This article takes a single moment-a court case that took place in Zanzibar in 1910 -and uses it to explore the legal imaginaries that circulated around the Western Indian Ocean at the height of British imperialism. It stitches together the actions of litigants, the utterances of qadis, and the proclamations of jurists, reading them alongside the silences in the legal material itself to bring to life a world of law, mobility, and imagination. More broadly, it suggests that through the exploration of parallel but never fully intersecting legal encounters in South Arabia and East Africa that emerged from a single moment, historians might use micro-level discourses and actions to make claims about macro-level phenomena.