Quote from Steve on October 10, 2021, 12:14 pm

There are no East African postage stamps here that I would not sell for 20p a stamp. I have always been fond of the Tanganyika 'giraffe' stamps. The history of Zanzibar is all about the East African slave trade but Ssssh!. Don't repeat that. No-one wants to own up to the East African slave trade anymore, especially Black Africans who suffered most at the hands of Omani Arab slavers. History being selective, they would rather remember and blame European colonialism. It is kind of reverse racism, a selective affirmitive action that blames whites but ignores their brother Africans transgressions in this regards. It is interesting to look at Britain's role in ending the East African slave trade.

In July 1890, Great Britain and Germany played colonial ‘swapsies' for no good reason other than that Britain wanted to end the East African slave trade based in Zanzibar. In the Anglo-German Agreement, (aka Heligoland–Zanzibar Treaty), Germany exchanged Zanzibar which it did not control for the Caprivi Strip in northern GSWA and also the Danish Heligoland Islands that Britain had seized during the Napoleonic War in 1814. As these North Sea islands commanded the entrance to the new Kiel Canal through which the Kaiser’s expanding Imperial German Navy would pass, (a bit like the South China Sea today!), their ownership was thought vital to Germany’s naval interests. In addition to the Caprivi Strip, Germany received a free hand in East Africa (GEA) and the resolution of two West African colonial borders. For its part, Britain gained Zanzibar in the hope of ending the East African slave trade. Run by Omani traders, Zanzibar was the largest slave market in East Africa. After much resisance from Arab 'business interests' Britain finally managed to get slavery abolished on Zanzibar in 1909. However, this practice continued clandestinely. It never really ended.