After the Omani Sultan of Zanzibar was overthrown during the Zanzibar revolution of 1964, many Swahili speaking Arab communities returned to Oman's capitol city of Muscat to start new lives. This paper examines the historical experiences of these communities as they became reintegrated into Omani society. It asks the overarching question: "What is the impact of Oman's imperial history in Zanzibar on Oman's post-colonial national identity?" Many of the families involved in this study lived East Africa for generations, and upon returning to the Muscat had to choose between possible social and economic marginalization or having to rearticulate their cultural, linguistic, and even racial identities. By focusing on expatriated communities, forced to articulate their own beliefs before the wider public, this study offers key insights into the process of post-colonial identity formation in the Arabian Gulf region. While much has been written in recent years about the history of post-revolution Zanzibar, there is a lack of information available about the impact of these events on the expatriated Omani communities of Zanzibar. In addition, there is almost no scholarly attention paid to the influence of East African culture on the Arabian Gulf peoples, despite the important historical relationship between these two import regions of the Indian Ocean economic system. Much of the research for this paper is based on interviews gathered during the author's time in Oman in 2006-7 living among the Swahili speaking families of Muscat. In addition, this paper uses empirical data from Omani and East African government sources. As Oman was both a colonial power and a colonized territory, the legacy of imperialism in this region of the Arabian Peninsula is particularly complex. This study sheds light on the impact of these imperial histories on the people of modern Oman.