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Crush a dried clove bud between your fingers on a Zanzibar farm and the smell is almost medicinal — sharp, warm, faintly numbing. For a century that smell paid for palaces, financed caravans into the interior, and drew ships from Salem, Bombay and Hamburg.
The Zanzibar spice trade history most visitors hear on a farm tour is the cheerful half: cinnamon bark, nutmeg, the lipstick tree. The real story is narrower and harder. It is one crop, one dynasty and one labour system, and it explains why Stone Town exists in the form it does. This page tells it; for the farm visit itself, see the Zanzibar spice tour.
The story
The winds came first. Long before cloves, Zanzibar sat on the monsoon highway. The north-east wind, the kaskazi, blows roughly from mid-December to February or March and carried dhows south from Arabia and India; the south-east kusi, roughly June to September, carried them home. Ivory, gum copal, cowries and people went north and east; cloth, beads and metalware came south. Zanzibar was a natural harbour at the right latitude, and that geography made everything that followed possible.
A stolen tree reaches the island. Cloves are native to the Moluccas in present-day Indonesia, where the Dutch long controlled the trade. In 1770 French agents carried seedlings to Mauritius, and from the French islands the tree spread. It reached Zanzibar in the early nineteenth century. Sources give two dates for its introduction and do not agree. An Aramco World article (2021) credits the Omani Zanzibari Saleh bin Haramil al-Abry (also written Harmali bin Saleh) with bringing cloves from Réunion in 1812, though other accounts give 1818. The sultan later took Saleh's house at Mtoni as a palace, as told in the Omani palaces.
Said's plantations, and who worked them. Sultan Said bin Sultan, who moved his court from Muscat to Zanzibar in the 1830s, made cloves a matter of state, requiring landholders to plant them. The labour came from enslaved people brought from the mainland, who by the 1850s are estimated to have made up around two-thirds of the island's population, and who picked, dried and carried the cloves. The slave market and the cathedral page tells that history in full.
Finance, ivory and a global market. Clove wealth sat alongside the caravan trade in ivory and captives from the interior. Indian merchants, encouraged by Said to settle, financed much of it; the customs of the port were long farmed to Indian firms. American, British, German and French trading houses opened in Stone Town. By the mid-century Zanzibar and Pemba were among the largest clove producers in the world, and the island's name became shorthand for spice.
The long decline. A storm that struck Zanzibar on 15 April 1872 destroyed, by one historical account, at least two-thirds of the clove and coconut plantations together. The sea-borne slave trade was banned in 1873 and slavery's legal status abolished in 1897, but forced labour on the plantations continued for years in practice. After the revolution of 1964, the state took over buying and exporting, prices paid to farmers were held down, and smuggling to the mainland and Kenya followed. Meanwhile Indonesia, which consumes enormous quantities of cloves in its kretek cigarettes, grew its own, and Madagascar became a major exporter. Cloves shrank from a fortune to one export among several.
Today. Pemba still holds the great majority of the islands' clove trees — around 3.5 million by one count. The Zanzibar State Trading Corporation (ZSTC), the state body, is the main buyer and marketer of cloves, and it has signed an agreement with a Danish company to export organic cloves to Europe; the sources we checked do not confirm that organic certification has been granted yet. The harvest season is not settled: one 2002 report gives September to December on Pemba, while other sources give mid-year, so confirm the timing with ZSTC or the Pemba office before you travel. On Unguja, the small mixed farms of Kizimbani and Kidichi grow cloves among vanilla, cinnamon and pepper, increasingly for visitors.
Key facts
Main spice: cloves, native to the Moluccas. Arrival on Zanzibar: early nineteenth century; credited to Saleh bin Haramil al-Abry in 1812 (Aramco World) or 1818 (other accounts, not confirmed). Royal backing: Sultan Said bin Sultan, who moved his capital from Muscat in the 1830s (sources give 1832 or 1840). Labour: enslaved people, around two-thirds of the population by the 1850s (estimate). Trade winds: kaskazi (NE) about mid-December to February/March; kusi (SE) about June to September. Decline: the 1872 storm (reported losses vary), abolition (1897), state control after 1964, Indonesian and Malagasy competition. Today: Pemba grows most of the crop; harvest timing is unsettled between sources (see section 2).
How to experience it
On a spice farm. The Kizimbani–Kidichi farms north-east of Stone Town are where you smell and taste the crop; our spice tour page covers how to choose a good farm visit. Put questions about the plantations' history to the guide as well as the plants; good guides answer plainly.
At Kidichi. The Persian baths built for Sultan Said sit in the same clove country, and fit into the same morning.
On Pemba. If cloves are your thread, go to the source. If your dates fall in the harvest, you may see buds drying in the open, but the timing needs confirming before you go; read Pemba or Zanzibar and Pemba before deciding.
In Stone Town. The Darajani market's spice stalls, the old merchant houses and the waterfront where the clove ships loaded all belong to this story — see Stone Town history in ten buildings.
Buying cloves. Choose whole buds with the round head intact; they should feel oily, not dusty. Buying at the farm puts money with the grower. Import rules for plant products vary by country, so look them up before you pack.
Right for you if… you want the island's past to sit underneath its beaches, or you travel with teenagers who will remember a smell longer than a date. If you only want a pleasant hour among the plants, the spice tour on its own is enough. If you have under a week on the islands, Unguja's farms tell the story without the extra flight to Pemba; the Pemba detour is not for you if time is short.
Why it matters to how we travel
A travel designer would tell the clove story whole, including the people who were forced to grow it. That would shape how spice mornings are arranged — with farmer-guides who earn properly from the visit, and with honest context rather than a souvenir pitch. A trip that includes Pemba's harvest season can show you the crop as it is grown today.
Journeys to consider
- Shores of Zanzibar — the spice morning sits between Stone Town and the coast. → Shores of Zanzibar island journey
- Southern Safari & Spice — Tanzania's parks, then the island whose name is on the label. → Southern Safari & Spice journey
- Zanzibar and Pemba island-hop — follow cloves to the island that grows most of them. → Zanzibar and Pemba island-hop
