Pemba

Pemba was an island in the Zanzibar Archipelago, with a stone city on the Ras Mkumbuu peninsula. The city has been plausibly, though not certainly, identified with Qanbalu, a Muslim port described by al-Masudi around 900.

In the fifteenth century Pemba was a vassal of Kilwa. Portuguese rule from about 1503 brought decline to the old towns, and Ras Mkumbuu was abandoned during the sixteenth century. Settlements revived after the Omani conquest of 1698; from the late eighteenth century Pemba increasingly turned to plantation agriculture, exporting sugar and later cloves under Zanzibari overlords.