Sayyid Majid bin Said Al-Busaid’s marriage has…

Sayyid Majid bin Said Al-Busaid’s marriage has produced only one daughter, Sayyida Khanfora bint Majid (who will marry her cousin, the seventh Sultan).

As a consequence, Majid is succeeded as Sultan of Zanzibar in 1870 by his brother Barghash bin Said.

Majid bin Said had become Sultan of Zanzibar and Oman on the death of his father, Sayyid Said bin Sultan, but his accession had been contested.

Following the struggle over the accession to the position of Sultan of Oman, Zanzibar and Oman had been divided into two separate principalities, with Majid ruling Zanzibar and his older brother Thuwaini ruling Oman.

The sultans have developed an economy of trade and cash crops in the Zanzibar Archipelago with a ruling Arab elite.

Ivory is a major trade good.

The archipelago, also known as the Spice Islands, is famous worldwide for its cloves and other spices, and plantations are developed to grow them.

The archipelago's commerce gradually falls into the hands of traders from the Indian subcontinent, whom Said bin Sultan had encouraged to settle on the islands.

During his fourteen-year reign as sultan, Majid has consolidated his power around the East African slave trade.

Malindi in Zanzibar City is East Africa's main port for the slave market between Africa and Asia (including the Middle East), and in the mid-nineteenth century as many as fifty thousand slaves have passed annually through the port.

Many are captives of Tippu Tib, a notorious Arab slave trader and ivory merchant.

Tib leads huge expeditions, some four thousand strong, into the African interior, where chiefs sell him their villagers for next to nothing.

These Tib uses to caravan ivory back to Zanzibar, then sells them in the slave market for large profits.

Tib has become one of the wealthiest men in Zanzibar, the owner of multiple plantations and ten thousand slaves. (Swahili Coast: East Africa's Ancient Crossroads", in a "Did You Know?" sidebar authored by Christy Ullrich, National Geographic)