Zanzibar

During the first decades of the twentieth century, the people of Zanzibar faced winds of change as tumultuous as the actual winds off the Indian Ocean were gentle: Long an important port for the international slave trade for both the Arabic nation of Oman and the Portuguese, by the beginning of the last century the island's economy was shifting to an agricultural basis as the slave trade was finally eradicated. But, as Fair (2002) discusses in her examination of the ways in which the people of this African island (which was probably at one time a part of the African mainland) created their own identity, not only the economic basis of the country was changing at the beginning of the twentieth century. The country was also increasing in population and as a result it was also becoming more urbanized. The population was also shifting, becoming more African as the Arabs who had for so many centuries been the dominant force in the culture began to be overtaken in political power by Africans, the majority of whom were Bantu. These Africans had for centuries made up the largest proportion of the population, but their power had been limited because the majority of them were enslaved. After the British became the colonial power over Zanzibar in 1890, they forced the island's Arab leaders to abolish slavery.

Fair examines this period in Zanzibar history in which poor, urbanized Africans, many newly freed from slavery but all contained by British colonial rule, struggled to find ways in

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Category: Foreign - Z