General Christopher Rigby, the best linguist in the British Army, was the British Consul in Zanzibar in 1860. In paragraph 33 of his Report on the Zanzibar Dominion of that year he wrote (probably with less than full full understanding):
"Since the death of the late Imam [Syud Said] numbers of sodomites have come from Muscat, and these degraded wretches openly walk about dressed in female attire, with veils on their faces".
- Christopher Palmer Rigby & Mrs Charles E. B. Russell. General Rigby, Zanzibar, and the Slave Trade, With Journals, Dispatches, Etc. New York: Negro Universities Press, 1970: 342.