Coast and Islands: Early Period
From the earliest records sometime in the first millennium A.D. until the end of the eighteenth century the East African coast and the islands from the Benadir Coast of Somalia to the Zambezi River and below in what is now Mozambique were oriented to the Indian Ocean and the lands abutting it, particularly those of Southwest Asia, and had little to do with the interior. A partial exception was the interaction of Arabs and later Portuguese with the East Central African states from trading posts on the Mozambican coast.
The first apparent references to the Tanzanian coast occur before 500 A.D. in a Greek commercial guide, but they are vague and no connection can be made between them and later developments. The earliest Arab sources alluding to the coast occur in the ninth and tenth centuries A.D. Arabs of the Persian Gulf area (and perhaps a few Persians) were clearly engaged in trade at that time, and by the twelfth century there were a number of trading posts and settlements on the coast and on the offshore islands—Zanzibar and Pemba (then called Qanbalu) in the north, Mafia and Kilwa Kisiwani (Kilwa on the island) farther south.
Some of the immigrants were either from the Persian Gulf and Yemen directly or had settled elsewhere on the coast before moving to the Tanzanian area: thus merchants said to be of Shirazi origin (in modern Iran) settled first on the Benadir Coast from which some of them moved to Mafia and Kilwa islands, controlling them by the beginning of the thirteenth century. Whatever their geographic origin most of these settlers were Arabs.
The earliest (ninth century) references to the indigenous peoples of the coast seem to indicate that most were Cushitic speakers, but there is some evidence of Bantu speech, not surprising in light of the early Iron Age sites in the hinterland between Mombasa and Tanga. By the fourteenth century the non-Arab coastal and island population was almost entirely Bantu speaking, and the dialects they spoke provided the Bantu base for what was to become Swahili, the mother tongue of all of the inhabitants of Zanzibar and Pemba and of most of those living in coastal towns in this early period and later.
For the most part, each of the coastal or island settlements during this period (to the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and into the eighteenth century) was essentially a small city-state. culturally Islamic and mercantile in orientation. For a long time the most important of the independent Swahili coastal towns or city-states was Kilwa Kisiwani. By the thirteenth century Kilwa controlled the sea routes to and from Sofala, the outlet—located on the coast of what is now Mozambique—for gold brought by Africans from the interior basin of the Zambezi River. Consequently Kilwa gained and maintained an economic ascendancy over the coastal area, which lasted into the fifteenth century, when it was overtaken by Zanzibar and Mombasa.
Other towns, such as Pemba, Zanzibar, Mombasa, Malindi, and Lamu, located mostly on the islands just off the coast for purposes of security, developed a pattern similar to that of Kilwa. These towns depended on the monsoons and on such African products, provided by African traders, as ivory, timber, iron, tortoise shell, leopard skins, ambergris, gold, and slaves, although the slave trade for export was not important in the Tanzanian region until the nineteenth century. At the coast these goods were then taken by Arab and sometimes other traders for resale in Asia. The trade intensified steadily from the thirteenth through the fifteenth centuries.
In most of these communities, according to Neville Chittick, there were three categories of people: the first consisted of a mixed Afro-Arab population that included the ruling families, the landholders, the merchants, the artisans, and most of the religious functionaries. The second category comprised full-blooded Africans who had been enslaved on the mainland and who performed agricultural and other labor. The third included transient or recently settled Arabs and perhaps a few Persians.
|
NEWSLETTER
|
| Join the GlobalSecurity.org mailing list |
|
|
|
