Lions Led By Donkeys Podcast - *PREVIEW* The Anglo-Zanzibar War ft. Riley Quinn

Episode Date: March 5, 2025

Get the whole episode on Patreon here! https://www.patreon.com/posts/123683504 Liveshow tickets are now available for April 11th in London: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/lions-led-by-donkeys-podcast-live-in-london-11th-april-2025-tickets-1266997737339?aff=oddtdtcreator Livestream tickets are also available for those who can't make it: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/livestream-lions-led-by-donkeys-podcast-live-in-london-11th-april-2025-tickets-1266999251869?aff=oddtdtcreator PRE ORDER YOUR EMU JIMA SHIRT HERE: https://llbdmerch.com/products/llbd-emu-jima-shirt Joe and Nate are joined by Trashfuture and No Gods No Mayor's Riley Quinn to talk about one of the shortest wars in history. Sources: https://www.historyextra.com/period/victorian/shortest-war-history/ https://www.thecollector.com/anglo-zanzibar-war/ https://www.history.org.uk/publications/resource/7950/the-shortest-war-in-history-the-anglo-zanzibar-wa https://altezzatravel.com/articles/the-anglo-zanzibar-war https://explorethearchive.com/anglo-zanzibar-war

If you ever want to catch us live, well, we're hitting the road again. We're returning to London on April 11th at 7pm at Rich Mix. Tickets are available now and you can check the show notes for that link. There'll also be live stream tickets if you can't make it to London, so you can still watch us and there'll be a separate link for that. So make sure you're getting the right tickets when you want to see us. Our merch store is restocked. So if you missed any of the live shows, specific merch, and wherever date that we went to and you couldn't make it to, it's all on our merch store, LLBDmerch.com. So get your orders in while they last. We only have certain sizes and certain numbers and whichever one it happens to be. So if want something get your order in once again that is LLBDmerch.com and

the link will also be in the show notes thanks and we hope to see you in London when it came to like public works in Zanzibar unfortunately didn't have the British people are coming I promise things get very stupid very quickly but he did also build something called a house of wonders, which sounds like a barracks for wizards, but yeah, it sounds like a civilizational bonus in Civ six. Like I think it might be if you play as Zanzibar, then you can have the house of wonders is one of your, your, your cultural wonders. I think it's actually a thing. But sorry, I know it was on one of them back in the day, but it was called the House of Wonders

because it was the first house in Zanzibar to have electricity and an elevator, which is way less cool. Yeah, I just always play as the Canadians in Civ 6, so no one ever declares war on me. Is your national wonder just like the Toronto Maple Leaf Stadium? Yeah, national wonder is Toronto Maple Leaf Stadium,

and then your civilization becomes unable to win on the sports victory. That national wonder is Toronto Maple Leaf stadium. And then your civilization becomes unable to win on the sports victory. That is true. Yeah. National wonder is we'll have two. It's one is SNC Lava Lynn and the other one is the four or five. If you build the, if you build the SNC Lava Lynn national wonder, then there is a 30% chance that a random building in one of your cities will fall down every turn. If you build the 405 Wonder, then all movement speed is halved in your empire. If you build the Blue Jays Wonder, you cannot win the sports victory. If you build the Ambassador Bridge Wonder, you just have to deal with a whole bunch of drunken people from Michigan coming over and committing gun crime.

Yeah, barbarians come. You have to deal with barbarians again in the late game. Despite all of this, it was during Bargash's rule that things started to go really bad for Zanzibar. And by that, I mean, the Europeans showed back up. Zanzibar, despite being a pretty small island, all things considered, control a fair amount of the Swahili coasts of Eastern Africa, which obviously meant European powers were not gonna be super happy about that.

But first there is a wonderfully named Society of German Colonization that strong-armed these Swahili coast people into accepting German protection rather than Zanzibari, and then the Berlin Conference that divvied up swaths of Africa between different colonial regimes. The Germans and the British both had designs over the area and decided amongst themselves who would get what.

The British would get trading rights over what today would be Kenya and the Germans would get what is today Tanzania, but minus the island of Zanzibar. However, the agreement was kind of gray. Rather than just taking over Zanzibar like you would imagine an empire would, the agreement forced the Zanzibar government into letting in trading houses run by the German East Africa Company, which is exactly what it sounds like. We talked a little bit more about this when we did the series on the Namibian genocide, but same kind of slow penetration here because it's the same reason that the VOC did it in

the Netherlands and the same reason why the British East India Company did it is like, we're going to privatize these ventures until they become profitable and then the state will take them over. In the Germans case, it failed hilariously and the Germans had taken over pretty quickly after colonization started. But before long, the British began to muscle in on the Zanzibari with the first thing of being to force them to abandon their slave trade. And I know that is a good thing, but they did this for not good reasons. Despite the banding of slavery being a good thing,

the British did it to just destroy the Zanzibari economy and make them more dependent on the British. No, no, no. I think we did it because we have always lived the principles of classical liberalism and we were actually fighting the reverse racism of the That's right. We decided that the Zanzibari's doing it was DEI and we had to get rid of that. Yeah. British East India Company DEI is somehow the most cursed thing that's ever been birthed on this show. I mean, to be fair though, to be fair,

British East India DEI is basically the company under Warren Hastings. That's right. Like these guys were were that is something that kind of got like the under Hastings the the East India Company was like they were really they they like had a very strange and paternalistic love specifically of like the Mughal culture. It was like it was insanely fucked up but like they were they were all trying to like be Lawrence of Arabia, but while they were trying to be what Lawrence of Arabia

would eventually become weirdly. They wanted to be Lawrence of Arabia, but they couldn't get a boner when they got whipped. Like there's an extent to which it just feels like this always seems to happen that a certain type of British guy, you take him out of Britain in the 19th century and expose him to temperatures above 30 centigrade over like one prolonged period of time. And he just becomes a weeb for Islam. Like it

really is a thing. Like it's very, very weird, but it's a thing. Ah yes, British photosynthesis. Every British person is about seven average degrees away from like- From receiving the light of Islam. Yeah, exactly. I'm saying from just, So basically we say is climate change is gonna basically make the caliphate.

Yeah, the Emirate of Zanzibar is coming back. It's just moving north and west. And this year when there's a heat wave of the UK and the power grid eventually can't handle all the AC everyone's just gonna simultaneously save the Shahado. Joe, Joe, Joe. AC? Yeah, AC's not really a thing.

That's not a thing. It's not here either. Yeah, it's not here either, but it also doesn't get hot. I definitely don't have air conditioning in anything that I live in. I definitely don't have air conditioning in that studio because we had the one rare hot weekend when we were there last July.

It was the one weekend, it got over 30, and that's when everyone on the show decided to come to the Netherlands to build the studio like i was like don't worry guys it's never hot here you might want to pack a jacket though and now we're all muslim yeah exactly yeah exactly we decided to cool off by jumping into the trash bin full of water and technically that's wudu that's ablutions more than that though they're they're farming and plantations that did exist in Zanzibar did depend on a slave-based workforce. The British knew this and by kneecapping them, they would weaken Zanzibar, weaken the Sultanate, and slowly allow them to get muscled more and more. Bargash, obviously

not wanting to fight the Brits, outlawed the slave trade, but simultaneously turned a blind eye to the massive black market trade for slaves that popped up afterwards, which only pissed the Brits off more. By this point, Bargash was forced to allow more and more British influence into his government. Trading houses popped up, and before long, British officers were instructing the Zanzibari army, which previously did not exist. The Zanzibari army was effectively a creation of the British. Then he died, leaving the Sultanate to another younger brother, Khalifa, who spent the last few years in prison for trying to plot to overthrow his brother. We call that winning by default. Again, you can't just imprison your plotting brother.

That's not how Sultanates were. Otherwise this shit happens. You gotta strangle him or blind him. There's no other, there's no other thing you can do. Also I do love that it's like, the British just love going to states in and around the Gulf and then just making them an army. Like we, like that's that, like Aliya, we've been doing that since,

not just since Aliya Mama, but since way before. In fact, a lot of telegraph nomads actually work for the Lee Enfield company maintaining bolt action rifles. Weirdly, that is still true today. There's a lot of, let's call them telegraph nomads of the 21st century digital nomads that are all generals in the UAE's military. And they're retired colonels from the US or the UK. One of them is in charge of their special forces. Yeah. One of the most senior ones is a retired Australian general. Yeah.

I love UAE special forces. It's like we're stacking up 10 deep and we're going to breach and clear this door of all of its Louis Vuitton belts. Yeah. Everyone stands in the door and then immediately pushes a button that causes just a complete scorched earth strike on the same building. They're like, well, we can't just walk in. Or it's just like 10 Emirati Special Forces guys stack up on a door and then they call in just like 10 guest workers to open it. That's probably what would happen. I actually worked at, I had actually worked with soldiers to the UAE during my tours in Afghanistan

and they never did shit. They refused to do anything. And the officers were based in imperialist United Arab Emirates army. Yeah. Yeah. Like I was jealous. Their officers were all Emirati and they refused to listen to anybody. And their soldiers were not. And their soldiers like, well, our officers say we can't go. So we're not going. It's like the brief must be nice. Briefing seat in Sicario where they're just like, all right, Delta, stand up. You know, U.S. Marshals stand up.

It's like, all right, Emirati for special forces. Stay seated. Yeah. We actually need six workers to pull us up to our feet. Yeah. I mean, I was going to say, as regards to this story, Khalifa, it must have been very confusing. He kind of like lived in a quantum state because technically speaking, he needs to reside in both the disfavored brother's wing of the house and the scheming vizier's wing of the house. And it's like which which do you belong to? He was in prison. So they take code they took they took care of that for that's an additional wing on the house, too Yeah, that's yeah

His brother put him in prison and then his brother died and then like the people that like the Sultan's age showed up like well You wouldn't by default man. You're salted Come on in. Yeah