Sultan's Palace Museum
Waterfront royal residence turned museum on a runaway princess and the sultanate she fled.
This guide to the Sultan's Palace Museum in Zanzibar City asks why a nine-months-pregnant princess fled her own family's palace by rowboat in the middle of the night. It follows Salme, one of thirty six children of Sultan Said bin Said, who built Zanzibar into a major slave-trading and clove-growing power, and traces her secret self-taught literacy, her romance with a German merchant named Rudolph Heinrich Ruete, and the marble halls that wealth built around her. It also follows the sultans in the portraits downstairs and the palace next door, leveled by British gunships in the shortest war on record. Her floor upstairs is the one room here that answers back.
Audio guides are written and narrated by AI.