Abstract Histories, memories, and legacies of slavery in Zanzibar have been rendered into words and images in autobiographies, novels, and films. In the 18th and 19th centuries, Zanzibar served as the main slave trading point in East Africa for the Indian Ocean slave trade, and its economy flourished on a slave-based plantation system. Memoirs by British missionaries and former slave owners from Zanzibar bear witness to the relational complexities of enslavement and the embodied realities of manumission, patronage, and (im)mobility. Postcolonial fiction writers from Zanzibar and the Sultanate of Oman have challenged the imposed silences around racialized and gendered violence in Zanzibar and Oman, and confronted the racism and Islamophobia inherent to the diasporic experience of Zanzibaris in Europe. In addition to the curation of former spaces related to slavery in Zanzibar, like the Slave Market, for tourist consumption, film has also emerged as a contested vehicle for representing Zanzibar’s slave past and breaking the silence on this still taboo topic. In the absence of a coherent narrative or archive of Zanzibar slavery past and modern revolutionary present, memories of slavery, sexual labor, and resistance embedded in memoirs, fiction, and film reveal the contested imaginaries of ethno-racial-cultural-national-religious identities, the imperial underpinnings of abolition, and the dissociative dissonance of the diaspora in the wake of Zanzibar’s revolutionary rupture.