period, and stranded relatives became a common theme of the Busaidi sovereigns and mobile rule in general. From Lamu, Hilal made his way to Aden and then to Mecca to rejoin his family. Hilal died there in June 1851, after which his family moved to Muscat.21 By happenstance, Said bin Sultan and Hamerton were both in Muscat when Hilal’s family arrived. The British official lectured Su’ud, one of Hilal’s older sons, on the importance of complying with his grandfather’s wishes.22 Perhaps the better lesson for Su’ud was that mobility alone was not a path to power. When Hilal’s younger brothers had become governors—Thuwayni in Muscat and Majid in Zanzibar—they enjoyed their father’s financial support. Without an allowance or access to credit, certain positions were untenable. Hilal predeceased his father, but their failed negotiations presaged the infighting among Hilal’s brothers that marked the period that followed his death.
TURMOIL AND TRANSITION, 1856 TO 1861
When Barghash attempted to sneak Said bin Sultan’s body to shore on that dark October night in 1856 he was part of a plot. Barghash, in cooperation with the Harthi sheikh who had traveled as Said bin Sultan’s hostage, attempted to usurp control of Zanzibar from Majid. Their plans failed but set into motion a series of disputes that would lead to armed rebellion three years later, create an opening for British intervention, and inadvertently broaden the circuits of mobility to include the East African interior and Bombay.
After Said bin Sultan’s death, Thuwayni bin Said, who had ruled in Muscat during his father’s absences, believed that he should control the entire dominion, while his younger brother Majid bin Said, who had become the Zanzibar governor in 1854, thought that he should be the one to take over his father’s rule. They had to contend with each other and with their local rivals. Thus, each of them faced similar circumstances: they had a sibling rival at the other end of the former empire who was angling to control the whole realm, and they each had a nearby brother hoping to usurp local power. In Oman, there was Turki bin Said, a brother younger than Thuwayni, who served as the governor of the port city of Suhar. In Zanzibar, Barghash bin Said was only twenty years old but his allegiance with the Harthi gave him additional heft.
The three years following Said bin Sultan’s death saw an unsettled state of affairs as Thuwayni and Majid squabbled over dominion and over an estate marked by debt. During the same period, two prominent people, the customs master and the British agent, exited. In Zanzibar, Majid had laid claim to Said bin Sultan’s ships, and in Muscat, Thuwayni claimed landed property. Yet they were also faced with debt because during Said’s rule the line between state assets and personal assets did not exist. Said had depended heavily on Jairam Shivji, his customs master, for loans and liquidity to underwrite mobile governance. Both before and during Said’s last trip to Arabia, he had taken loans from the house of Jairam Shivji to engage in diplomacy with the Persians and to offer stipends to win the loyalty of the rebels. Thus one of Said’s legacies was a great debt to the firm of Jairam Shivji. Shivji had retired in 1853 from Zanzibar and returned to Kutch, his birthplace.23 Likewise, Hamerton died in Zanzibar shortly after Said bin Sultan, and was not replaced immediately, in part due to the northern Indian uprising in 1857. Thus when Colonel C. P. Rigby arrived in Zanzibar in 1858, he wanted to reassert British influence and tamp down the slave trade. This fit into the new increased control in India, with the Crown—in the form of the Raj—taking over the British East India Company’s rule in the subcontinent.24 The dispute between Thuwayni and Majid lasted for nearly three years, with accusations back and forth and property seizures in Zanzibar and Muscat.
By early 1859, Thuwayni, the senior brother, was frustrated by his penury and sought to break the impasse by coordinating with allies in Zanzibar and launching an invasion. Instead, he ran into British attempts to assert control in the western Indian Ocean. Thuwayni complained about the hierarchy and wealth of the status quo between Muscat and Zanzibar: “The man who is given a bone . . . can only suck it, but he who gets the flesh eats it. I am the elder brother and I have the bone in Muscat. Majid, my junior, has the flesh in Zanzibar.”25 Thuwayni outfitted an expedition to sail to Zanzibar in February, seize the island, and overthrow Majid.26 The previous year, he might have executed this plan without difficulty, but in 1859, post-uprising in India, British consular and naval officers intervened. In late February 1859, the Political Resident for the Persian Gulf sent a commodore from the British Navy to Muscat to use “friendly counsel and remonstrance” to persuade Thuwayni to cease hostilities against Majid. The commodore delivered a letter to Thuwayni and explained that he should discuss his claims against Majid with the British. The naval officer was to follow Thuwayni in his ship to assure that he returned to Muscat.27 This left Thuwayni’s allies in Zanzibar, led by Barghash, on their own. In short, the death of Seyyid Said had allowed the British to increase their role as arbiters in the region, and the unified Arab rule of this western Indian Ocean dominion was being dismantled.
Although the officer successfully intercepted Thuwayni bin Said and called back his ships, arbitration did not resolve the situation. The result was a breaking point with historiographical implications. Thuwayni sent a representative to Zanzibar to meet with Majid but after several months of negotiations, they remained at a stalemate. Historians have seen the moment in two ways: beset by internal dissent or a gallant move for unity. British officials, writing twenty-five years after the fact—at a time with Harthi activism in Oman was challenging the sitting sultan—claimed that Thuwayni’s 1859 representative had not come in good faith, but rather had come “to distribute money among the Harthi tribe & induce them to rise.” In this version, Thuwayni withdrew because he had been double-crossed by the Harthi, who held great sway over a young Barghash.28 The Omani historian al-Hashimy, following al-Salimi, has framed this as an Omani national issue: the 1859 negotiations were the last chance to preserve the supposed unity of the trans-Indian Ocean Omani empire.29
Either way, the breakdown of negotiations allowed the British to intervene in the succession dispute. As historian Rheda Bhacker explains, “From now on it was to be the paramount power, Britain, who assumed the role of kingmaker in Zanzibar as well as in Muscat.”30 In April of 1859, before the matter was formally settled, however, the government in Bombay had already split the African and Arabian realms bureaucratically, assigning Muscat to Persian Gulf officials. “I am desired in conclusion to observe that the Resident in the Persian Gulf should [ . . . ], now that Zanzibar and Muscat are disunited [ . . . ], be regarded as the officer in charge of Political relations as with the Imam of Muscat.”31 The bureaucratic wheels had begun to constrain the mobility of Arab rulers in the western Indian Ocean. Said’s sons would never move so freely or so frequently as he had. Events in Zanzibar would only compound this.
BARGHASH’S REBELLION AND EXILE, 1859 TO 1862
In early 1859, while Thuwayni schemed his invasion of Zanzibar, Barghash and the Harthi chiefs conspired to overthrown Majid. The cloak and dagger maneuvers, related in breathless detail by a surprising narrator, were not successful and resulted in a scattering of the conspirators into exile, from the ivory depots of central Africa to cosmopolitan, industrial Bombay. Barghash’s machination aligned with the plot in Muscat, attracted allies of questionable character, and split the royal family. In 1859, Barghash was only in his early twenties and aside from some loyal young relatives, did not have a natural base of support in Zanzibar. He was more client than patron. The British consul called him “a morose discontented man.”32 The consul noted in 1858 that, while Barghash had few followers in Zanzibar, his alliance with Thuwayni put him among the leaders of a group in Muscat that planned to dispossess Majid.33 In these circumstances, with few funds of his own to attract allies, Barghash encouraged others to bet on the future, promising influential positions when his plot succeeded. He invited them to meetings, held in the darkest part of the night, based on when the moon was rising or setting.34
These meetings, according to the memoirs of Salme bint Said, Barghash’s younger sister, were steeped in secrecy, and the conspiracy played out with delicious intrigues. Salme, who had a falling out with Barghash decades later, lends a suspenseful narration to the events
