History of Zanzibar led to the Anglo-Zanzibar War, also known as the shortest war in history. The islands gained independence from Britain in December 1963 as a constitutional monarchy. A month later, the bloody Zanzibar Revolution, in which several thousand Arabs and Indians were killed and thousands more expelled and expropriated, led to the Republic of Zanzibar and Pemba. That April, the republic merged with the mainland Tanganyika, or more accurately, was subsumed into Tanzania, of which Zanzibar remains a semi-autonomous region. Zanzibar was most recently in the international news with a January 2001 massacre, following contested elections. Zanzibar has been inhabited, perhaps
Wildlife of Zanzibar baobab trees. The island’s coast line is reef-fringed with coral reefs studded with multicoloured fish. The island has a large number of the Zanzibar suni ("Nesotragus moschatus") called 'pa', on the coral rag on the east coast, duiker ("Cepholophus adersi") locally called the 'paanunga' and Newmans tree coney ("dendrohyrax neumanni"). An important bird species is Guinea fowl. Jongowe village on the island has a population concentration as well as a large number of mosque remnants and a group of 40 stone houses, within an area of all traced to the 14th century. Mosque ruins and some stone houses built in