The Indian Ocean - Michael Pearson [200]
Proceeding roughly west to east, and south to north, Zanzibar was ruled by Omani sultans through the nineteenth century, though British power increasingly intruded on their autonomy. Society was thoroughly stratified, with a ruling elite who claimed Arab origin. Below them were Muslims who could not convincingly claim Arab descent, and below them descendants of slaves. But the commercial sector, including many government posts, was controlled by Indians, usually Muslims of some description and hailing from Kutch. Zanzibar became independent in 1963, and in 1964, after a bloody revolution, merged with Tanganyika to make the new nation of Tanzania. The revolution displaced the Arab elite, and both they and the Indians often chose to leave. Here and elsewhere a situation owing much to the past wishes of the colonial powers, in this case Britain with its indirect control, left a precarious situation at independence.
Madagascar perhaps should not be considered as an island, for it is larger than many landed states. We can merely point out that the island, ethnically very diverse, was a French colony from 1896. Its history since independence in 1960 has been a chequered one, and now the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund play something of a colonial role in 'advising' the various governments on their economic and social policies.
The four main islands of the Comoros again contain strong ethnic divisions. When Arabs arrived a millennium ago they found a population divided between Malayo-Polynesian people and Swahili-speaking Africans. These divisions produced a situation where one of the four, Mayotte, was mostly populated by Malayo-Polynesian people who had come from Madagascar, as compared with the other three, who had the same Afro-Arab mixture as the Swahili coast. France took over all four islands in the late nineteenth century, but at independence in 1975 Mayotte chose to remain part of metropolitan France. The recent history of the other three has been a turbulent one, with several coups and mercenaries sometimes playing a deciding role. The Comoros, like Zanzibar, have often stressed their Islamic credentials. In 1993 the three islands became a member of the League of Arab States.
Both the Comoros and Madagascar had been settled long before the Europeans arrived in the Indian Ocean, and this contrasts strongly with the next set of islands we will look at, which were uninhabited. These are the Mascarene islands: Reunion, Mauritius and the Seychelles.
The Portuguese visited Mauritius in the sixteenth century, and the Dutch twice tried to establish a settlement colony there. However, permanent European control came only when the French took the island in 1721. They quickly established sugar plantations, and brought in large numbers of African slaves to work them. In the late eighteenth century the population consisted of 6,000 whites, 3,700 free people, most of whom were Indian, and nearly 50,000 slaves. Britain took the island in 1810, during the Napoleonic wars, and in 1835 abolished slavery. Over the next eighty years some 450,000 indentured Indian labourers were introduced. The island became independent in 1968. There are strong ethnic and religious divisions. Over half the population are Indian Hindus, about 30 per cent are creoles and Europeans, 16 per cent are Muslim, and about 3 per cent are of Chinese-Mauritian background. The sugar economy, in effect the economy for some two centuries, is still dominated