Slaves, Spices and Ivory in Zanzibar. Abdul Sheriff

reported in 1849 that two-thirds of the island had been, until a decade before, ‘a very good forest’ which was then being cleared by Busaidi and other rich landowners of Zanzibar to establish clove plantations. By 1848–9 Pemba was producing 10,000 fraselas of cloves, but the imposition of the tax on Pemba cloves, coupled with the fall in the price that accompanied overproduction by the late 1840s, postponed the rise of Pemba as a major producer until after the hurricane of 1872.⁶¹

      So feverish had been the spread of cloves in both Zanzibar and Pemba that they had begun to encroach seriously on areas better suited to other crops and to undermine the islands’ self-sufficiency in foodstuffs. Traditionally Pemba had been a granary for Mombasa and Arabia, and even Zanzibar had exported large quantities of foodstuffs to Arabia and the mainland as late as 1819. But as Burton put it in his characteristic style:

      Requiring little care, [cloves] speedily became a favourite, and in 1835 the aristocratic foreigner almost supplanted the vulgar coconut and the homely rice necessary for local consumption.⁶²

      Loarer adds cassava, sweet potatoes and grains to the list of foodcrops displaced by cloves. While it is questionable whether cloves could have displaced rice from the flat swampy valleys where they cannot thrive, the higher price enjoyed by cloves may have led to a diversion of labour from foodcrops. This contributed to the transformation of Zanzibar into an importer of foodstuffs. By the 1860s Zanzibar was importing large quantities of rice and other cereals, only a small proportion of which was re-exported, as Table 2.2 shows.