Urban blight at the Michenzani housing project, Zanzibar town, Tanzania

Ng'ambo (literally, "The Other Side"; sometimes also referred to as the "New City") is one of the two main parts comprising

Zanzibar City Zanzibar City or Mjini District, often simply referred to as Zanzibar (''Wilaya ya Zanzibar Mjini'' or ''Jiji la Zanzibar'' in Swahili language, Swahili) is one of two administrative districts of Mjini Magharibi Region in Tanzania. The district co ...

, the capital of

Zanzibar Zanzibar (; ; ) is an insular semi-autonomous province which united with Tanganyika in 1964 to form the United Republic of Tanzania. It is an archipelago in the Indian Ocean, off the coast of the mainland, and consists of many small islands ...

, the other being the historical

Stone Town Stonetown of Zanzibar ( ar, مدينة زنجبار الحجرية), also known as Mji Mkongwe ( Swahili for "old town"), is the old part of Zanzibar City, the main city of Zanzibar, in Tanzania. The newer portion of the city is known as Ng'ambo ...

. Ng'ambo is much larger and more modern than Stone Town, with office buildings and large apartment blocks, as well as

slum A slum is a highly populated urban residential area consisting of densely packed housing units of weak build quality and often associated with poverty. The infrastructure in slums is often deteriorated or incomplete, and they are primarily inh ...

areas.Zanzibar Town
/ref>Michael Pacione, ''Applied Geography: Principles and Practice'', p. 339: "Colonial Heritage Problems in Stone Town, Zanzibar" Ng'ambo and Stone Town are divided by Creek Road.

History

Until the mid 19th Century, Ng'ambo was a small community of African slaves. It then began to grow, and by 1895 it comprised 15 wards and was home to 15,000 people. By 1922 its population was twice that of nearby

, and by the time of independence from Britain in 1964 it housed 80,000 people. After the

Zanzibar Revolution The Zanzibar Revolution () occurred in January 1964 and led to the overthrow of the Sultan of Zanzibar and his mainly Arab government by local Africans. Zanzibar was an ethnically diverse state consisting of a number of islands off the east co ...

, Ng'ambo was the site of the "New Zanzibar Project", a 1968 urban redevelopment scheme started by the revolutionary government. This scheme was funded, in part, by the German Democratic Republic. It was to be the start of a project to provide the entire population of Zanzibar with western-style apartments, located in ten new towns. The 1968 plan called for 9,992 apartments to be built in the Soviet-style on land created by the demolition of existing homes. A prominent example of apartment blocks built with the GDR aid in Ng'ambo is found in the

Michenzani Michenzani is a large neighbourhood of Ng'ambo, the more modern part of Zanzibar City in Tanzania. It is located just across Creek Road, that separates the historical part of the city, Stone Town (to the west) and Ng'ambo (to the east). The pla ...

neighbourhood. The new apartments were often reserved for ASP party members or doled out as favours and so many of those whose homes had been demolished were left without a place to live. The small apartments were unpopular with Zanzibaris used to large families and construction stopped after just 1,102 apartments were built; the project was viewed as a political failure, although they have seen a resurgence in use as

starter home A starter home or starter house is a house that is usually the first which a person or family can afford to purchase, often using a combination of savings and mortgage financing. In the real estate industry the term commonly denotes small one- or tw ...

References

Bibliography

* ''Ng'ambo Atlas. Historic urban landscape of Zanzibar town's "other side"''. Ed. by Antoni Folkers & Iga Perzyna. Department of Rural and Urban Planning, Zanzibar & African Architecture Matters. LM Publishers, 2019.
Digital edition
*. *. Zanzibar City Populated places in Zanzibar Geography of Mjini Magharibi Region {{Zanzibar-geo-stub