The short yet bloody Anglo-Zanzibar War took place on this day (27/08/2024) in 1896. Despite lasting only 38 minutes, the war included an artillery battle and naval action which claimed around 500 lives. The majority of the casualties were Zanzibari civilians or members of the Sultan’s palace guard, while only one British sailor was injured.[1]
The threat of violence began when the pro-British Sultan of Zanzibar, Hamad bin Thuwaini, suddenly died on 25 August, two days before the war. Within a few hours, his cousin, Khalid bin Barghash, had taken his place in the palace and declared himself sultan. He needed British approval for this, which was not forthcoming. Since the signing of the Heligoland-Zanzibar Treaty between Germany and Britain in 1890, which delineated the boundaries of British and German imperial influence in East Africa, Zanzibar had been declared a Protectorate of the British empire. British diplomats stationed in Zanzibar therefore ordered Khalid to stand down, and they sought permission from the British government to use military action if a peaceful resolution could not be reached.
Khalid refused and amassed around 2,800 civilians as troops, as well as the palace guard and servants, to defend the palace on the seafront of Zanzibar City. On 26 August, diplomat Basil Cave and Rear-Admiral Harry Rawson were authorised by the British government to “adopt whatever measures you may consider necessary” to regain control of the sultanate.[2] After sending an ultimatum to Khalid that threatened military action if he did not surrender—Khalid did not believe the British would follow through on their threats of open fire—the artillery bombardment of the palace began at 9:00 on the morning of 27 August.
Contemporary newspaper and magazine reports of the Anglo-Zanzibar War, which you can find in the digital collections hosted by British Online Archives, demonstrate how British management of their Protectorates, and the attendant violence that this precipitated, was figured as part of the paternalistic “civilising mission” of empire. For example, an issue of The Graphic from September 1896 explained how, despite following British directives, the former sultan had been “reactionary”, and flagged how he had opposed Britain’s decision to abolish the slave trade. Because of this, the article reasoned, he and a large proportion of the Zanzibari people apparently represented the “bitter back-water of Islam”, which harboured a “hatred of our innovating civilisation”.[3] This is a familiar component of colonial logic, whereby the abolition of slavery was used to prove the “civilisation” and liberal progressiveness of the British imperial project. British “civilisation” was likewise juxtaposed against the presumed backwardness of primitive people. Crucially, contravention of the core ethos of this “civilisation” was used to justify extreme violence in colonies. In Discourse on Colonialism, Aimé Césaire outlined how European imperialism itself “proceeds toward savagery” through such violence, exposing the paradoxes in the binaries of the “civilised” versus the “primitive” that are conspicuous in colonial logic.[4]
Racist tropes suggesting the primitivism of non-white people abound in the article in The Graphic from September 1896, such as the author celebrating the “irresistible forces” of the “Christian and civilised power”.[5] The author goes on to explain how “[t]he Arabs have been taught a lesson they will not lightly forget. A new Sultan, of supposed progressive tendencies and English sympathies, has been placed on the throne.”[6] Though the shortest war in human history, the Islamophobia and discourses of Otherness that the Anglo-Zanzibar War (re)ignited in the nineteenth-century press have long afterlives and continue to be deployed today.
As for Khalid, he escaped the palace during the bombardment, sought asylum in the German consulate, and then lived in German East Africa until Britain invaded in 1916 as part of the East African Campaign of the First World War. Twenty years after the Anglo-Zanzibar War, he was exiled to the Seychelles and St Helena, before eventually returning to East Africa where he died in 1927.
[1] Ben Johnson, “The Shortest War in History,” Historic UK, available at https://www.historic-uk.com/HistoryUK/HistoryofBritain/The-Shortest-War-in-History/.
[2] Telegraph message quoted in Geoffrey R. Owens, “Exploring the Articulation of Governmentality and Sovereignty: The Chwaka Road and the Bombardment of Zanzibar, 1895–1896,” Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History 7, no. 2 (2007), 2.
[3] British Online Archives, The Graphic, 1869–1932, “Zanzibar: Yesterday and Today”, available at https://microform.digital/boa/documents/41544/5th-september-1896, image 18.
[4] Aimé Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism, trans. Joan Pinkham (Monthly Review Press, 2001), 35–36.
[5] British Online Archives, The Graphic, 1869–1932, “Zanzibar: Yesterday and Today”, available at https://microform.digital/boa/documents/41544/5th-september-1896, image 18. You can read another contemporary account of the events of the Anglo-Zanzibar War in The Sketch, available at https://microform.digital/boa/documents/28429/2nd-september-1896, image 3.
[6] British Online Archives, The Graphic, 1869–1932, “Zanzibar: Yesterday and Today”, available at https://microform.digital/boa/documents/41544/5th-september-1896, image 18.