More than half a century has passed since a revolution forced them to leave their homeland in East Africa for the hard, desert landscape of Oman, a country which at that time had only one hospital and three primary schools.
Since then, Oman has transformed out of recognition, but for the Omanis of Zanzibar the memories and traumas of that time are difficult to process.
At the Coconut House, traditional food from Zanzibar – including a famous octopus dish – is served up to the people of Muscat, Oman’s capital. A man in his fifties walks in and whispers a greeting in Swahili.
Across the city, a wide range of cuisine from Zanzibar can be found, all of it popular with Omani families. Specialities like mohogo, kisamvu, maharagi, mandazi, sambusa, chicken and fish curries subtly blend East African, Arab and Indian flavours, ingredients and spices.
This blend of flavours reflects the history of Zanzibar and speaks to the longstanding ties between the Tanzanian archipelago off the coast of East Africa and the Gulf sultanate.
Oman has had trade and migration links to the region going back centuries. More than 100,000 Omanis were born in East Africa or have family links to the region, according to estimates, although a census has yet to be conducted.
Like millions of people across East and Central Africa, Zanzibari Omanis speak Swahili, a Bantu language that has been enriched with vocabulary from Arabic, German, Portuguese, English, Hindustani and French over centuries of colonial presence in the region.
In the 18th and 19th centuries, Omanis ruled a powerful maritime empire, which encompassed East Africa’s seaboard, vast coastlines of the Gulf and southwest Iran. Stone Town, on the island of Zanzibar – nowadays a semi-autonomous region of Tanzania – became the empire’s capital city in 1840 and a logistical hub connecting East Africa to the wider world.
During the second half of the 19th century, Zanzibar became a sultanate under the British imperial protectorate. Omani sultans and politicians ruled over a majority African population which, for centuries, had been living under colonial domination. On “the spice island”, Omani and European settlers owned slaves, profitable businesses, vast lands and plantations.
Black Africans, many of whom were indentured labourers, felt an unsurprising hostility and resentment towards their non-African overlords. This era came to a violent end in 1964 in the Zanzibar revolution when the Sultan of Zanzibar, as well as the mainly Arab government, was overthrown. The sultan fled with his family to London.
Academic sources estimate that African revolutionaries killed 5,000 to 15,000 Arabs and imprisoned thousands more during the Zanzibar Revolution.
“African revolutionaries killed my father’s sister who was pregnant, cut her stomach and removed the baby,” Zanzibar-born Omani artist Madny al-Bakry remembers.
Al-Bakry, who paints Arabic calligraphy and also Zanzibar landscapes, left the island, where his father ran a dairy business, in 1971.
“On the day of the revolution, I woke up and saw guns all over the living room table. ‘What is going on?’ I thought. And yet, my father asked me to go to deliver milk to our clients because the regular delivery man did not show up.
“Once in the street, I saw an Indian man on his scooter screaming, ‘They are coming, they are coming,’ so I thought, ‘Who is coming?!’ I did not want to run away and let people think that I was scared but when I saw an Omani guy holding a gun to protect the street, I got into our house.”
Like many other Arab Zanzibaris at the time, al-Bakry’s father was arrested during the revolution. “My father got detained successively for eight and six months. When he ended up in jail for the third time in a row, I took the decision to escape Zanzibar,” said al-Bakry, who believes a change “had to happen”.
According to the artist, many descendants of Zanzibar-born Omanis believe that the archipelago’s Arab elites had been living “in a bubble, which prevented them from understanding a surge in African nationalism among the population.
“We saw it coming. A minority cannot rule a majority,” al-Bakry told MEE.
‘Not for human beings’
From 1964 onwards, the deadly crisis pushed thousands of Arab families into exile for a years-long journey towards their ancestral homeland. However, Said bin Taimur, the clinically paranoid sultan of Oman at the time, feared outside influences and prohibited the return of most Omanis born in East Africa.
