Some history about Tanzania a lotta ppl don’t know, a :

Mainland Tanzania, actually formerly went by the name of Tanganyika, a sovereign state that existed up until 1964

It was then in 1964 that Tanganyika merged with the Zanzibar Archipelago to form Tanzania. (Tan)ganyika + (Zan)zibar = Tanzania

Original Tanganyika flag (left) and Zanzibar flag (right) together made the flag we know today

At the time, Zanzibar (an archipelago of islands roughly 100km from the mainland) was an autonomous region. The Zanzibar was known as one of the big hotspots of the Arab slave trade

The Sultanate of Zanzibar which came from Oman had taken over the Zanzibar archipelago as well as the Swahili coast even going into Kenya

Arab slave traders mostly from Oman would involve in the trading of African bantu slaves between East Africa and the Eastern coast of the Arabian peninsula

it was also very common practice for the Arab men of Oman to marry the Bantu women of Tanganyika and Zanzibar as additional wives

The naming of the island Zanzibar (Zanjibar/زنجبار) is believed to have derived from the Arabic word Zenji(زنجي) which literally means nigger/negro and “bar” is believed to be of Persian origin for coast essentially translating Zanzibar to “Negro-coast” or “coast of the blacks”

In 1964, an unknown at the time man from Uganda came to Zanzibar island in which he claimed he had been “given orders by God” to remove the Arabs from Zanzibar

This man was called John Okello and it was him who led the Zanzibar revolution in which during and after the revolution anywhere up to 20,000 Arab men, women and children were slaughtered, raped and tortured by the up-risers in a bloody revolution

During and after the revolution, mass graves of Arab corpses covered the Island and a significant portion of Arabs and their families fled back to Oman

At the time, Europeans were present in Zanzibar due to colonisation activity. Interestingly, Okello had ordered the Zanzibari’s to not to lay a hand on a single European they came across

There is actually a video on youtube of the Europeans in a helicopter recording the masses of Arab corpes on the ground

Despite Okello’s successful attempt to remove the Arabs from the island, his real motive was to push Christianity onto the Zanzibari people who were strongly intertwined with Islam and Islamic lifestyle.

Even with Okello’s preaching, the Zanzibaris were firm and made it clear they had no intention of converting to Christianity and eventually Okello was no longer welcomed in Zanzibar despite rising in the political ranks, he then eventually returned to Uganda

Shortly after the revolution, Tanganyika along with the Zanzibar’s government and leading political parties merged to become Tanzania as we know today.

Obviously I’ve researched and this is my take on what I’ve found as a brief but hopefully interesting summary obviously there’s a lot more to our history which we should educate ourselves on