Ng'ambo is one of the two main parts comprising Zanzibar City

Zanzibar City

Zanzibar City is the capital and largest city of Zanzibar, in Tanzania. It is located on the west coast of Unguja, the main island of the Zanzibar Archipelago, roughly opposite to Dar es Salaam across the Zanzibar Channel...

, the capital of Zanzibar

Zanzibar

Zanzibar ,Persian: زنگبار, from suffix bār: "coast" and Zangi: "bruin" ; is a semi-autonomous part of Tanzania, in East Africa. It comprises the Zanzibar Archipelago in the Indian Ocean, off the coast of the mainland, and consists of numerous small islands and two large ones: Unguja , and Pemba...

, the other being the historical Stone Town

Stone Town

Stone Town also known as Mji Mkongwe is the old part of Zanzibar City, the main city of Zanzibar, in Tanzania, as opposed to Ng'ambo . It is located on the western coast of Unguja, the main island of the Zanzibar Archipelago...

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

Slum

A slum, as defined by United Nations agency UN-HABITAT, is a run-down area of a city characterized by substandard housing and squalor and lacking in tenure security. According to the United Nations, the percentage of urban dwellers living in slums decreased from 47 percent to 37 percent in the...

 areas. 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 Stone Town

Stone Town

Stone Town also known as Mji Mkongwe is the old part of Zanzibar City, the main city of Zanzibar, in Tanzania, as opposed to Ng'ambo . It is located on the western coast of Unguja, the main island of the Zanzibar Archipelago...

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

After the Zanzibar Revolution

Zanzibar Revolution

The Zanzibar Revolution by local African revolutionaries in 1964 overthrew the Sultan of Zanzibar and his mainly Arab government. An ethnically diverse state consisting of a number of islands off the east coast of Tanganyika, Zanzibar had been granted independence by Britain in 1963...

, Ng'ambo was the site of the "New Zanzibar Project", a 1968 urban redevelopment scheme

Urban renewal

Urban renewal is a program of land redevelopment in areas of moderate to high density urban land use. Renewal has had both successes and failures. Its modern incarnation began in the late 19th century in developed nations and experienced an intense phase in the late 1940s – under the rubric of...

 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

Microdistrict

Microdistrict, or microraion , is a residential complex—a primary structural element of the residential area construction in the Soviet Union and in some post-Soviet and former Communist states...

 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

Michenzani is a large neighbourhood of Ng'ambo, the more modern part of Zanzibar City. It is located just across Creek Road, that separates the historical part of the city, Stone Town and Ng'ambo...

 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

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 two-bedroom houses, often older homes but sometimes...

s.