Slaves, Spices and Ivory in Zanzibar. Abdul Sheriff
whose share in a single venture in the southern slave trade was worth MT$218,000, and he credits the introduction of cloves to this same Arab. At the end of the nineteenth century W.W.A. Fitzgerald recorded what was then becoming a tradition; that Haramil b. Saleh (sic) accompanied a French officer from Zanzibar to Bourbon at the end of the eighteenth century and obtained permission to take back a small quantity of seeds and plants with him. These were planted on his plantation at Mtoni and, according to Guillain, at Kizimbani. The contemporary Albrand dates this introduction more precisely to c. 1812 and adds that by 1819, when he visited Zanzibar, they were already 15 feet high. This is confirmed by another French visitor in 1822 who found cloves growing on two plantations belonging, according to him, to the governor who ‘is almost the only person on the island who has on his lands these precious trees.’50
Saleh was the leader of one of the factions at Zanzibar competing for power. He was opposed by the Harthi clan, long established at Zanzibar, who may have been more identified with the northern slave trade, though undoubtedly also profiting from the French slave trade. It was led by Abdullah b. Juma al Barwany, a very rich man who had been governor of Zanzibar, and controlled Kilwa at the time of Albrand’s visit. Saleh’s faction may have played a part in the removal from the governorship of Abdullah b. Juma whom Seyyid Said allegedly feared. Within three years Saleh’s relative was awarded the governorship. Saleh himself fell victim to this factional struggle, probably during Seyyid Said’s visit to Zanzibar in 1828. He had apparently continued to participate in the southern slave trade despite the Moresby Treaty of 1822. Seyyid Said imprisoned the governor and confiscated Saleh’s properties, profiting thereby ‘with all the appearance of justice’. Saleh apparently escaped to the mainland and, though he was eventually pardoned, he died a pauper.51
What was particularly interesting about Saleh’s properties was that they included Mtoni and Kizimbani. Seyyid Said also bought a plantation at Mkanyageni from the sons of Saleh, and inherited another at Bumbwini from his slave ‘Alkida Jengueni’. It was probably from these plantations, all planted with cloves before Seyyid Said’s first visit to Zanzibar in 1828, that the first crops came. Bombay trade figures show that between 1823–4 and 1832–3 small quantities of cloves were already being imported from East Africa.52
While Seyyid Said can no longer be credited with introducing cloves to Zanzibar, as so many historians have maintained, he was a sovereign of Zanzibar and a merchant prince who felt the pinch even more acutely when the southern slave trade collapsed. He claimed that the Moresby Treaty of 1822 cost him MT$40,000 to MT$50,000 in lost revenue alone. Therefore, when he jumped onto the clove bandwagon, he gave it a most royal push. The American trader, Edmund Roberts commented in 1828 that the government of Zanzibar ‘for some time past have turned their attention to the cultivation of spices, the sugar cane, coffee, etc. all of which . . . will shortly be articles of export’. By 1830 an American vessel was able to buy 127 fraselas of cloves from the governor of Zanzibar, the first known cargo of Zanzibar cloves sent to the United States, at the still handsome price of MT$10 per frasela.53 Seyyid Said took a direct lead in this expansion by extending the cultivation of cloves on the plantations he had confiscated or otherwise acquired which, by the time of his death, numbered forty-five. In 1834 W.S.W. Ruschenberger saw about 4,000 cloves trees at Kizimbani, ranging in height between 5 feet and 20 feet, the smaller ones having been planted since the confiscation. In 1840 production of cloves from Seyyid Said’s plantations alone amounted to between 5,000 and 6,000 fraselas, and, by the late 1840s, to between 20,000 and 30,000 fraselas. Each of his numerous children, concubines and eunuchs also had their plots, and one of his elder sons, Khalid, owned ‘the grand and superb plantation “Marseilles”’, so named because of his ‘predilection for France and everything French’. Seyyid Said’s kinsman and governor of Zanzibar, Suleiman b. Hamed al Busaidi, was one of the richest landowners, whose plantations at Kizimbani, Bububu, Chuwini and elsewhere, were furnishing 5,000 to 6,000 fraselas worth over MT$10,000 by the late 1840s.54
The ruling Busaidi dynasty was at the head of what was developing as the landed aristocracy. Seyyid Said is said to have compelled his Omani subjects, under threat of confiscation of land, to plant a certain proportion of clove to coconut trees. By the mid-1830s it was reported that:
the easy profits which clove plantations yielded made all the inhabitants of Zanzibar turn their eyes towards the crop . . . almost everybody on the island is now clearing away the coconuts to make way for them.55
A French naval officer, Captain Loarer, aptly described this as a clove ‘mania’, and it was still raging in the 1840s. Members of the second most powerful Omani clan, the Harthi, participated in this feverish expansion and its leader, Abdullah b. Salim, who traded extensively, possessed great wealth in land and 1,500 slaves. Hasan b. Ibrahim, who had been a captain in the Sultan’s navy and had been appointed in 1832 as the agent to transact business for foreign merchants at Zanzibar, also owned by 1839 a plantation with 12,000 clove trees at Bububu. It was named Salem after the American port that had initiated American trade with Zanzibar. Between 1841 and 1843 the United States Consul and commercial agent, R.P. Waters, made contracts with at least eight other Arab producers for the supply of cloves.56
Though the Omani ruling class undoubtedly dominated landownership at this period, members of other ethnic groups began to join it fairly early on. As early as 1811 a British naval officer, Captain Smee, mentioned ‘some considerable Arab and Soowillee landholders’ possessing from 200 to 400 slaves.57 Sadik b. Mbarak, described as a Swahili born at Merka, who had acted as an interpreter for the anthropologist C. Pickering and as a clerk for Waters, had a shamba (plantation) in Zanzibar, though it was probably small. On the other hand, Burton heard in 1857 of an unnamed Swahili who had purchased an estate for MT$14,000, which suggests that it must have been of considerable size. The most important among the Swahili landowners was probably the ruler of the indigenous Shirazi population, Mwinyi Mkuu Muhammad b. Ahmed al Alawi, who lived on the proceeds of plantations at Dunga and Bweni. When he died in 1865 his plantations were inherited by his son Ahmed, who died of smallpox in 1873, and by two daughters who married into prominent Arab landowning families, unions that emphasised the confluence of the different ethnic sections of the landowning class.58
Map 2.2 Clove areas of Zanzibar
Plate 4 Mwinyi Mkuu Muhammad bin Ahmed bin Hasan Alawi, the Shirazi Ruler of Zanzibar, with his son, the last Mwinyi Mkuu
By the 1840s some of the Indian merchants had also begun to pay ‘their tribute to this mania’, according to Loarer, each having his small shamba. Ibji Sewji, brother of the custom master of Zanzibar, acquired a new shamba in 1844, and another merchant had 3 plantations and 175 slaves when he went bankrupt in 1846. Production of cloves on non-Busaidi plantations had initially lagged behind, partly as a result of those early confiscations, but as the ‘mania’ gripped the population, production jumped, surpassing royal production in 1845 by two to one.59
By the late 1840s, therefore, a landed aristocracy had emerged which, though predominantly Omani, was not exclusively so. And it was as a class that it enjoyed economic privileges, the most important of which was freedom from taxation, although members of the ruling dynasty also enjoyed exemption from duty on the import of slaves. It was only when overproduction threatened the prosperity of the class that Seyyid Said imposed a tax of MT$-1/4 per frasela on cloves from Pemba in an effort to slow down expansion there. The source of capital for the clove economy was primarily commerce which provided most of the Sultan’s revenue and the merchants’ commercial profit. Some Arab merchants involved primarily in coastal trade, such as Muhammad b. Abd al Kadir, diverted their capital from commerce into clove production, especially during the highly lucrative phase in the early 1840s, as did members of the Indian mercantile community. And many caravan traders into the interior of Africa, after three or four journeys, settled down to a more leisured life in Zanzibar.