Seats and Sites of Authority: British Colonial Collecting on the East African Coast

2018 ◽  
pp. 116-134
Author(s):  
Sarah Longair
Keyword(s):  
Indian Ocean ◽  
Material Culture ◽  
Political Transformation ◽  
African Continent ◽  
East African ◽  
East African Coast ◽  
Arabian Nights ◽  
Victorian Period ◽  
The Indian Ocean ◽  
British Colonial

For over a thousand years, the Swahili culture of coastal East Africa had developed by synthesising myriad influences from the African continent, Arabia and across the Indian Ocean. By the mid-Victorian period Zanzibar was a key Indian Ocean commercial centre, and in 1890 was established as a British Protectorate. This chapter examines, through writings, collections of material culture and photographs, the British encounter with Zanzibar and the island’s cosmopolitan culture. British officers described themselves as going to ‘the East’ when departing for the island. The word itself epitomised mysterious otherness and exoticism, while its Arabian-Nights charm contrasted with the stereotypes about the African interior. Yet its skyline was criticised for lacking minarets and domes and being insufficiently Islamic. It was also described as unhealthy and dirty, making British intervention necessary to transform it into ‘an island paradise’. This chapter analyses how the British response to Zanzibar as a liminal space between Africa and the East shifted in this period of economic and political transformation on the coast.

scholarly journals The Ends of the Indian Ocean: Tracing Coastlines in the Tanzanian “Hinterland”

2019 ◽  
Vol 46 ◽  
pp. 359-383
Author(s):  
Julia Verne
Keyword(s):  
Indian Ocean ◽  
Central Africa ◽  
East African ◽  
Relational Thinking ◽  
East African Coast ◽  
East Central ◽  
Trade Routes ◽  
Empirical Ground ◽  
The Indian Ocean ◽  
Spatial Entity

Abstract:In recent years, several attempts to revitalize Area Studies have concentrated on oceans as the unifying force to create regions. In this respect, the Indian Ocean has become a prime example to show how economic as well as cultural flows across the sea have contributed to close connections between its shores. However, by doing so, they not only seem to create a certain, rather homogeneous, Indian Ocean space, they often also lead to a conceptual separation between “coast” and “hinterland,” similar to earlier distinctions between “African/Arab” or “East/Central Africa.” In this contribution, so-called “Arab” traders who settled along trade routes connecting the East African coast to its hinterland will serve as an empirical ground to explore and challenge these boundaries. Tracing maritime imaginaries and related materialities in the Tanzanian interior, it will reflect on the ends of the Indian Ocean and the nature of such maritime conceptualizations of space more generally. By taking the relational thinking that lies at the ground of maritimity inland, it wishes to encourage a re-conceptualization of areas that not only replaces a terrestrial spatial entity with a maritime one, but that genuinely breaks with such “container-thinking” and, instead, foregrounds the meandering, fluid character of regions and their complex and highly dynamic entanglements.

Chinese Porcelain as a Symbol of Power on the East African Coast from the 14th Century Onward

2016 ◽  
Vol 20 (1) ◽  
pp. 74-93
Author(s):  
Andrea Montella
Keyword(s):  
Indian Ocean ◽  
Social Classes ◽  
Main Section ◽  
East African ◽  
East African Coast ◽  
14Th Century ◽  
African Coast ◽  
The Indian Ocean ◽  
Ancient Times

The aim of this paper is to illustrate the role of Chinese ceramics in Swahili society, with particular emphasis on their funerary uses. Although the importance of Chinese ceramics, especially porcelain, is attested throughout the Indian Ocean, scholars have only recently pointed out their role not only as chronological markers, but also as useful tools to better understand the politics and social customs of certain areas, such as the East African Coast. Imported vessels are involved in several ritual activities which have been performed in Swahili houses since ancient times. Ceramics act as protective tools in the innermost and main section of the house, exclusively reserved for women. According to local customs, Chinese ceramics are believed to be able to ward off negative influences. Furthermore, ceramics became part of the constitution of authority and power, not just a reflection of them. In particular, their importance is evident from their use in religious monuments such as mosques and tombs, where they are used as architectural decorative elements in order to display the wealth of the deceased and as symbols of legitimacy bestowed from ancestors to their heirs. Chinese porcelain in funerary contexts thus became a necessary instrument whereby the Swahili elite asserted their prominence during the continuous negotiation of power between them and other social classes.

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.

A Material Culture: Introduction

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stephanie Wynne-Jones
Keyword(s):  
Indian Ocean ◽  
Material Culture ◽  
Eastern Africa ◽  
Eastern Coast ◽  
African Continent ◽  
First Millennium ◽  
The Indian Ocean ◽  
Trading Economy ◽  
Indian Ocean World ◽  
Trading Networks

Africa’s eastern littoral borders the Indian Ocean, providing the setting for the settlements, people, and language known collectively as Swahili, which have been a key part of that ocean’s trading networks for at least two millennia. Graeco-Roman sailors visited the now-forgotten metropolis of Rhapta, and their voyages were recorded in the narratives that later became the first-century Periplus of the Erythraean Sea (Casson 1989). Traces of that early contact survive in the form of beads and coins, yet are limited in number and diffuse in nature (Chami and Msemwa 1997a; Horton 1990). From the seventh century onwards, a series of more permanent settlements began to monopolize this trade; by the eleventh century some of these had grown into towns that were able to control and provide a focus for the mercantile opportunities of the Indian Ocean. The trading economy of Swahili towns was based on the wealth of the African continent—gold and ivory were particularly valuable exports—and underlain by a mixed economy and diverse population of fishers and farmers, traders and craft-workers (Horton and Middleton 2000; Kusimba 2008). By the ‘golden age’ of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, the Swahili were an African society of considerable cosmopolitanism and fame, with towns like Kilwa Kisiwani known throughout the medieval world (Sutton 1993, 1997). Swahili archaeology is focused, conceptually and methodologically, on the series of stone towns that grew up along Africa’s eastern coast from the end of the first millennium AD. These towns developed as key nodes in both local and international networks of interaction, and became the conduits through which the African continent traded and communicated with the wider Indian Ocean world. The material settings of the towns, and particularly the distinctive tradition of coral architecture they contain, embody their cosmopolitanism, with this locally derived building tradition creating unique urban spaces that nevertheless reference the Islamic architecture of the Arabian Peninsula and Persian Gulf (Garlake 1966). Archaeology on this coast is still relatively new, dating back only to the 1950s and 1960s, and to the pioneering work of researchers convinced they had discovered evidence for Arab trading stations on the coast of eastern Africa (Kirkman 1964).

scholarly journals India-Africa: Rediscovering Trade Relations through Cultural Assimilation

2020 ◽  
Vol 6 (4) ◽  
pp. 5-15
Author(s):  
Manish Karmwar
Keyword(s):  
Indian Ocean ◽  
Fifteenth Century ◽  
Sixth Century ◽  
Cultural Assimilation ◽  
East African ◽  
East African Coast ◽  
Trade Relations ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Indian Ocean ◽  
Ancient Times

Indo-African trade relations are one of the imperative segments to understand African settlements in different parts of Indian sub-continent. Several Africans rose to positions of authority as generals and governors, in the Janjira and Sachin kingdoms they rose from king-makers to Emperors. The evidence of African trade in India has a significant history. From ancient times, three valuable export commodities which were prized in Africa: pepper, silk and cotton. The migration from the African sub-continent into India went up only in the sixth century A.D. but we have had an incredible trade-relation from time immemorial. From the Sixth century through the fifteenth century the history of the East African coast is somewhat illuminated by Arabs, Persians and Europeans. During the course of the sixteenth century the Portuguese dominated the Indian Ocean and its shoreline. Portugal was determined to remove Muslim merchants, especially Arabs, in the Indian Ocean system. This paper tries to explore India Africa relation especially with east Africa from earliest times to nineteenth century A.D. The paper recognizes the fact that trade and natural resources have been the principal reason   behind the age-old links between Africa and India. The paper identifies the Cultural assimilation and African diaspora through the ages which has a vital facet to further strengthen the Trade Relations.

Early Muslim Trading Settlements on the East African Coast: New Evidence from Shanga

1987 ◽  
Vol 67 (2) ◽  
pp. 290-323 ◽  
Author(s):  
M. C. Horton
Keyword(s):  
Indian Ocean ◽  
Early Period ◽  
East African ◽  
Rock Crystal ◽  
East African Coast ◽  
Trading Systems ◽  
African Coast ◽  
History Of ◽  
First Millennium ◽  
The Indian Ocean

Much archaeological and historical research has recently been devoted to the study of the early Swahili communities inhabiting the East African coast during the late first millennium a.d. The practice of Islam can be shown to date back to perhaps the beginning of the ninth century from when the first mosques have been excavated. The economic importance of East Africa for the Indian Ocean and Mediterranean world is apparent from the wealth of imports and exports found in a large number of these coastal sites. African trading systems brought to medieval society high-value commodities ranging from gold, rock crystal and ivory, to slaves and timber. The items were carried across large distances sea by traders following the seasonal monsoon system around the coasts and across the Indian Ocean. is argued that the trading settlements were African in culture and origin, but then attracted Muslims who were responsible for occasional local converts from a very early period in the history of Islam.

‘Indian’ metalwork in East Africa: the bronze lion statuette from Shanga

Antiquity ◽  
1988 ◽  
Vol 62 (234) ◽  
pp. 11-23 ◽  
Author(s):  
M.C. Horton ◽  
T.R. Blurton
Keyword(s):  
Indian Ocean ◽  
East Africa ◽  
East African ◽  
The West ◽  
East African Coast ◽  
Early Date ◽  
Islamic World ◽  
African Coast ◽  
The Indian Ocean

There are few frontiers from later periods whose archaeology is more beguiling than the east African coast. To the east are the sea-routes of the Indian Ocean, to the Islamic world, to India, to Indonesia, to China. To the west are the distinctive cultures of medieval Africa. And on the coast are the settlements where the east and the west touch. This paper works towards the wider issue of circum-maritime cultures from a single find from the new excavations at Shanga which have revealed mosques of a remarkably early date.

From Marco Polo to Manuel I of Portugal: The Image of the East African Coast in the Early Sixteenth Century

2012 ◽  
Author(s):  
JEAN MICHEL MASSING
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Indian Ocean ◽  
East Coast ◽  
East African ◽  
East African Coast ◽  
Marco Polo ◽  
African Coast ◽  
The Indian Ocean ◽  
Interesting Development

Less than twenty years after Vasco da Gama joined the commercial perimeter of the Indian Ocean (1497–8), European artists had developed a view of the newly discovered lands, ranging from highly exotic and sometimes quite fanciful renderings based on medieval sources (the ‘Tapestries of the Indies’) to careful ethnographic illustrations based on written and visual sources (Hans Burgkmair's large woodcut frieze, People of Africa and India, of 1508). These few years, in which the monstrance of Belém of 1506 (Museu Nacional de Arte Antiga, Lisbon) was produced with the gold of Kilwa, also saw an interesting development in Portuguese gold coinage. All these ventures record a brief moment of European fascination with the east coast of Africa and its multicultural inhabitants, which is the object of this study.

Burcad Badeed as Grounds and Method in Literary Expressions of Somali Piracy

2020 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 32-51
Author(s):  
Kelsey McFaul
Keyword(s):  
Indian Ocean ◽  
Knowledge Production ◽  
Western Indian Ocean ◽  
East African ◽  
East African Coast ◽  
Maritime Piracy ◽  
African Coast ◽  
The Indian Ocean ◽  
Indian Ocean World ◽  
The Relationship

The emergence of maritime piracy in the western Indian Ocean captured global attention from 2007 to 2012, resulting in simplistic and racialized representations of piracy in news and other media. In 2011, two diasporic Somali writers published literary works intervening in this representation: Nuruddin Farah’s novel Crossbones and Ubax Cristina Ali Farah’s essay “Un sambuco attraversa il mare” [“A dhow is crossing the sea”]. This essay reads Farah and Ali Farah’s alternative narratives of piracy through the Somali phrase burcad badeed, which both translate as ‘sea bandits’ or ‘pirates.’ As a method burcad badeed first historicizes contemporary piracy within the longue durée of the Indian Ocean world. Second, it draws on the ocean as an analogy and aggregator of dispersed forms of knowledge, thereby inviting comparative reading across conventional boundaries of generation, language, and form, and making visible practices of collective, embodied, and polyvocal knowledge production. Finally, burcad badeed complicates the distinctions between land and sea which undergird legal definitions of piracy to focalize particular landscapes: Namely the beach and the relationship between coast and hinterland. The beach foregrounds the ecological devastation to which piracy is a response, while the relationship between coast and hinterland frames practices of movement, complex racializations, and senses of belonging in Somalia and on the east African coast.

A Long-Distance Nexus in the Indian Ocean: Gujarati Banias, Brokers, and Middlemen in Eighteenth-Century Portuguese East Africa

2020 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
pp. 234-254
Author(s):  
Luís Frederico Dias Antunes
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Indian Ocean ◽  
East Africa ◽  
Small Island ◽  
East African ◽  
Commercial Activity ◽  
Long Distance ◽  
East African Coast ◽  
African Coast ◽  
The Indian Ocean

Abstract Historiography has long recognized the strategic importance of Diu as a commercial hub in the Indian Ocean, despite the decline it experienced in the last quarter of the seventeenth century. A great deal of Diuese commerce, along with the island’s privileged connections with East Africa (especially Mozambique), was sustained by the activity of the Banias—Hindus and Jain—who had long used this small island as a platform for trade. This article analyzes the forms of organization, commercial and financial techniques, and main roles of the Banias of Gujarat, one of the largest and most important urban merchant communities in India and in other Asian and African markets along the Indian Ocean. In the case of Diu, we seek to understand the extent to which the financial capacity and commercial experience of the local Banias allowed them to dominate most commercial activity in Mozambique from the late seventeenth century onwards. We examine the internal structure of the Banias’ merchant communities, the hierarchical dependencies and trade links between the Banias of Diu and of Mozambique, and, lastly, the adaptation of their experience and commercial techniques to the East African coast.

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