omani forces, invited in by local Swahili rulers, drove the Portuguese out of the East African coast in the late 17th century. That Omani presence is what later brought Sayyid Said's dynasty to Zanzibar.
3. The Shortest War in History
After Sultan Ali bin Said died in 1893, a succession dispute broke out among three contenders for the throne; the British intervened and installed Hamad bin Thuwaini as Sultan on their own terms. When Hamad died suddenly in August 1896, his cousin Khalid bin Barghash seized the palace and declared himself Sultan without British approval, in breach of the arrangement that any new Sultan needed British consent. Britain gave him an ultimatum to stand down; he refused and barricaded himself inside the palace, the Beit al-Hukm, with several hundred armed supporters.
British warships opened fire, and in under 40 minutes it was over — the shortest war on record. Roughly 500 of Khalid's men were killed or wounded; the British lost one sailor. Khalid fled to the German consulate and was later moved to German East Africa, an episode that strained relations between Britain and Germany for years afterward. The war left Zanzibar a British protectorate in all but name.
4. The Cinema Era
Cinema reached Zanzibar in the early 20th century, and by the 1920s Stone Town had several picture houses screening British, Arabic and Hindi films side by side — at one point as many as fifty-three cinemas operated across the island. The last of them still standing opened in 1920 under British colonial rule, was rebuilt in an Art Deco style after a fire in the 1950s, and remains on Vuga Road in Stone Town — nationalised after the 1964 revolution, closed in the 1980s, and now being restored as a cultural venue.
5. Early Motor Cars
Automobiles reached Zanzibar in the early 20th century, alongside similar early imports elsewhere in East Africa, and gradually took over from horse-drawn carriages as the main way to get around Stone Town. This photograph, from the hotel's collection of old Zanzibar images, shows one of the island's first motor cars.
6. The Zanzibar Railway
Zanzibar had East Africa's first railway. In 1879, Sultan Barghash bin Said had a seven-mile line built from the House of Wonders in Stone Town to his palace at Chukwani, at first pulled by mules; in 1881 he brought in a steam locomotive from England. The line closed when Barghash died in 1888.
A second line followed a couple of decades later: the Bububu Railway, built by the American firm Arnold Cheney & Co., ran from Stone Town to the village of Bububu until 1930. It carried locals daily and kept a first-class carriage for sightseeing visitors wanting to explore the island — an early version of the island tours still on offer today.
7. Public Health
Zanzibar built a public-health system considered strong for the region — hospitals, trained midwives, and a maternity centre opened in Makunduchi in 1950 with UNICEF's support. The Karimjee Jivanjee family, a long-established Indian merchant family in Zanzibar known for its philanthropy, funded a hospital in Stone Town that served the wider public.
From 1957, Zanzibar also hosted one of the World Health Organization's most ambitious malaria campaigns of the era, spraying homes and treating cases across the islands. It cut malaria dramatically for over a decade — but never fully eliminated it: when the programme wound down in the late 1960s, cases rebounded. It's a reminder that the island's health history is a story of serious effort, not an easy, once-and-for-all victory.
A Layered History
Zanzibar's history rarely fits one label — trading empire, colonial battleground, and a small island that still kept its own firsts. Its influence on daily life today is easiest to see close up, in Stone Town's streets and in festivals that draw on all of it.