Zanzibar

     Zanzibar Hotel and Beach 

 

History

Zanzibar is a unique coral island lying in the Indian Ocean a short distance from Tanzania. With Pemba, and about 50 other islands, Zanzibar originally was an independent country until 1964 when it was united with Tanganyika to form Tanzania under President Julius Nyerere. Presently it has its own President and a degree of autonomy.

The Town

Zanzibar town is located midway along the West Coast of the island. The old part of the town, known as Stone Town, is composed of a network of shady, winding narrow alleys between old stone buildings with ornately decorated entrances and balconies. 

Numerous tiny shops here sell everything under the sun. Along the seafront are located several luxury hotels, the old Sultan's Palace (House of Wonder), the old fort, restaurants and the docks

For a small island in the southern waters of the Indian Ocean, 

Zanzibar has a long and unexpected history. For centuries the island has been a center of slave and ivory trade, if not all trading, from central Africa to the rest of the world and was the worlds main producer of the highly valued clove spice. It is also the center of Swahili language and culture. Zanzibar is the undisputed capital of the Swahili coast. 

 

The first Europeans to encounter this vast trading network and culture around Zanzibar were the Portuguese, who arrived in the late 15th Century. The Portuguese were ousted with the help of Oman, in the mid-16th Century, whose vast trade connections had been severed by the entrance of the Portuguese. Zanzibar became the seat of the Omani empire, when Sultan Seyyid Said moved his capital from Muscat to Zanzibar in 1840,

 

due largely to its economic importance in the empire and unrest at home. This was to last only 50 years until the British, keen on expanding their colonial reach, declared Zanzibar a British Protectorate. This, in turn, 

was to last until 1963, when the British handed power back to the Sultan in a constitutional monarchy which was itself overthrown in early 1964 in a violent revolution which established the Revolutionary Government of Zanzibar, which rules the country to this day.