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Zanzibar, a part of the United Republic of Tanzania, is a series of many islands, the main ones being Unguja and Pemba. The more populated of the two main islands, Unguja, is better known as Zanzibar Island and is home to Stone Town (also known as Zanzibar Town or Zanzibar City), an historic, bustling city of narrow alleyways and stone coral buildings. In addition to the two main islands, there are many other islands and inlets in the Zanzibar archipelago which stretches from the top of Pemba to the south point of Unguja

Unguja is in the Indian Ocean about 40 km east of the Tanzanian mainland. The slightly hilly island itself is about 85 km long and between 20 - 30 km wide at its widest points. Most of the population lives in the more fertile regions of the north and west. The eastern part of the island is arid and covered in coral rag (rock made of coral)making it unattractive for farming, but the beaches and the reefs on the eastern coasts make them ideal for fishing villages, tourist guesthouses, and resorts.
The people of Zanzibar are predominantly Muslim, about 95% of the population being followers of Islam. The remaining percentage is a mix of Christians, Hindus and followers of various other religions. Swahili is the official and national language of Tanzania but English is also spoken in Zanzibar, and a percentage of the population also has a working knowledge of Arabic. The population consists of people from the following ancestries: African, Persian, Omani (and other Arab states), and Asian. The local economy is based on agriculture and fishing. The population of the archipelago is estimated at over 740,000 while the population of Unguja is estimated at almost 450,000, forty per cent of which live in Stone Town. The literacy rate in Zanzibar is very high.

The name Zanzibar came from a combination of two Arabic words, 'Zinj', meaning black, and 'barr', being the Arabic word for land, the result meaning 'Land of the Blacks'.

For a small island in the southern waters of the Indian Ocean, Zanzibar has a long and unexpected history. Easily accessible for the people of the African mainland, the Zanzibar Islands are believed to have been settled first by Africans, some three to four thousand years ago. Centuries later the island began a history of hosting foreigners from Egypt, Greece, Persia, Arabia, India, China and Europe. The first recorded visit to Zanzibar is from about 60 AD and appears in a work titled "The Periplus of the Erythaean Sea", written by a Greek merchant who was living in Alexandria. Claudius Ptolemy, the famous Greek geographer living in Egypt, also made mention of Zanzibar in his work at about 150 AD, although the island was referred to under another name. Trade routes from Egypt, Roman Europe and the African coast, including Zanzibar, were, by the time of Ptolemy's writing, extending to Indo-Chinese ports.

It is believed that Bantu people (Africans speaking Bantu languages) settled in Zanzibar somewhere around the 4th century AD. By the 7th century AD, Islam had made its way to Zanzibar by way of Arab and Persian immigrants who were fleeing political strife, war, and famine in their own lands. The Arabs mixed with the local African population and along with trading goods, traded words as well, which eventually resulted in a language called Kiswahili today. The people referred to themselves and their culture as Swahili (thought to be named from the Arabic word sahil meaning coast) and thus the language was named as well. For the following centuries the Arabs and Persians continued to trade with their homelands while marrying into local society in Zanzibar and along the East African coast.
The oldest trace of Islam on the island is in Kizimkazi, the southern-most village on Unguja, where there's a mosque with inscriptions dating back to 1107 AD. The mosque has been renovated several times but the old inscriptions are still there and available for viewing by tourists.
By the 15th century, Zanzibar was its own Sultanate but this independence did not last. In 1498 Vasco da Gama's expedition from Portugal began a stronghold over the whole East African Coast that lasted for two centuries. The Portuguese did not send enough men to protect their new territory and by the late 1600s they had lost their last East African holding by surrendering Mombasa on the now Kenyan coast. After the Portuguese were beaten out of the region, the Omanis took control of Zanzibar despite protest from local African chiefs. The Omanis ruled Zanzibar in actuality and in theory up until the bloody revolution of 1963. During this period, about a dozen sultans of the Busaidi family took the throne and ruled the islands. The most influential, successful, and possibly the most kind of these was "Said the Great" or Seyyid Said bin Sultan. Sultan Said introduced cloves to the island in the early 1800s and, together with the lucrative slave trade that ran out of Zanzibar, put his empire in riches. Things were going so well for the Sultan in Zanzibar that, around 1840, he decided to move the Sultanate capital from Muscat to Unguja.

By the mid 19th century, Zanzibar was the world's leading clove exporter as well as a large exporter of slaves. A reported 25,000 slaves passed through Zanzibar every year. Slave trader Tipu Tip got so rich off the trade that he was able to afford over thirty concubines and their children in addition to his official wife and her two children.
At the time of Sultan Said's death he had one official wife and 75 concubine-cum-wives (called sarari). Only 36 of his over 100 children remained. Of these, 18 were male and 18 were female and all were born of sarari mothers.

From 1896 Zanzibar became a British protectorate trough a war that is listed in the Guinness Book of World Records as the shortest war in history. It lasted only for forty five minutes.

The British Protectorate continued until June of 1963. Constitutional independence was established on December 10th, 1963 and control of the islands was passed to the constitutional monarch. The new monarchy didn't last long, however, because on January 1964, just a month later, a violent revolution resulted in the emergence of the People's Republic of Zanzibar led by President Karume, the leader of the Afro-Shirazi Party. The revolution was brief but brutal; over 17,000 Arabs and Indians were killed in a period of several days. Many of the remaining Asians and Arabs left the island and their possessions and land were nationalized.

On April 24, 1964 Zanzibar joined with Julius (Mwalimu – Swahili for 'teacher') Nyerere's Tanganyika to form modern day Tanzania. Zanzibar's autonomous state included a constitutional right to keep its own President, Chief Minister, Cabinet and House of Representatives.

In the late 1980s Zanzibar opened to the idea of free market and started to take advantage of its tourism potential. Zanzibar held its first multi-party elections in 1995.