This article maps four different types of cross-cultural experience in contemporary historical novels about colonial Africa (colonialist, exoticist, intercultural, and transcultural) before focusing on H. C. Buch's Sansibar Blues (2008) as a case study in German postcolonial memory and the literary use of transcultural voices. Together with Ilija Trojanow's Der Weltensammler (2006), Sansibar Blues marks a new departure in the history of writing cross-cultural experience and representing the 'Other', but, unlike Trojanow, Buch uses partially authentic non-European voices that draw on the autobiographies of two prominent nineteenth-century figures in the linked histories of Zanzibar and Germany: Emily Ruete alias Princess Sayyida Salme of Oman and Zanzibar, and the ivory dealer Tippu Tip alias Hamed bin Mohammed. The article includes a detailed analysis of Buch's adaptation of these sources.