Swahili City-States of the East African Coast

2012 ◽  
Author(s):  
Thomas Spear
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Patterns ◽  
East African ◽  
East African Coast ◽  
Arab Immigrants ◽  
Rural Farmers ◽  
15Th Century ◽  
Local Practices ◽  
African Coast ◽  
Cultural Intermediaries ◽  
City States

Hundreds of Swahili towns and villages lie scattered along almost two thousand miles of the East African coast from Somali to Mozambique. While many Swahili are rural farmers and fishermen, others are cosmopolitan traders and craftspeople who reside in urban stone houses. Yet all are bound by a common language, culture, and Muslim religion that both Swahili and others have long seen as the product of Persian and Arab immigrants who came to trade and settled to create distinctive maritime communities. From the mid-1980s, however, the consensus of both local and scholarly opinion has shifted to stress their local origins, the fact that Swahili is an African language, and the ways coastal religious beliefs and cultural patterns came to embrace both local practices and foreign influences, as Swahili came to be seen as an African people who, on moving to the coast and engaging in overseas trade, developed into distinctive, mercantile, cosmopolitan communities that served as economic and cultural intermediaries between their mainland neighbors and overseas visitors. The earliest Swahili towns emerged in the 8th century and, with increasing trade and wealth, developed into prosperous and complex city-states in the 15th century before they were displaced by the Portuguese in the 16th and 17th centuries, Omani in the 18th and 19th centuries, and Europeans in the 20th century. Yet Swahili towns have endured throughout as bearers of a distinctive coastal culture.

History of Zanzibar to 1890

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Abdul Sheriff
Keyword(s):  
Indian Ocean ◽  
Industrial Revolution ◽  
East African ◽  
East African Coast ◽  
Swahili Coast ◽  
Cape Of Good Hope ◽  
15Th Century ◽  
The Indian Ocean ◽  
City States ◽  
A Minor

The East African or Swahili coast is at the confluence between the continental world of Africa and the maritime world of the Indian Ocean, giving rise to a cosmopolitan culture. The Zanzibar archipelago is geographically at the center of the East African coast, and was ideally located in terms of the monsoons for trade and social interaction with the African mainland as well as across the Indian Ocean. The first golden age of the Zanzibar archipelago blossomed from the middle of the first millennium ce when transoceanic connections began to be forged between the western seaboards of the Indian Ocean as far as China in the east. It was spearheaded by Unguja Ukuu, followed by a number of ports on Pemba and Unguja, including Kizimkazi with its unique 12th-century Kufic inscription. The Portuguese intervened from the 15th century to monopolize and divert Indian Ocean trade to Europe via the Cape of Good Hope, although they did not succeed. Nevertheless, they disrupted the former patterns of trade and social interactions in the Indian Ocean. After the Portuguese interlude, the Swahili civilization tried to recover its initiative, but it could no longer hold its own. The Swahili city states had to seek assistance from Oman. Zanzibar developed as the seat of a vast commercial empire in the 19th century based on the clove economy on the islands and commerce that extended from the Indian to the Atlantic Ocean, and a vast hinterland that extended as far as the African Great Lakes. It flourished, but it could not withstand the onslaught of the European colonial powers in their scramble for Africa to monopolize its natural resources and markets for their industrial revolution. With the colonial partition of Africa, Zanzibar was reduced to a minor British protectorate by 1890.

Biography Writing in Swahili

1997 ◽  
Vol 24 ◽  
pp. 299-307 ◽  
Author(s):  
Farouk Topan
Keyword(s):  
East African ◽  
East African Coast ◽  
Literary Traditions ◽  
African Coast ◽  
History Of ◽  
African Context ◽  
City States ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
The City

Any meaningful assessment of biography and autobiography writing among the Swahili as a historical source needs to take at least three factors into consideration. The first is the influence of Arab literary traditions on the emergence of the genre on the East African coast; the second is the relationship between literacy and orality, and its implication for writing and narration in an African context. The role of colonialism, and the introduction of the Western “mode” of biography and autobiography writing, forms the third factor. The aim of the paper is to survey these factors, not chronologically, but as part of a general discussion on the notion and status of the genre in the Swahili context.Swahili interface with Arabic as an essential ingredient of Islamic practice laid the foundation for the development of literate genres on the East African coast, among them the biographical and the historical. In the process, Swahili adopted styles of narrative expression which are reflected in the terms employed for them. The most common are habari (from the Arabic khabar) and wasifu (from wasf). In its original usage, khabar denoted a description of an event or events that were connected in a single narrative by means of a phrase such as “in that year.” It lacked a genealogy of narrators, and the form was stylistically flexible to include verses of poetry relevant to the events. In Swahili the current meaning of the word habari is “information” and “news” (and, hence, also a greeting) but, as a historical genre, it has been used in two ways. The first is in relation to the history of the city-states recounted through documents whose titles include the word, khabari/habari, (or the plural, akhbar in Arabic), usually translated as “chronicle(s).”

scholarly journals The Relationship of the Cotton Crop to Plague, and its Role as a Vehicle for Rats and Fleas in East Africa

1935 ◽  
Vol 35 (3) ◽  
pp. 388-403 ◽  
Author(s):  
J. Isgaer Roberts
Keyword(s):  
East Africa ◽  
Export Trade ◽  
East African ◽  
East African Coast ◽  
Cotton Crop ◽  
African Coast ◽  
Relationship Of ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Belgian Congo

Mombasa is the main port for the East African coast, handling all exports and imports for the two territories, Kenya and Uganda, which are incidentally the worst plague centres in the area. A fair amount of the Tanganyika and Belgian Congo produce also reaches this port. As Mombasa is the receiving centre for all the export trade of Kenya and Uganda, it might be expected that plague, if conveyable in any form or by any means, would appear regularly with the arrival of some of the main crops which are usually considered to be associated with the disease in the interior. Maize and cotton are generally supposed to be connected with the incidence of plague, and it is of particular interest to contrast briefly the figures for the incidence of the disease at the port within recent years and the periods of export of these crops.

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