Zanzibar to the End of the Great War
The Anglo-German Agreement on East Africa of 1890 provided for the British Protectorate over Zanzibar (including Pemba). Technically the control of internal affairs and succession to the sultanate were left in the hands of the traditional rulers. Great Britain was to take over foreign affairs. In fact British control was gradually extended to all aspects of internal administration and finance, including the sultan's income, and most key posts were eventually filled by British personnel. In 1896 the British determined the succession to the throne, and the sultan became even more dependent on them than earlier ones had been.
In 1913 the essentially colonial status of Zanzibar was acknowledged by the transfer of Zanzibar's affairs from the Foreign Office to the Colonial Office. A British resident replaced the consul general, and Zanzibar was placed under the jurisdiction of the governor of the East African Protectorate (then the name for that part of Kenya from the coast to the eastern edge of the Rift Valley).
The British formally abolished the slave trade in 1876, but they moved slowly in enforcing the law and did not abolish slavery itself until [897, in part because they Feared effects on the labor supply, in part because they. saw Zanzibar as an essentially Arab state, the social system of which would be disrupted by the freeing of a substantial number of African slaves.
Provision was made for compensation to slave owners by the state, and the slaves themselves were required to take the initiative in applying for freedom. Moreover the use of slave labor was not made a crime, and some kinds of slaves (for example, concubines) were exempted from the law. No employment programs for freed slaves were devised, and former slaves were subject to vagrancy laws if they were without a job or fixed residenee.
For these reasons, the lack of free land and an improvement in working conditions, relatively few slaves applied tier freedom in the first decade or so. In 1909 a law eliminated compensation for slaves freed after 1911. a sanction that speeded up their emancipation. Nevertheless forms of hidden slavery and semislavery remained, and there was no program for helping ex-slaves adjust to their freedom. Some of them became tenants on clove plantations, exchanging their labor on the plantation for the right to build a house and plant food crops on a small plot nearby. The demand for labor was apparently not filled by these tenants, and many of the migrants from German East Africa who came for the clove harvests stayed on as squatters.
In these early years. and later, the British persisted in seeing Zanzibar as an Arab nation. Although the Arabs had lost much of their authority to British administrators, the sultan remained, and Arabs were given special consideration with regard to such !flatters as government positions and education.
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