The slave market in Zanzibar closed in 1873 under British pressure. By 1880, the Anglican Cathedral was rising from its foundations on the exact same site. The altar was placed precisely where the whipping post had stood.
Sultan Barghash bin Said ruled the island in 1880, the most powerful man between Cairo and Cape Town. He installed electric lights in his palace, built the most modern building in East Africa, and created the continent's first public transit. Outside the city, his clove plantations ran on indentured labor that was slavery in everything but name.
Zanzibar sat 25 miles off the East African coast and produced three-quarters of the world's clove supply. Every plantation owner was racing to plant more trees. The island smelled like Christmas dinner, year-round.
Stone Town held 80,000 people: Omani Arabs, Swahili merchants, Indian financiers, European consuls, and the formerly enslaved. Trade flowed in dhows from Muscat, Bombay, and Madagascar. The standard currency was an Austrian silver coin - the Maria Theresa thaler - standard from East Africa to Arabia.
Barghash's personal guards were Baluchi mercenaries from what is now Pakistan. The carved wooden doors of Stone Town carried social signals: pointed brass studs, imported from India, originally meant to stop elephant charges; chains carved into the frame meant the household offered hospitality.
Within ten years, Germany and Britain would carve up the mainland. Within two decades, Barghash would be a British puppet. The clove prosperity was already borrowed time.
But in 1880, the muezzin's call mixed with church bells and the chanting of dock workers unloading ivory. The air smelled like money and cloves.
Who actually profited from the "end" of the slave trade: the planters who shifted their labor to cloves, or the church that built its altar on the whipping post?
ALT Time Traveler's Guide to Zanzibar, 1880