Short Stuff: The Shortest War

How long was the shortest war in human history? Under an hour. Hard to believe? Not when you hear the story. See omnystudio.com/listener https://omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed Human.

• 0:04Josh Clark?

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• 0:39Josh Clark?

  Hey, and welcome to the Short Stuff. I'm Josh, and there's Chuck and Jerry sitting in for Dave. And appropriately, in this short stuff, we're going to talk about the world's shortest war.

• 0:48Speaker 02

  That's right. Another Dave Ruse special for the shorty. So thanks, Dave, for this.

• 0:53Josh Clark?

  Yeah, thanks.

• 0:54Speaker 02

  This is about the Anglo-Zanzibar War, which is generous to call this a war, but technically it's listed as such. It was really a very quick, one-sided conflict, so quick it is known as the shortest war. Numbers vary, but you probably see 38 minutes online when you look this thing up. Maybe as high as 45.

• 1:16Josh Clark?

  Yeah, but everyone agrees it was less than an hour, this war.

• 1:19Speaker 02

  That's right.

• 1:20Josh Clark?

  So Anglo-Zanzibar means that it was between England and Zanzibar, appropriately enough. It happened, did you say, in 1896?

• 1:30Speaker 02

  I did not mention the date.

• 1:32Josh Clark?

  It happened in 1896, and it was between the British Royal Navy and the Sultan of Zanzibar. And you might say, like, what's the deal here? Zanzibar, it's off the coast of Tanzania today. Why would the British Navy care about this? Well, back in the 1890s and before that, Zanzibar was a very important and very wealthy trading port that exchanged goods between the interior of Africa and the rest of the world, Middle East, Europe, so forth. So Zanzibar was a very important place at the time.

• 2:07Speaker 02

  I thought it was important because of the great Billy Joel song, "Zanzibar."

• 2:11Josh Clark?

  For real, Billy Joel did a record on that?

• 2:15Speaker 02

  There's a song called Zanzibar, good song. But I think it's about a bar named Zanzibar.

• 2:19Josh Clark?

  Oh, okay. That's a good name for a bar.

• 2:22Speaker 02

  Yeah, I like it. I just figured I'd try and work in Billy Joel as much as possible, since you didn't know I was a fan.

• 2:29Josh Clark?

  Zanzibar, yeah.

• 2:31Speaker 02

  You want to know the lyrics? I'm not going to sing it. "I got the old man's car, I got a jazz guitar, I got a tab at Zanzibar. Tonight, that's where I'll be, I'll be."

• 2:41Josh Clark?

  What's the next line?

• 2:43Speaker 02

  That's the chorus, then it goes into the next verse.

• 2:45Josh Clark?

  Okay. When I hear Zanzibar, I think of the G.I. Joe Dreadnoughts. They were in league with Cobra, and they were either from Zanzibar, or one of them was named Zanzibar.

• 2:55Speaker 02

  See, I still never watched that stuff. I missed out.

• 2:59Josh Clark?

  They were great, man. I know, you were stuck with the big ones.

• 3:01Speaker 02

  Yeah. So, where did we leave? It was a busy trading port. Did you mention everything they were trading yet?

• 3:07Josh Clark?

  No.

• 3:07Speaker 02

  Okay, you left that to me. So, they were trading ivory, they were trading spices and things like that. They were getting back weaponry and textiles. But very sadly, one of the biggest exports was enslaved Africans. They estimate up to 30,000 enslaved people were shipped out through Zanzibar, all the way up through the 1880s, by the way, which is almost a couple of decades after the Emancipation Proclamation. That was still going on there. And the Sultan of Zanzibar was selling his people out, because he was getting rich off of this slave trade.

• 3:42Josh Clark?

  Yeah, and the British really didn't like this. They wanted to have a... To control this really expensive port, but they were very much driven by outlawing slavery in Africa as well. So, those two things were big drivers of Great Britain's interest in Zanzibar. And they, in 1890, came up with a treaty between the British and the Germans... The Germans, sorry. That basically said, "Here's a bunch of East Africa, this is yours, this is mine, this is yours." It was part of what became known as the scramble for Africa. And the European powers just basically carved the entire continent up. That led to decades of colonization, colonialism.

• 4:29Josh Clark?

  That didn't free up until, I guess, about the 60s. I think the scramble for Africa deserves its own episode someday.

• 4:36Speaker 02

  Yeah, for sure. Yeah, very shameful stuff. But they carved out what they called zones of influence, and they made Zanzibar a British protectorate, which I looked up the difference between that and a colony. Apparently, a protectorate, they're self-ruling and stuff like that. So it's not quite colony, it's colony-light. They are still very much under the control of the British government and military. So they said, "Zanzibar is our protectorate, and we want to get a friendly Sultan in there, at the Sultanate of Zanzibar, that's friendly to our needs and wants." And so they picked a guy named Ahmad bin Teweni. And he was basically a puppet. He was the fifth Sultan of Zanzibar, and this was in

• 5:18Speaker 02

  1893. But he was not around long, because Dave says here it was his nephew, also his cousin, this guy Khalid bin Bargash, who had already had one failed run at the Sultanship, I guess? Is that what it would be called, or Sultan-y? And then tried again by almost certainly poisoning and killing either his uncle or cousin.

• 5:43Josh Clark?

  Teweni.

• 5:43Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 5:44Josh Clark?

  Yeah. And one reason that he's a suspect is right when Teweni died, bin Bargash showed up in the palace and was like, "I'm Sultan now, everybody. Just wanted to let you know." So you mentioned that Teweni's Sultancy lasted only three years. Bargash's Sultancy lasted only three days, because he installed himself as Sultan, and the British were like, "We don't like you. You're not going to do our bidding. So we have a problem here."

• 6:14Speaker 02

  Yeah. So they said, "Here's what we're gonna do." Actually, let's take a break, because everyone's wondering what the heck's gonna happen next, right?

• 6:21Josh Clark?

  Yes.

• 6:22Speaker 02

  All right, we'll be back right after this.

• 6:36Josh Clark?

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• 7:36Speaker 03

  First thought is like, wow, how are we going to do all this?

• 7:39Josh Clark?

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• 8:47Speaker 02

  All right, so I was, everyone's hanging on the edge of their seat. What are the British gonna do? They're gonna engage in gunboat diplomacy, which is, the very next day, they, they pulled up a bunch of ships to the harbor there, or whatever it is there, and pointed the cannons at the royal palace and said, "You need to be out of there by 9:00 a.m. and we'll just be waiting here to see what you do."

• 9:09Josh Clark?

  That's pretty nice. At 9:00 a.m., you can get up early, you could exercise, eat breakfast.

• 9:14Speaker 02

  You've got plenty of time.

• 9:15Josh Clark?

  Yeah. So Bargas was like, "I don't think you're gonna do that." He decided he was gonna call the British's bluff, that they would, they wouldn't fire on their own protectorate. So he brought out his own heavy artillery guns. I think the previous Sultan had actually developed a bit of a, a personal fighting force, so those people showed up. There were thousands of defenders, I saw 1,000. I'm not 100% certain, but there were a bunch of Zanzibari defenders around the palace by 8:00 a.m. on the day that Bargas was supposed to leave.

• 9:50Speaker 02

  That's right. And he told the British consul, Basil Cave, "I'm not leaving." And Basil said, well, he said, "We have no intention of hauling down our flag and we know, do not believe you will fire upon us." And Basil Cave, in the British, most British way possible, said, "Hmm, we'd prefer not to attack, but unless you do as you're told, we shall certainly do so."

• 10:12Josh Clark?

  Very nice. You sound like, again, every time you do a British accent, you sound like Hank Azaria in "Mystery Men."

• 10:19Speaker 02

  Oh, I love it. I'll take it every time.

• 10:21Josh Clark?

  The Blue Rajah.

• 10:22Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 10:23Josh Clark?

  So 9:00 a.m. happened, and just very promptly, the British started pounding the Sultan's palace to dust. They made good on their promise and they just started firing on it from three warships.

• 10:36Speaker 02

  And 38 minutes, by, by most accounts, is how long that took to completely just, I don't think that they destroyed the palace, but they put a herding on it. Two minutes into this, Bargas literally went out the back door and fled to the German consulate and was like, "Please help."

• 10:54Josh Clark?

  Yeah, he did. And the Germans were like, "Okay, well, we'll take care of you." And they smuggled him to Tanzania, or what's now Tanzania. And I guess he lived out his days there. Did you see anything about him after that?

• 11:08Speaker 02

  Uh, I looked into it, but I don't remember it all. And I was like, why am I bothering with all of this if we're not going to talk about it?

• 11:16Josh Clark?

  Right.

• 11:17Speaker 02

  Sorry.

• 11:17Josh Clark?

  The thing is, one of the other remarkable aspects of this very, very short, less than an hour war was just how lopsided the casualties were.

• 11:26Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 11:27Josh Clark?

  So, I mean, it's, it's interesting to talk about now, but 500 Zanzibarries lost their lives.

• 11:33Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 11:33Josh Clark?

  In less than an hour.

• 11:36Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think they just rained down artillery on them and like 500 people died very, very quickly. Uh, only one British sailor was wounded even, I think. No one died on their side.

• 11:46Josh Clark?

  He probably slipped on the deck of a warship and like impaled his thigh on his sword.

• 11:52Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 11:52Josh Clark?

  That's what I'm guessing happened.

• 11:53Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 11:54Josh Clark?

  Although I did see British Marines storm the island, so it probably actually happened there.

• 11:58Speaker 02

  Yeah. Uh, after this though, they, uh, cause Bargon was gone. Uh, they said, all right, well now we're going to install our own new Sultan that we wanted to do begin with, that will be sympathetic to our needs and basically do what we say.

• 12:13Josh Clark?

  Yes. So there was a, this is a big deal, especially at the time, because it basically showed the other nations of East Africa, like dude, these guys will mess you up. They're not, they're not messing around. They want our, they want our land. They want our nations. Um, and that, like I said, really kind of was a flashpoint for the scramble for Africa. Because I think also other European powers were like, oh man, the Brits are going to do that. They're going to take over the entire continent. We better get there as soon as possible.

• 12:42Speaker 02

  Yeah. Uh, and then like you mentioned, um, the 1960s was when a lot of this started unwinding itself and Zanzibar was, uh, was one of them under British control until 10 of December, 1963. And then they became a fully sovereign state and a member of the Commonwealth of Nations. So good for them.

• 13:01Josh Clark?

  Yeah. And the sovereign state thing only lasted a short time because very quickly they merged with, we kept saying what's now Tanzania.

• 13:09Speaker 02

  Right.

• 13:09Josh Clark?

  At the time it was Tenganyika and they merged with, with Zanzibar to into Tanzania.

• 13:18Josh Clark?

  Isn't that neat?

• 13:19Speaker 02

  That's right. That's super neat.

• 13:20Josh Clark?

  It's a great amalgamation of names.

• 13:22Speaker 02

  Yeah, I love it. And just learning more and more about African history, something I did not learn much growing up, has been a cool part of the show, and I can't wait to learn more.

• 13:30Josh Clark?

  Agreed. I think short stuff is out.

• 13:36Speaker 06

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