Siti Binti Saad (1880 – 1950) was born in Zanzibar to a poor family and became one of the first to sing taarab music in Swahili instead of Arabic, and perhaps the first women to sing taarab in public performance. She was also the first East African woman to record an album when Gramophone brought her to Bombay in 1930, one of the major events in the international popularization of taarab music. Her songs frequently protested Zanzibar's corrupt criminal justice system, often from a proto-feminist perspective.