Majid bin Said of Zanzibar

Majid bin Said was the first ruler of an independent Sultanate of Zanzibar after the division of his father Said bin Sultan’s Omani dominions. Born in Zanzibar in 1834, he claimed succession when Said died in 1856, but his position was contested by his brother Thuwaini in Oman. British arbitration helped formalise the separation: Majid retained Zanzibar and the East African dependencies, while Thuwaini ruled Oman. This settlement made Zanzibar the political centre of a distinct commercial state in the western Indian Ocean.

Majid’s reign from 1856 to 1870 coincided with rapid growth in Zanzibar’s clove economy and its role as a major entrepôt linking East Africa, Arabia, India and European commerce. That prosperity was inseparable from slavery and the slave trade, which remained fundamental to plantation labour and regional exchange. Majid also faced rivalry from his brother Barghash and cultivated relations with foreign powers. He died in 1870 without a surviving son and was succeeded by Barghash, under whom external pressure against the slave trade intensified.

In M. M. Kaye’s Trade Wind, in 1859 Boston heiress Hero Athena Hollis travels to Zanzibar to join her uncle, the American consul, determined to oppose the island's slave trade.