I was only seven in a strange land – where were my parents?

Leila Sharp was one of a band of children brought to Britain by the last Sultan of Zanzibar after a coup d'etat in 1964. For four decades she wondered what had happened to her family

Patrick Barkham
The Guardian

Life in exile: Leila Sharp didn't see her family for more than 40 years. Photograph: Martin Godwin for the Guardian

In 1964, the Sultan of Zanzibar sought refuge in Britain after a bloody uprising in the newly independent nation. His dramatic arrival with his family and entourage made front-page news. In one picture, a Red Cross helper was pictured wrapping a little girl in a blanket. The child was Leila Sharp. Teetering on the aeroplane steps after touching down in Manchester, the bewildered seven-year-old, who had lost all her family and was alone in a foreign land, believed she was dead. "The ground was all glittery with frost and the airport lights shining on it. I thought, this is it – we've all died and gone to heaven," she says.

It is one of a series of vivid early memories that have haunted Leila, 55, for most of her life. Growing up in children's homes in Kent, and told by the authorities that her parents were dead, Leila refused to believe that she was an orphan. It was not until 43 years later, when she finally dared to return to Africa to search for answers that Leila could make sense of her memories and discover the fate of her family – and why she was taken across the world with the sultan.


Leila, a teaching assistant, has been married to Nick, a bus driver, for 34 years. They have four children and still live on the Kent coast, where Leila was sent to a children's home, days after arriving with Sayyid Sir Jamshid bin Abdullah Al Said, the 11th and last Sultan of Zanzibar.

Her earliest memories are of life by the sea. Like the most famous escapee from Zanzibar, Freddie Mercury, Leila grew up in the cosmopolitan port of Stone Town on the Zanzibar archipelago, then a British colony. Her father and uncle were coffee sellers. "I used to sit on the window sill waiting for my dad to come home. We lived close to the harbour and as soon as I saw him I would bolt out to meet him. Wherever he went, I would go," she says. "I was always running. People would say, 'There goes Salum's daughter'".

Another early memory is of sitting on her mother's lap. "She was crying and I was crying," she says. For reasons Leila did not understand, her parents were separating. In a traditional Muslim family, the men made the decisions and her mother was to be sent away; her father was to return to Yemen, his home country.

Soon after that, Leila's uncle told her she was going to a party at the sultan's palace. All she knew about the sultan was that her father did not care for him, and would make a spitting motion at the mention of his name. Leila sat still to have her hair plaited; she wore a white dress and shiny red shoes. "I skipped all the way to the palace, holding my uncle's hand," she says.

But there was no party and Leila was left at the palace. "When I realised my uncle wasn't coming to collect me I sat on the floor in the hallway and screamed and screamed. No one could stop me so the sultan locked me in the cupboard to calm me down," she says.

Leila joined a small number of Muslim children who were looked after by the sultan and his household. At times she held a spitoon for the sultana, an elderly lady who had a terrible cough. The little girl would then curl up to sleep on a fluffy carpet in the sultana's room. Although only six, she rebelled in every way she could, sliding down the banisters and trying to run away.

The elderly sultan became ill and went to hospital. When he returned, one of his legs had been amputated and a funeral was held for the limb. Soon afterwards, the old sultan died, and another funeral was held to reunite his body with his leg. The young sultan succeeded his father in July 1963 and had to oversee the tricky transition from British protectorate to independent nation. He also had problems closer to home. Leila remembers her father returning to get her. "I remember him bashing the door down, yelling his head off: 'Give me my daughter! I'll kill you!' I was kicking the door from the inside while my father was drumming the door from the outside."

Again, Leila was put in the cupboard. This time, she screamed so much that the sultan took her to the living room. "He had a knife in his hand. He said, 'Leila, if you don't stop screaming, I'll cut your tongue out.' I called his bluff and poked my tongue out. I was such a stroppy moo. When he put the knife down I did what my father did and made a spitting motion."

It was only when she was walked by the sultan to the barking, drooling guard dogs that Leila was frightened into stopping her screams. She had no idea why she was forbidden to see her father. That would only become clear decades later.

Zanzibar celebrated its independence in December 1963, and Leila met the soldiers who accompanied the Duke of Edinburgh to the palace. She had never seen white people before and they scared her. A month later, the new country was convulsed by revolution as the African majority seized power from the Arab minority. Anyone who looked Arabic was in danger of being killed. Leila remembers a fire bell, and rounds of machine-gun fire that sounded like drums. "Everyone was walking in the same direction and I got caught up with the flow."

The sultan and his entourage, including Leila, fled by boat and then chartered a plane from Dar es Salaam in Tanzania and flew to Britain. Unable to land in London due to thick fog, they were diverted to Manchester.

The Guardian reported the Sultan's arrival at St Pancras station as "perhaps a last moment of glory in his public career". There also were, the report continued, "familiar attendants of disaster – the Red Cross ladies with bundles of old clothes for 'kitting out' cold, impoverished refugees, and the Zanzibar ambassador to Egypt, who had flown to London to meet the sultan and was distributing copies of a petition he had sent to the United Nations Commission on Human Rights, asking for 'immediate interference to stop the widespread massacres in Zanzibar'."

Leila realised she was not dead – "It's not often that people mistake Manchester for heaven," says Nick, her husband, smiling – and was sent to the children's home in Kent, with five other children from the sultan's household. "There are no immediate plans for the sultan or his family to visit the group," noted a local paper.

Leila did not realise it until much later but the sultan, who settled in Portsmouth, felt a keen obligation to care for her and tried to fulfil it.

Despite being a strict Muslim, Leila was given pork to eat at the children's home and wasn't allowed to leave the table until she had finished it. "I cried and cried into my plate. In the end, I had to eat it. That night I couldn't sleep. I thought, I've sinned and I'm going to hell. My teeth were rattling all through the night with the fear."

Later, however, Leila converted to Christianity and when the sultan visited her as a teenager and offered to look after her, she did "a very nasty thing". She still felt furious, believing he had taken her from her family, and so she cooked a bacon sandwich in front of him. "I thought he wouldn't want to know me because I would be unclean," she says.

Leila learned English quickly but in Kent in the 60s stuck out. "Everybody wanted to be my friend. They used to fight over me. I was the teacher's pet and I was so cheeky, I would do anything to try to stop them favouring me."

She soon forgot Swahili and Arabic but never her family. Aged 10, she was put up for adoption. "I refused to be adopted because I said, 'I know my parents are alive – I want to find them.'"

The authorities said her parents were dead. Leila explained that they had left Zanzibar before the revolution. No one believed her and no officials ever helped her to look for them.

Leila thought about returning to Zanzibar and trying to track down her mother, but was afraid of being persecuted for having fled with the sultan; and she was terrified of being rejected by her parents. She still did not know why she had been taken to the palace.

As a teenager, Leila would travel to London to visit the three older girls from Zanzibar who had been sent to the same children's home. These girls were related to each other and all had contact with their families. That made Leila feel more alone than ever and she remembers weeping all the way home on the coach from Victoria. On one visit, she went to the bathroom to cry. When she came out, her friend's husband sensed she was upset and promised that when he next visited Zanzibar he would find her family. He later left a photograph of Leila at the post office in Stone Town, where a friend of Leila's mother saw it. Finally, Leila received a letter from her mother.

She replied eagerly but was disheartened when her mother's letters asked for money. Later, she learned that the person her mother got to write the letters in English had slipped in demands for money. On another occasion, Leila managed to speak to her mother on the phone. "She said 'Nakupenda sana' [I love you very much] in Swahili. I understood exactly what she was saying. It was just lovely to hear her voice, it was so soft and gentle."

But then Leila lost touch with her mother: letters went unanswered and, it turned out, crossed in the post. Meanwhile, her father had remarried in Yemen. Leila received a brief letter in Arabic, and wrote back. He then sent a copy of her birth certificate, which she had never seen. In one long letter she told him about her life and that she had become a Christian. "I felt I had to honour him and tell him. He wrote back to me giving me his blessing."

That was the last she heard from her father before he died. As she found out more, Leila discovered she had a younger brother in the United States, working as a truck driver in Kansas. He regularly visited their aunts and cousins in Kenya and so, tentatively, Leila began to plan a trip with her eldest daughter, Natalie, for her 50th birthday, hoping to be reuinted with her mother at last. Six months before the trip, her cousin, Maimuna, wrote to tell Leila that her mother had died three years before. She went to Mombasa with Natalie anyway. After 43 years, she wanted answers, to fill in the blanks. Most of all, she wanted to know why she had been sent to the palace.

Having feared rejection, when she met her aunts and cousins she was overwhelmed by a new sense of how central she had remained to her mother's life. "There is no day we'll be with your mother and she'll stop talking about you," Maimuna had written. Leila discovered that her mother always remembered her birthday, and her cousins knew all about her.

It was only on her second trip back to Zanzibar that Leila found out why she had been left at the palace. An old friend of her uncle's explained that her father had had a breakdown when the marriage ended, and her uncle agreed to look after her. He told the sultan her father had gone "crazy" and that the sultan would have to look after her. This, and the fact that Leila came from the same tribe as the sultan, explained the ruler's sense of obligation towards the coffee seller's daughter. This, Leila understands now, was why the sultan had held on to the screaming girl who kept running away, plucked her away from the bloody uprising and brought her to a strange country.

Leila speaks to her brother in Kansas almost daily on the internet. The person she has not made contact with since her teens is the sultan. "I'm not angry with him at all, now that I know the circumstances. All the anger that was in me – I never knew the truth of anything," she says.

For years, the sultan has lived quietly in Portsmouth. He is in his 80s now. Would she ever agree to see him again? Leila smiles. "I would love to meet him again," she says.

Source: The Guardian of UK