A History of the East African Coast

by Charles Cornelius

The Barracouda sailed into Mombasa harbour on December 4th 1823. At the time, a lone Omani ship was attempting to enforce a blockade of the harbour, but The Barracouda, being the ship of an ally, was allowed in. The Mazrui were prepared to provide the British ship with a lot more than food and water, once again offering the coast to Britain. Again the offer was turned down, although the officer who was forced to spurn the Mazrui felt in fear for his life when he gave them the bad news in a room in Fort Jesus. Rejected a third time, the Mazrui now opted for a different tactic. As The Barracouda sailed over the horizon, the Mazrui hastily knitted their own home-made version of the Union Jack and hoisted it above Fort Jesus, much to the consternation of the Omani watching from a distance. If this had surprised the Omani, it was nothing compared to the reaction of Captain Owen when he sailed into Mombasa two months later.

  Owen would have had no more love for the Mazrui than for the Omani. He later described the sheikh as “an old dotard who had outlived every passion but avarice”, but when investigating why a Union Flag - albeit a rather odd-looking one - was fluttering above Fort Jesus, he was presented with the desperate pleas and offers of the Mazrui and saw in them a golden opportunity to rid much of the Swahili coast of slavery. Owen agreed to establish a British protectorate over Mombasa, along with a 200 mile stretch of coastline that probably wasn't even the Mazrui's to give away. In return, the Mazruis agreed to end the slave trade within the protectorate.

  The Omani were now forced to back off. Owen departed leaving his deputy, a South African lieutenant called John James Reitz, in command of Britain's latest imperial possession. The Mazrui gave Reitz a sizeable plot of land on the mainland north of Mombasa, an area still known today as English Point, but, slightly less generously, Owen only gave him a garrison of five men, a force totally incapable of enforcing the terms of the deal, which the Mazrui broke almost as soon as Owen had left. Reitz, having embarked upon a suicidal inspection of the malaria-infested coastline, was dead within four months, leaving the governorship of the protectorate in the hands of a sixteen year old midshipman, George Philips, whom the Mazrui never liked, especially after he managed to seize a slave dhow, free its cargo and establish the first colony for freed slaves on the coast.

  Eventually, Britain's first imperial venture into East Africa came to an end. Seyyid Said made a polite complaint to the British headquarters in Bombay, which, when they heard what was going on in Mombasa must have regarded Owen's actions as little short of gross insubordination, given that he had put at risk the delicate alliance between Great Britain and Oman. In 1826, the protectorate was annulled, leaving the Mazrui to face the Omani alone.

  Seyyid Said bided his time. In 1828, he paid his first visit to his East African realm and, while taking in the delights of the islands and beaches there, set out to oust the Mazrui from Mombasa. This he did after considerable fighting and before returning to Muscat forced the Mazrui to sign a treaty recognising Busaidi overlordship, leaving behind a force of 300 troops in Fort Jesus under the command of Nassir bin Suleiman. Yet again, the Mazrui refused to lie down and, with Seyyid Said back in Muscat, they besieged the Omani troops inside the fort, starving them into surrender. Nassir was murdered and the Mazrui were once again back in control of Mombasa. The Omani made two attempts to recover Mombasa in the years that followed, but it was not until the Mazrui fell out amongst themselves in 1837 that Seyyid Said was finally able to occupy Mombasa without a drop of blood being spilt. The Mazrui were rounded up, arrested and deported to Persia. Some fled to Pate and Siyu where, in 1843, a briefly successful attempt at resistance was made in which one of Seyyid Said's greatest generals was killed by a hail of poisoned arrows. Said ordered the construction of a fort at Siyu to subdue any further resistance, leaving him in total control of the Swahili coast from Pate to Cape Delgado, a position he now used to exploit and develop the commercial opportunities of the region.

   

  The Zanzibar Sultanate

  For a man brought up in the sun-scorched, barren wastelands of Oman, Seyyid Said must have felt he was in paradise when he first visited the East African coast in 1828. In January of that year he visited Zanzibar, an island that had been a loyal subject of Oman for almost a century, and so taken was he by the place that two years later he decided to abandon Muscat and move the entire headquarters of his sultanate to the island. Now it was time for Zanzibar to reap the benefits of loyalty to Oman.

  It wasn't just the lush climate and the fertile soil, the warm sea and the vivid colour that attracted him there. Seyyid Said was a visionary and he recognised that Zanzibar was the ideal location from which to control the turbulent political situation right along the coast. Ships could reach Mombasa, Pate or Kilwa in days if rebellion flared; it would take weeks from Muscat, and then only if the wind was blowing in the right direction. Miles of sea between her and the mainland offered Zanzibar protection from attack by mainland tribes, making his headquarters virtually impregnable. The island had more than enough fertile farmland to make her self-sufficient in food - unlike islands such as Lamu, Pate, Kilwa and Mombasa - and fresh water was in ample supply.

  All of this was enough to turn Zanzibar into the political and military superpower of the coast. But Seyyid Said wanted more for the island. He planned to turn it into the commercial hub of East Africa, a market through which fortunes in ivory, slaves, gums, skins and all the other products of the region would pass before being exported to the markets of the Indian Ocean.

  He quickly established himself, his family and his countless concubines in two large palaces he had built on the island, one at Mtoni in the bush to the north of Zanzibar town, and another in the town itself, the Beit al-Sahel, or House of the Coast, on a site now occupied by the Palace Museum. He later added another palace at Kidichi to the east of the town which included Persian baths that can still be seen today. Together with his domestic slaves, they would have housed a number in excess of a thousand people and from his palaces Seyyid Said transformed Zanzibar.

  To bring about his vision, he swept away the old Swahili duties and replaced them with a flat-rate tax of 5% on all items imported into Zanzibar. This simplified system, together with the support Seyyid Said provided for commerce, soon saw merchants and bankers flocking to the island and from the end of the 1820s to the end of the 1850s, Zanzibar's customs revenues increased fivefold.

  It wasn't simply an expansion of the traditional trade with Arabia, Persia and India that caused this economic boom. Traders from North America and Europe quickly took an interest in Seyyid Said's new commercial hub, something fuelled by a startling rise in demand for ivory amongst wealthy westerners. In 1833, the year after Seyyid Said made Zanzibar his capital, the island's main port was visited by nine American and four British ships. By 1859 this number had risen to thirty-five American, twenty-four French, twenty-three German and three British ships. Ivory was so popular in the USA that one town in Connecticut, famous for manufacturing piano keys and billiard balls out of the stuff was named Ivoryton. In 1833, the USA concluded a trade treaty with Zanzibar and four years later the American president, Martin Van Buren, appointed a New Englander, Richard Waters, as Zanzibar's first foreign consul. Three years later a Zanzibari trade embassy was sent to New York headed by Ahmed bin Naam to further develop contacts between the two nations. The Europeans soon followed suit and the following year Britain appointed Colonel Sir John Hamerton as her first consul. The French consul arrived in 1844 and within a couple of decades most European nations had an official representative on the island.

  Along with ivory, another ‘commodity’ brought from the African interior to Zanzibar was doing well, much to the consternation of some of the Europeans attracted there by the tusks of dead elephants. The slave trade had been carried out in Zanzibar for centuries, just as it had been going on elsewhere along the coast, but in Seyyid Said's new commercial capital, the trade expanded at a startling rate. At the end of the eighteenth century, around 4,500 slaves passed through the slave market at
Shangani every year. In the 1830s this had risen to 60,000, earning the market square the name kelele, meaning noisy. With his import duties earning him 5% on every sale made there, Seyyid Said was raking in a fortune, but with the trade increasing under the eyes of the growing number of westerners on the island – literally: their consulates were just yards from Kelele Square - this trade would ultimately prove to be the undoing of Seyyid Said's successors.

  The British tried to halt the trade in 1845 when their consul produced a treaty which, had Seyyid Said signed it, would have ended it there and then. Somewhat concerned, the sultan sent an embassy to England headed by his liwali in Mombasa, Ali bin Nassir, and after this Arab prince had sufficiently wowed royalty and government ministers with his oriental mystique, Hamerton was forced to revise his treaty to allow the movement of slaves between the towns of the East African coast. While this should still have ended the export of slaves from East Africa to the Middle East, the British did almost nothing to enforce it save for posting a couple of dhow-chasing frigates off the coast, which could, in any case, do nothing to stop slave dhows sailing south of Lamu. The Hamerton Treaty had actually managed to create a safe haven for the slave traders from which dhows could wait until the coast was clear before launching themselves north to Arabia, something which gave Lamu's economy a massive boost.

  In any case, many of these slaves remained in Zanzibar and Pemba to work on another of Seyyid Said's great visionary ventures, the development of clove plantations. As early as 1818, Seyyid Said had passed a decree ordering that for every coconut palm, farmers on Pemba and Zanzibar islands had to plant three clove trees. While it took some years to get off the ground, the results of this venture were staggering. From 1843 to 1859, clove exports from Zanzibar and Pemba rose from 30 tons a year to well over 2,000 tons, turning the two islands into the world's biggest producer of cloves, jointly accounting for 80% of the world's entire clove crop early in the twentieth century.

  In less than a quarter of a century, Seyyid Said had transformed Zanzibar from a sleepy fishing village of mud huts nestling at the foot of the Omani fort into the political, military and commercial master of East Africa. By the middle of the nineteenth century, Zanzibar's influence even extended far into the interior of Africa, via thousand mile long trade routes that stretched from the coastal towns as far inland as Lakes Victoria, Tanganyika and Nyasa. Trade with the interior had been going on for centuries, but largely through a string of informal markets which exchanged goods bought in neighbouring locations. From the 1830s however, large trade caravans, financed by Zanzibar's Indian bankers, led by Swahili merchants and sometimes numbering a thousand porters, began to penetrate the interior of Africa, primarily in the hunt for a fortune in ivory and slaves. Bearing with them the blood red flag of the sultan, these caravans brought about the first direct contact between the coast and the ancient chiefdoms of Central Africa and ultimately, the sultan of Zanzibar would claim these lands as part of his realm.

  As these pioneering caravan routes were developed, so too did the ports connecting them with the international market in Zanzibar. Bagamoyo, from where caravans made the epic 1,200 mile march to the town of Ujiji on the shores of Lake Tanganyika, had been founded in the eighteenth century to facilitate access to Zanzibar, and by the nineteenth century was expanding rapidly. Further north, so too was the port of Tanga, which by 1850 may have been even bigger than Mombasa. And even though Kilwa was some way south of Zanzibar, she went through another of her periodic booms as the starting point of the caravan route to Lake Nyasa. Even Mombasa, dazed from the sudden shock of losing her pre-eminent position to Zanzibar, continued to expand in response to the boom in demand for ivory.

  But not everybody was touched by this economic boom. After the Battle of Shela, the Omani looked on Lamu as the main town of the northern archipelago and developed it as their northern headquarters. While Lamu benefited greatly, helped by the Hamerton Treaty which made it the starting point for the illegal slave route to Arabia, the other towns of the Lamu Archipelago fared less well and Pate went into a precipitous decline. Some time around 1840, the Nabahani, having ruled Pate for six centuries, were deposed and their last sultan, Ahmed bin Famoluti, fled to the mainland where he set up a rival sultanate at Witu, embarking on a campaign of attacking the mainland farms that supplied Pate.

  In 1854, Seyyid Said made one of his increasingly rare visits to Oman in order to deal with a Persian attack on Bandar Abbas. It was the last time he would see Zanzibar. Two years later, having left Muscat for the return journey to Zanzibar aboard his flagship, Victoria, the 67 year old sultan contracted dysentery and died six days later near the Seychelles.

  Seyyid Said's body arrived in Zanzibar six days after his death on 19th October 1856, accompanied aboard Victoria by his third son, Barghash, who, in time-honoured Omani tradition, had every intention of seizing the sultanate from under the nose of his older brother, Majid. Burying Seyyid Said's body in secret, Barghash set out to capture Majid in his palace at Mtoni, only to find that he'd already left having learned of the arrival of the Victoria from some fishermen, forcing Barghash to abandon his attempt to usurp the crown - for the time being.

  The succession to the sultanate was still a contentious issue though, particularly when the oldest brother, Thuwain, who had ruled Oman in Seyyid Said's absence, learned that the sultanate was to be divided: Thuwain was to stay in Muscat, ruling as Sultan of Oman, while Majid was to rule the East African dominion as Sultan of Zanzibar. Thuwain was furious, understandably so given that his inheritance had become, by 1856, the poorer half of the sultanate, and so he set out with a fleet of ships to seize control of Majid's portion. The British intervened, negotiating a peace treaty in 1861 between the two feuding brothers which granted Thuwain financial compensation of 40,000 Maria Theresa Dollars per annum. Thuwain, however, only had to put up with this situation for another five years, before being murdered in his sleep by his own son.

  Meanwhile, Barghash embarked upon a second bid to wrest the sultanate from Majid. Egged on by the French, Thuwain and the el Harthi family, Barghash plotted and schemed against his brother until Majid felt it best to confine Barghash to a house in Zanzibar town. Barghash escaped, dressed as a woman, with the help of his two sisters, Khola and Salme, and took up residence at his fortified and heavily armed plantation which he had named Marseilles in honour of his Francophile leanings. When Majid attacked the plantation, Barghash quickly escaped and, with Majid still at Marseilles, headed straight for Zanzibar town and the seat of government...where he came face-to-face with a force of British troops who had no intention of letting this family dispute upset their growing influence over the sultanate. Barghash surrendered to the British, who sent him into a leisured and comfortable exile in Bombay.

  The intervention of the British and French in the Omani succession dispute shows how far European influence had grown in Zanzibar. European consuls, particularly the British, were not afraid to use the threat of military force to get their way. For his part, Seyyid Majid was more than happy to cultivate his relationship with the British if it meant they upheld his claim to the sultanate. However, many Swahili subjects felt that European influence was beginning to become too strong and that the sultan was showing too much respect for the growing number of white merchants and officials in the town. Then in 1866, one European went too far, causing a scandal which threatened the lives of every European on Zanzibar.

  In part, it all happened because the new British consul wanted a house in the country. Eager to please the British, Seyyid Majid asked his younger sister, Salme, to move out of her house in the middle of the island, forcing her to take up residence in a house in Zanzibar town. Her new next door neighbour was Heinrich Reute, a German merchant from Hamburg, and in the densely packed streets of Zanzibar town it meant the two were effectively living in adjacent rooms. They talked through windows that faced each other, fell in love and began an affair that, while carried out discretely, quickly became scandalous gossip a
round the town. For any Muslim woman to take up with a Christian man was bad enough; for her to be the sister of the sultan made the scandal many times worse.

  Then she became pregnant. Realising the danger - if news of this broke out, he would probably have been lynched - Reute smuggled her out of Zanzibar aboard a British ship, HMS Highflyer, and she fled to Aden while Reute wound up his business dealings in Zanzibar hoping that no one would notice the princess was missing. When the scandal became public knowledge, the entire white community of Zanzibar was under threat, and only the presence of a hastily despatched British naval frigate prevented potential reprisals. The baby was born that December and a few months later Reute joined Salme in Aden where they married, Salme having converted to Christianity and adopting the name Emily. Although the baby that caused all the scandal died young, they had another three children back in Germany until Heinrich's untimely death in a tram accident in 1870. As far as Princess Salme's family back in Zanzibar were concerned, she was herself as good as dead for having committed such a sin and even though she returned twice to Zanzibar on brief visits, no sultan would ever speak to her again.

  Sex scandals weren't the only thing to provide Zanzibar with a reputation for lurid goings-on. There was plenty more besides, and as more and more westerners visited the island, stories about Zanzibar started to make their way into European consciousness, giving the island a unique reputation. While ships sailing into the harbour at Zanzibar could smell the sweet fragrance of cloves wafting in the air, they could also pick up a somewhat decidedly less savoury aroma. Dr David Livingstone called the place Stinkibar, noting in one of his journals that “the stench at night is so gross or crass one might cut out a slice and manure a garden with it.” Dr James Christie, an English physician who visited Zanzibar in 1869 wrote that “no stranger ever lands at Zanzibar without expressing extreme disgust at the odious state of the sea beach .... to some it occasions nausea and vomiting, and both olfactories and optics are most painfully affected. Except at high tide no one ever thinks of boat exercise and it is only at that time that European ladies can approach the shore.” In effect, the seafront was the town's toilet and dustbin, into which drained the open sewers of the densely-packed town. Combined with the tropical air that bred disease, the filth deposited in the harbour occasionally erupted into cholera outbreaks that swept away people in their thousands, such as those of 1858 and 1869 which were thought to have claimed 50,000 Zanzibari.