CONTENTSINTRODUCTION: The Swahili 1

PART 1: EARLY HISTORY 4

The Land of Punt 4The Periplus of the Erythraean Sea 5Azania and Rome 6

PART 2: THE MEDIEVAL SWAHILI CIVILIZATION 8

Gede and James Kirkman 8The First Swahili Towns 9The Foundation Tales 10Chinese and Arabic descriptions of the coast 12The Rise of Islam 14Al Idrisi 15Economic Boom 16Ibn Battuta 18The Golden Age 20

PART 3: THE PORTUGUESE 22

European Exploration and Vasco da Gama 22Portuguese Conquest of the East African Coast 25The Decline of Portuguese Control 33

PART 4: THE OMANI 37

Omani Rule and the Mazrui 37Seyyid Said 39Owen's Protectorate 40The Zanzibar Sultanate 42Suppression of the Slave Trade 47The Scramble for East Africa 50Swahili Resistance 51

PART 5: THE TWENTIETH CENTURY 55

Colonial Rule 55Independence 59

EPILOGUE 61

FURTHER READING 63

INTRODUCTION

Living along the narrow coastal strip where the African continent meets the Indian Ocean, the Swahili

people are a result of the coming together of two distinct cultures: African Bantu and Middle Eastern Arab. It is

auniqueculture. For centuries,whilemostAfricanpeople followedanomadic lifestyle, theSwahili haddeveloped

a thriving urban civilization that was engaged inmaritime trade on an intercontinental scale, used one of Africa's

firstwritten languages, enjoyeda sophisticated, deeply religious culturebasedarounda stringof stone townsand

whose leaders lived in palaces inlaid with gold, silver and ivory. Here was one of Africa's oldest and greatest

civilisations.

The development of the Swahili civilization is inextricably linked with trade. The Swahili, and the people

who lived here before them, have been engaged in overseas trade for the last threemillennia, providing a range

of luxury goods unsurpassed anywhere in the world. The northern parts of the coast, in modem Somalia, had a

limitless supply of spices, such as cinnamon, and aromatic gums like frankincense andmyrrh. Further south could

be bought goods harvested from wild animals such as ivory, rhinoceros horn, tortoiseshell and leopardskin.

Ambergris, a liquid found in the intestinesofwhales,was valuedhighlybyperfumemakers. Slaves, too, havebeen

exported for centuries to the countries of the Middle East and beyond. Gold, brought up from the mines of

Zimbabwe for export from the towns on the southern parts of the coast such as Sofala, Mozambique and Kilwa.

And eventually, often via themarkets of Egypt, the Levant, Arabia, Persia and India, these goods found their way

to wealthy courts as far apart as England and China. The East African coast was an integral part of a trading zone

of near-­‐global proportions.

Stretching along 3000 miles of coastline from Somalia in the north to Mozambique in the south and

encompassing offshore islands as distant as the Comoros Islands, the East African coast has been blessed with a

combination of geographical gifts that have made the region ideal for settlement, navigation and commercial

exploitation. The coast is protected by an almost unbroken line of coral reef, keepingmuch of the force of ocean

waves and currents at bay, making navigation behind the reefs much easier and providing sheltered beaches for

offloading cargo. The coral itselfmade an excellent building tool. In places, rivers flowing from the distant African

highlands break out into the ocean, forming deep inletswhich provided excellent natural harbours and a base for

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larger towns,whileoffshore islands, someclose to themainland,others furtheroffshore, providedgoodharbours

and a degree of protection from marauding tribes from the interior.

The East African coast begins at the tip of the Horn of Africa, the peninsula jutting out at the end of the

Red Sea, a point known as Cape Guardafui. The coastline around and to the south of the Horn is a dry area with

few natural harbours where sand dunes extend far inland, but in the hinterland beyond is a land that was, from

ancient times, so rich in spices and aromatic gums that it was also known as the Cape of Spices or the Cape of

Cinnamon. Waves of immigrants from nearby Arabia and settlement by inland tribes has altered the population

to such an extent that it cannot today be called part of the Swahili world, but it is where our story begins.

Thespartan,northernSomali coasteventuallybreaks into themore lushBenadir coast,alongwhichtowns

likeWarsheikh,Mogadishu,Merca, BravaandKismayuare located. Further south, a stringof thin islands sits close

offshore and, just beyond the frontier with modern Kenya, lies the Lamu Archipelago, three small, sandy islands

whose creeks act as beds for huge crops of mangrove trees, whose wood was used as a valuable construction

material for thousands of years. Here, themainland is still sandy, but it soon gives way to amore lush and fertile

coastal plain where agriculture thrives and through which the Tana and Sabaki Rivers flow out into a great bay,

watched over by the town of Malindi, whose harbour water is dyed red by the soil carried to the ocean from far

inland. After another fertile stretch of deeply forested land lies Kilifi, looking out over a grandiose bay of brilliant

blue and further south, the island of Mombasa, nestling between the two arms of themainland coastline. South

ofMombasa liesa longstretchof sandybeach,popularamongst tourists todayandhometoanumberof scattered

settlements all thewayup to theborderwith Tanzania. Thenorthern Tanzanian coast is home to thebustling port

of Dar es Salaam, Tanzania's former capital and still an important commercial centre. The great islands of the

Swahili coast lieoff thecoastofTanzania includingPemba,andthequeenof themall, Zanzibar.Mafia Islandstands

close to the delta formed by the outpouring of the Rufiji River and further south lies Kilwa. A string of small

settlements line the fertile coast that stretches intoMozambique,whereanumberof importantportsare located,

including Quelimane, Maputo and, lying just south of the point at which the Great Rift Valley breaks out into the

ocean, Sofala, while 300 kilometres offshore lie the Comoros Islands. Beyond lies the giant island ofMadagascar

and the coast of South Africa, beginning with the province of Natal.

Until the twentieth century, the East African coast looked out to the Indian Ocean and theworld beyond

for its raison d’être. Travelling by water used to be, the world over, the preferred method of travel and the East

African coast was no exception. Here, the people of the Indian Ocean invented a sewn boat with triangular sails,

the dhow. Able to navigate both deepoceans and shallow coastalwaters, it was ideally suited to conditions in the

Indian Ocean. The journey across the ocean wasmade possible by a hugely helpful weather condition, monsoon

winds that blew away from East Africa for one part of the year, before turning 180 degrees and blowing back the

other way. These winds have been blowing with metronomic regularity for aeons, carrying dhows laden with

cargo. From October to April, the wind blows from the northeast. Known to the Swahili as the kazkazi, it carried

dhows from India, Persia and Arabia to the East African coast, carrying goods to sell in exchange for East Africa's

luxuries. Then the wind turns, and for the rest of the year the northwest monsoon blows. Known as the kuzi, it

carried dhows away from East Africa, ladenwith gold, ivory, and all the other produce of the land. Before the age

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of steam, this force was the power that drove trade around the Indian Oceanworld andwithout it, the story that

follows would not have been possible.

Only with the construction of railways and roads at the end of the nineteenth century from the coast to

thenew townsof the interior suchasNairobi, did the coast start to lookmore to theAfricanhinterland. Roads and

railways overcame someof thedifficulties of travelling overland, a journeypreviouslymadealmost impossible by

an uncompromising expanse of arid desert that cut the coastal plains off from the fertile highlands.

So here it is then. A story brimming with pioneers, pirates, adventurers and entrepreneurs, horrors,

tragedies and comedies, scandal and political intrigue, international commerce, lost cities, invasion, rebellion,

terrorism and reconstruction, an African success story that provides us, not onlywith a history of the past, but an

understanding of the present and a hope for the future.

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PART 1

EARLY HISTORY

The Land of PuntDeep inside the Temple of Queen Hatsheput at Thebes on the banks of the River Nile is a relief depicting

an Egyptian expedition to the 'Land of Punt', an ancient land thought to lie in the Horn of Africa in modern-­‐day

Somalia. The expedition of five ships was sent out to collect incense trees andmyrrh in response to the prophecy

of an oracle. The relief itself is around 3500 years old, and mentions that the expedition was the first Egyptian

voyage to the Land of Punt for five hundred years, meaning Egyptians were going there to trade at least as long

ago as 2000BC. While the voyage in those days may rarely have been made by Egyptians, it is likely that traders

from south-­‐western Arabia made regular trips across the Red Sea to barter for the luxury goods of Punt, goods

that included spices and aromatic gum resins such as frankincense andmyrrh; from themarkets of Arabia, these

goods would then have exported to the wealthy courts of Arabia, Egypt and beyond.

Oneof themost famous ancient customers for East Africa's producewould have beenKing Solomon, one

of ancient Israel's first kings, aman famed for his wisdom andwealth, who ruled around the year 1000BC. During

his reignhewasvisitedby theQueenofSheba,whoseempire includedsouth-­‐westernArabiaandtheAfricancoast

on the other side of the Red Sea. Quite how far south her coastal empire stretched is open to debate -­‐ some think

it reached as far as modern-­‐day Mozambique -­‐ but a story, told in the Biblical Book of Kings, tells that in return

for receiving hiswisdom, theQueenof Shebaprovided Solomonwith hugequantities of spices, gold andprecious

stones, luxury goods found along the East African coast. The Solomon and Sheba relationship didn't end there:

every threeyearsafterher first visit, Solomonsent ships togathergold, silver, sandalwood,precious stones, ivory,

apes and peacocks from Ophir, a market town probably within Sheba and thought by some to be modern-­‐day

Sofala inMozambique. TheBible says that Solomon importeda colossal 23 tonsof gold a year,muchofwhichpaid

for the construction of his Temple in Jerusalem, with the rest lavished upon his magnificent court: King Solomon

is said to have had made shields hammered from gold and to have sat upon an ivory throne, while his courtiers

drank fromgolden goblets. Thiswas one seriously rich king, and, almost certainly, these products came fromEast

Africa.

The Periplus of the Erythraean SeaThese early trading stories are sketchy and laced with legend, but there can be little doubt that by the

second century AD, a well-­‐organised trading system, served by coastal settlements, had been established along

the coast of East Africa. We know this because of a guide book, by far the most important written source for the

coast that survives from ancient times, called The Periplus of the Erythraean Sea. A Periplus is a kind of ancient

guide book and the Erythraean Sea was the name given by ancient Greeks and Romans to the Indian Ocean. This

Guide Book to the IndianOcean, written around 40BCby aGreekmerchant, described a journey from theRed Sea

south along the East African coast. A century later, a Greek from Alexandria in Egypt called Claudius Ptolemy,

wrote one of the greatest ancient works on geography, which included information about the East African coast,

giving us a text with which to compare and supplement the Periplus. Together, these two texts give us a

fascinating, all-­‐too-­‐brief glimpse into life at the coast in the first half of the second century AD.

Both the Periplus and Ptolemy referred to the East African coast using the ancient Greek name for the

region, Azania. They named several settlements but these cannot be easily identified with any towns today. We

cannot even be sure if they were permanent settlements becausemany of themmay well have been temporary

trading bases, growing as traders arrived with the kazkazi, dying once the kuzi began to take traders home.

Themost important town inAzaniawasRhapta, "the lastmainlandemporiumofAzania" according to the

Periplus, a town named after the small sewn boats used there, where a large amount of ivory and tortoiseshell

couldbe found.Rhapta is alsomentionedbyPtolemy,whogaveRhapta thegrandiose titleofmetropolis, and says

it was "set back a little from the sea" near a river that flowed out into a bay which took three days and nights to

cross.

Since the first English publication of the Periplus in 1912, historians and archaeologists have speculated

and searched in vain as to the precise location of Rhapta. The most likely location would have been in the delta

formed by the outpouring of the Rufiji River opposite Mafia Island. Mark Horton has calculated, using the

information about sailing days contained in the Periplus that Rhaptawas in the vicinity ofmodern-­‐day Bagomoyo

in northern Tanzania, but others have suggested it was as far north as the coast opposite the Lamu Archipelago

or somewhere in the delta of the Tana River: UngamaBay,with its headland at Kipini, justwest ofwhich flows the

Tana River, bears a striking resemblance to Ptolemy's description: "This bay begins with the market town called

Toniki; andbeside thepromontory is the river Rhapton and themetropolis of the samename set back a little from

the sea."

Essina, Sarapion, and Toniki are towns mentioned by Ptolemy that lie along the coast, but again, their

location is unclear. The Periplus also mentioned Sarapion, a town called Nikon, an island called Diorux and the

Pyralaae Islands, which are generally thought to be the islands of the Lamu Archipelago. But all of these are just