Sultanate of Zanzibar

The Canning Award

formationDrafted from Lyne, Zanzibar in Contemporary Times: A Short History of the Southern East in the Nineteenth Century (1905)

Sayyid Said died at sea off the Seychelles in 1856, sixty-five years old, leaving behind an empire that had never been one state so much as one man's personal rule over two: Muscat, poor and mountainous, and Zanzibar, rich on cloves and the slave trade and governed, in Said's last years, by his son Majid. No will settled who would inherit which half, or whether the two should even stay divided. Majid's elder brother Thuwaini, already ruling Muscat as their father's governor, expected to inherit the whole - or failing that, an annual tribute substantial enough to prove Zanzibar still answered to him.

Majid paid the first year's forty thousand crowns and then stopped, pleading an empty treasury even as his own revenue ran past two hundred thousand a year. Thuwaini, convinced the debt was less the issue than the principle, prepared in 1859 to send an expedition to Zanzibar to collect it by force. Neither brother had the fleet or the appetite to fight the matter out to a finish, and both, in the end, turned to the one power both trusted more than they trusted each other: Great Britain, whose Political Agent at Zanzibar, Colonel Hamerton, had already spent years managing exactly this kind of family quarrel.

Lyne, Zanzibar in Contemporary Times: A Short History of the Southern East in the Nineteenth Century (1905) · Émile Bayard · Public domain

An arbitration neither brother could refuse

The case went to Lord Canning, Governor-General of India, whose commission examined Arab custom on inherited sovereignty and found that succession in Oman's history had never been settled by primogeniture alone, but by the "concurrence of the principal tribes" - and that the people of Zanzibar had already, in effect, elected Majid their ruler by accepting his government for years without dispute. Canning's Award, dated April 2, 1861, declared Majid sovereign of Zanzibar and its African dominions in his own right, bound only to an annual subsidy to Muscat rather than to any claim of subjection. Thuwaini accepted it on May 15; Majid, on June 25. For the first time since Said had built it, the empire existed as two separate states rather than one man's unequal inheritance waiting to be fought over - and Zanzibar, the richer half, now answered to no one outside its own island but the British whose arbitration had made it sovereign.

A spear at each eye

expansionDrafted from Lyne, Zanzibar in Contemporary Times: A Short History of the Southern East in the Nineteenth Century (1905)

Barghash inherited Zanzibar in 1870 already the most consequential sultan his line would produce, and the demand that defined his reign arrived within his first three years on the throne. In January 1873 Sir Bartle Frere reached Zanzibar as Queen Victoria's special envoy, carrying a treaty that would prohibit the export of slaves from the coast entirely - even between two ports of Barghash's own dominions, a trade the sultanate's economy had never operated without.

Lyne, Zanzibar in Contemporary Times: A Short History of the Southern East in the Nineteenth Century (1905) · Unknown · Public domain

The timing could not have been worse for Barghash to hear it. A hurricane had flattened plantations and houses across the island the previous August; cholera had already reduced Arab families across the coast to poverty. "It will require years to recover the losses," he told Frere's staff, "and now the prospect of being obliged to give up the supply of slave-labour will absolutely ruin us." When Dr. Badger, Frere's interpreter, pressed him on the hardship inflicted on the slaves themselves, Barghash did not deny it - he simply insisted his own people's survival came first, and refused to sign.

Blockade, not persuasion

Frere's mission left without a treaty, but Britain had never actually needed Barghash's consent to act - only his acknowledgment that it would act regardless. Dr. John Kirk, the British Agent who had stayed behind after Frere's departure, spent months working on the fears of the Arab chiefs whose own support Barghash could not rule without, describing a blockade in terms alarming enough - no mail, no fresh meat from the mainland, no safe passage even for the Sultan himself - that the chiefs began urging Barghash toward the treaty their own resistance had helped him refuse in the first place. "A spear is held at each of my eyes," Barghash told his advisers, "with which shall I choose to be pierced?"

He signed on June 5, 1873: the total cessation of the slave export trade, the closing of every public slave market in his dominions, and British protection for slaves freed under the treaty's terms. "Now my head is safe on my shoulders," Barghash told Kirk when it was done; "it is your head that is in danger." He was not entirely wrong. Zanzibar's economy had been built for a century on the trade the treaty ended, and the sultanate would spend the rest of Barghash's reign discovering exactly how much of its own power over its own mainland had depended on Britain's continued goodwill rather than on anything it still controlled itself.

Treaties on paper

contractionDrafted from Lyne, Zanzibar in Contemporary Times: A Short History of the Southern East in the Nineteenth Century (1905)

Barghash's own offers of British protection over Zanzibar's mainland possessions had gone unanswered for years - Britain, committed since 1862 to respecting Zanzibar's independence alongside France, had no wish for burdensome new territory. Germany had no such hesitation. In 1884 a "Society for German Colonization" sent Dr. Karl Peters into the interior to collect signatures from local chiefs on documents most of them cannot have understood: one Bondei headman, asked outright, declared he was "neither a subject of the Sultan Seyyid Barghash nor of any person" and that the Sultan "has no possessions or fortresses" anywhere near his village - which did not stop the same document from surrendering, on his behalf, "all the rights which according to European ideas are comprised in the sovereign rights of a Prince."

The German Emperor accepted these treaties as grounds for a Charter of Protection over Usagara, Nguru, Uzeguha and Ukami on February 17, 1885. Barghash, who received the proclamation from the German Consul-General on April 27, protested by telegraph and had to be talked out of travelling to Berlin in person. He sent General Mathews to secure declarations of loyalty from the chiefs around Kilimanjaro before the Germans could reach them - and succeeded, on paper, only to have a German agent named Jühlke arrive days later and undo it, also on paper. As one Chaga chief who had signed for both sides put it to Mathews: "bring with thee a better flagstaff."

A fleet, not a negotiation

Paper contests were not what settled the matter. On August 7, 1885, Commodore Paschen's German fleet entered Zanzibar harbour, and on the 11th the Commodore demanded Barghash recognise the Kaiser's protectorate over Usagara, Uzeguha, Nguru, Ukami and Witu outright, and withdraw the garrisons he had stationed there. Barghash had no fleet capable of answering Paschen's, and no ally willing to intervene on his behalf; his formal submission went to the Commodore on August 14, a week after the ships had arrived.

What followed over the next two years was less a negotiation than a formal accounting of what Zanzibar had already lost. A joint British-German-French delimitation commission spent 1885 and 1886 determining what coastline the sultanate still controlled, with the German commissioner refusing to recognise any stretch the others could not prove beyond dispute. The Anglo-German Agreement of October and November 1886 confirmed Zanzibar's sovereignty over the islands and a coastal strip ten miles wide - and assigned everything behind that strip, from the Rovuma river to the Tana, to German and British spheres the sultanate would never again administer. Barghash accepted the arrangement on December 4, 1886. The mainland empire his own diplomacy, treaties and garrisons had spent two decades assembling now existed almost entirely on paper of a different kind: European paper, drawn up in London and Berlin, that no Zanzibar delegation had been present to negotiate.

Thirty-seven minutes

endDrafted from Lyne, Zanzibar in Contemporary Times: A Short History of the Southern East in the Nineteenth Century (1905)

Seyyid Hamid bin Thuwaini died suddenly on August 25, 1896, and within the hour Khaled bin Barghash - who had already tried and failed to seize the throne once before, in 1893 - marched fifty armed followers into the palace square and broke down the doors. General Sir Lloyd Mathews, who had known Khaled since boyhood, tried to talk him down as he had three years earlier; this time Khaled would not be talked to at all, and within minutes a mob of five hundred Arabs held the palace behind him. Mathews's own impulse was to shoot Khaled on the spot - he later reflected it might have averted everything that followed - but he judged himself not justified in taking so extreme a step alone, and withdrew.

Khaled spent the next two days fortifying the palace with roughly two thousand armed Persians, Comorians and slaves, seven Hotchkiss and Krupp guns, two Maxims that had been gifts from Queen Victoria herself, and the sultanate's one remaining warship, the Glasgow. He ordered a salute fired to announce his own accession and demanded the foreign consuls recognise him; they kept their flags at half-mast and waited for Britain to act first. By the second night, residents later agreed, Zanzibar Town had never known a stiller one.

Nine o'clock

At seven on the morning of August 27, Rear-Admiral Rawson sent Khaled an ultimatum: haul down his flag, disarm his followers, and surrender himself at the Custom House by nine o'clock, or the ships in the harbour would open fire. Khaled's envoy asked for a parley and was refused. At five minutes to nine the Admiral signalled his three bombarding ships to prepare for action; the Palace clock struck the hour, and the Thrush, Racoon and Sparrow opened fire on the palace guns.

Lyne, Zanzibar in Contemporary Times: A Short History of the Southern East in the Nineteenth Century (1905) · Fred T. Jane · Public domain

Half an hour later the palace and its clock tower were in flames, the middle palace a ruin, five hundred of Khaled's own men dead or wounded in and around the square, and the Glasgow - which had opened fire of its own accord and been sunk by a six-inch shell from the flagship St. George - at the bottom of the harbour. Thirty-seven minutes after the first shot, the red flag came down from the palace staff and the cease-fire sounded. Khaled himself had already fled through the town to the German consulate, from which he was carried aboard a German warship to exile at Dar-es-Salaam. Within hours Seyyid Hamoud bin Mohammed was conducted to the Custom House and proclaimed Sultan amid the salutes of the same ships that had just destroyed his predecessor's palace.

Lyne's own history, written less than a decade later by a man who had served the government it describes, draws the plainest conclusion available: for a century Britain had "imposed her treaties upon [Zanzibar's] rulers without having to fire a shot," and the bombardment was less a conquest than confirmation of an authority Zanzibar's sultans had, in every practical sense, already stopped being able to refuse.

Thirty-five years on one throne

afterlifeDrafted from Office), Colonial Office Annual Report on Zanzibar, 1946 (1947)

The bombardment did not end the sultanate; it settled, by force, an arrangement Britain had already been building by treaty for years. France and Germany had waived their own claims to the islands in 1890, in exchange for Madagascar and Heligoland, and on the 4th of November that year Zanzibar and Pemba were formally proclaimed a British Protectorate. A constitutional government followed within the year, with a British Representative sitting as First Minister beside the sultan. Seyyid Hamoud bin Mohamed, installed within hours of Khaled's flight, proved an eager partner in this new order rather than a resentful one: intensely English in his own sympathies, he completed the abolition of slavery by decree the year after his accession, and reigned in comparative calm until his death in 1902.

Three sultans in fifteen years, then one for decades more

The throne that had briefly changed hands within a single hour in 1896 kept changing hands quickly for a decade and a half afterward. Hamoud's son Ali, educated at Harrow, succeeded him as a minor with a British-appointed Regent managing the state until his majority in 1905; six years later, en route to the coronation of King George V, Ali left his ship at Naples, travelled on to Paris, and abdicated from exile rather than return to Zanzibar at all. The throne was first offered to Seyyid Khaled bin Mohamed, Hamoud's brother, who declined it on grounds of failing health; it was then offered by the British Government to Khalifa bin Harub, a nephew of the dynasty who had himself witnessed the 1896 bombardment as a young man newly arrived in Zanzibar. Khalifa ascended the throne on the 9th of December, 1911.

He did not leave it again for decades. Administrative control passed from the Foreign Office to the Colonial Office in 1913, an Executive and a Legislative Council replaced the old advisory Protectorate Council in 1926, and through every one of these changes Khalifa remained the sultan they were made around - his own son and heir apparent eventually sitting beside him on the Executive Council he presided over. In December 1936 Zanzibar marked the twenty-fifth anniversary of his accession; in November 1944, the two-hundredth anniversary of the Al-Busaid dynasty's own founding was commemorated under the same sultan's reign. The throne that three men had held between them for fifteen turbulent years after the bombardment had, by then, been occupied by one man for longer than any of his predecessors combined.

Office), Colonial Office Annual Report on Zanzibar, 1946 (1947) · Francis Barrow Pearce · Public domain