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Princess Salme, daughter of Sa‘id ibn Sultan, ruler of Oman and Zanzibar, was born in Zanzibar on August 30, 1844. In 1866 she fled to Aden where she was baptized with the Christian name Emily and where she married the German merchant Rudolph Heinrich Ruete. In Hamburg three children were born. Her husband died in 1870, and after that she lived in several cities in Germany. In 1885 and again in 1888 she went to Zanzibar. Between 1889 and 1914 she lived in Jaffa and Beirut, and afterwards again in Germany. She died in Jena in 1924. The present work contains a short biography of Princess Salme/Emily Ruete and of her son Rudolph Said-Ruete, a new English translation of her Memoirs, and an English version of her other writings, unpublished so far: Letters Home, Sequels to the Memoirs and Syrian Customs and Usages.
Emily Ruete was born in 1840 as Princess Sayyida of Zanzibar. Set against a backdrop of political intrigue in the great age of European colonialism, this memoir offers a portrait of 19th-century Arab and African life, not only in the palace, but in the city and plantations as well.
Emily Ruete was born in Zanzibar (in modern day Tanzania) as Sayyida Salme, Princess of Zanzibar and Oman. She was the youngest of the 36 children of Sayyid Said bin Sultan Al-Busaid, Sultan of Zanzibar and Oman. Her extraordinary life story is the subject of Memoirs of an Arabian Princess from Zanzibar.
Memoirs of An Arabian Princess: An Autobiography is the memoirs of Emily Ruete (born Sayyida Salme) , princess of Zanzibar and Oman. It is believed to be the first autobiography of an Arab woman.
This unique book is the only autobiography written by a Princess of Zanzibar in the 19th century. Emily Ruete was born Sayyida, Princess of Zanzibar, in 1844. Zanzibar was then ruled by Omani Arabs and had grown rich from the slave trade and ivory from continental Africa and spices from the island of Zanzibar. They had spread their influence and swahili language as far west as Kisangani on the Congo river. It was a time of european traders and missionaries, harbingers of colonization and crusades against the slave trade. The Princess eloped with a German trader and moved to Germany, having been rejected by her family in Zanzibar. In this book, which she wrote to leave a record of her history for her children, she describes life in the Zanzibar royal palace and plantations, life in the harem, traditions, palace intrigues and overthrows, slaves, the status of women etc. This is a great book for anyone interested in Zanzibar or the history of Eastern Africa.
IT WAS at Bet il Mtoni, our oldest palace in the island of Zanzibar, that I first saw the light of day, and I remained there until I reached my seventh year. Bet il Mtoni is charmingly situated on the seashore, at a distance of about five miles from the town of Zanzibar, in a grove of magnificent cocoanut palms, mango trees, and other tropical giants.
This 19th-century autobiography offers a rare inside look at the society surrounding a sultan's palace. A real-life princess in exile recalls her vanished world of harems, slave trading, and court intrigues.
A dramatic account of the slave trade in the early 19th century Indian Ocean is presented through the stories of the Omani Sultan Said and his daughter, Princess Salme, offering insight into the Arabian Peninsula kingdom's lucrative growth and ties to America.