evidence: In August 1885 Otto von Bismarck sent five German warships to Zanzibar to ask then Sultan, Sayyid Barghash, to "salimu amri", acknowledge German naval military might and cede power to Kaiser (Emperor) Wilhelm I. Britain intervened on behalf of the poor guy and, working together with Germany and France, called the bluff of Omani claims to the hinterland, which the sultan was now forced to give up to the benefit of the British and Germans who then split it up between themselves along latitude 1° S to Mt. Kilimanjaro and on to Lake Nam Lolwe (Victoria). This left for the Oman sultan Zanzibar and his meager ten-mile holding agreed upon in the mid-1880s and that the Germans were all too happy to lease. What this history tells us is that the strip and interior hinterland were claimed by the Sultan as imperial counter-European bluff. With regard to the coastal strip, the claim was much more credible as it was by virtue of its occupation by the Sultan’s Arab, Swahili and African groups that practiced Islam.