Maruhubi Historical Sites

This guide to Maruhubi in Zanzibar City opens with a puzzle: why Sultan Barghash bin Said built an entire palace between 1880 and 1882 that he never slept in. It follows the household he built it for, one official wife and reportedly as many as a hundred concubines, kept behind towering stone columns, Persian-style marble bathhouses and an aqueduct-fed garden of pools, all funded by an economy built on ivory, cloves and the slave trade. That cloistered household ran almost entirely on its own, with the sultan visiting only when he chose.