A History of the East African Coast

by Charles Cornelius

  These finds, together with evidence from the Periplus and Ptolemy, suggest that a very well-developed trading system existed between Azania on the one hand, and the Mediterranean world and Arabia on the other, from at least as far back as the third century BC. Given that coins were being used, and that they came from such a wide geographical area, also suggests this trade must have been on a sophisticated level.

  It also suggests how devastating the collapse of the Roman Empire must have been for Azania, particularly the safe passage it afforded to Greek and Egyptian ships. It is possible that this ancient trading system, dating as far back as 2000BC, began to break up around the fourth century. The collapse of the Roman Empire would have led to a downturn in trade between Azania and the Red Sea, and it is also thought that at the same time, trade with Arabia could have declined because of an economic decline caused by a catastrophic dam burst. Historical evidence of trade simply dries up, and for the historian, the East African coast becomes shrouded in mist, a mist that would take centuries to lift.

   

  PART 2: THE MEDIEVAL SWAHILI CIVILIZATION

   

  Gede and James Kirkman

  In 1948, a university archaeologist, Dr James Kirkman, began excavations on the ruins of an old Swahili city, a city which had probably been inhabited from the late thirteenth century but had been abandoned for around 300 years. Buried in thick coastal bush and sand, what Kirkman gradually uncovered were the remains of a once great and prosperous Islamic city on a site covering 45 acres, enclosed by two sets of stone walls, containing the ruins of a fort, numerous stone buildings and, at its centre, a large Friday mosque, pillared tombs and an ornate palace honeycombed with rooms and a council chamber. From the sandy soil he unearthed a variety of goods brought to the Swahili coast from places as far apart as Venice and China. The city, set slightly inland from the sea just south of Malindi, was known to locals as Gede, meaning “precious” in the local Galla dialect.

  Despite more than half a century of investigation that still continues today, Gede is shrouded in mystery. Quite why it was built inland is a puzzle, given that every other site known to us was either located next to the sea, on an island shore or a river close to the sea. It was never mentioned (as far as we can tell, because Gede was almost certainly known by a different name when it was inhabited) by any later Portuguese writer, a rather breathtaking omission given the scale of the city. There is also no conclusive reason for why it was abandoned. What we do know is that soon after its inhabitants left, this once great city was quickly lost to memory, buried and crumbling amidst rapidly encroaching coastal vegetation, forgotten for two centuries until paid a brief visit by Sir John Kirk, Britain's official Resident in Zanzibar in 1884. Not until 1929 was Gede officially recognized as an historical monument, but only when Gede was declared a national park and Kirkman was appointed its warden did she begin to reveal her secrets.

  Unlike Mombasa, Malindi, Mogadishu, Lamu and the other large towns that predate the fifteenth century, Gede, as a result of its abandonment, had been frozen in time. Kirkman was therefore able to uncover evidence of a sophisticated, cultured, well organised and highly religious civilization, engaged in trade on an intercontinental scale, an image far removed from the Victorian-inspired notion of Africa as the Dark Continent, a place devoid of civilization and progress.

  The excavations at Gede by Dr Kirkman were the first attempt to analyse the origins and development of the Swahili towns by studying the remains of the towns themselves, and his pioneering work inspired many to follow in his footsteps, smitten by the abundance of untouched archaeological sites up and down the coast which still pose so many tantalising questions. Among those who have since engaged in archaeology at the coast are Neville Chittick at Takwa, Kilwa and Zanzibar, Tom Wilson and Athman Lali Omar at Pate, John Sutton and Mark Horton at Shanga and Stéphane Pradines, extending our knowledge of Gede.

  We know that some settlements existed two thousand years ago because of the Periplus of the Erythraean Sea and by the end of the fifteenth century it is thought there could have been around 400 sites containing some kind of stone construction; of these, about 75 would have had populations in excess of a thousand people. So far only eleven of these sites have been dated to earlier than the eleventh century and none before the eighth. It is therefore quite possible that the founders of these towns were quite different from those who had inhabited Rhapta.

  We know little about the kind of people who inhabited towns like Rhapta at the time of the Periplus, but we do know that by the year 500 AD, they began to be displaced by a technologically more advanced racial group, the Bantu, who had been spreading across central and western Africa for centuries. The Bantu followed a pastoral lifestyle, shepherding large herds of livestock and moving with them as they sought out the best pastures, and it is from them that many of the tribes of modern Kenya are descended and from whose linguistic tradition the Swahili language is derived.

  Among other new techniques, the Bantu brought to the coast skills in ironworking, something evidently unknown at the time of the Periplus when iron tools had to be imported. While most of the Bantu remained pastoralists, it is likely that some of them began to trade with the Arab and Persian merchants at the coast, and as this developed, they would have begun to establish permanent settlements at the coast. It is from these settlements that the Swahili civilization emerged.

   

  The First Swahili Towns

  Settlement on small islands or on the seafront is entirely dependent on the ability of its inhabitants to construct wells in order to extract fresh water from the ground. Otherwise, settlements have to be located beside rivers at a point above the high tide mark for fresh water to be available. There is evidence that mainland settlements did exist before those on islands and near beaches. Rhapta, which Ptolemy said was “set back a little from the sea”, is a possible example. Pottery remains dated to the ninth century have been unearthed in the delta of the Tana River, including finds at a settlement called Ungwana, situated on a raised beach beside a tributary of the Tana River. However, the ability of towns lying a short distance inland to carry out international maritime trade is limited and fails to take advantage of such natural geographical features as beaches, deep harbours and estuaries. Seafront settlement, particularly on islands, was therefore a revolutionary step forward.

  Archaeology now suggests that the earliest part of the Swahili coast to be extensively settled was the Lamu Archipelago, a cluster of hot, low-lying, desert islands off the extreme northern coast of Kenya. The sand dunes here no doubt conceal many more secrets, but the work done so far on the three main islands of Lamu, Manda and Pate suggest that at least eight towns existed here more than a thousand years ago.

  In 1980, the Cambridge archaeologist, Mark Horton, began the first in a series of six excavations at Shanga, a now-ruined, stone town on the southern shore of Pate Island. It is the oldest site known on the coast and possibly the first to make use of wells. Shanga was probably founded in the middle of the eighth century by Bantu pastoralists who saw trade with the Arabs and Persians as a lucrative, alternative source of income, possibly because of a prolonged drought which had made their previous lifestyle less tenable. Shanga may well have been a temporary settlement at first, inhabited when traders arrived on the north-east monsoon, abandoned when traders returned to the Middle East when the monsoon winds changed direction.

  Before Horton's work in the 1980s, the oldest known settlement was Manda Town, a site on the northern tip of nearby Manda Island. This had been excavated by the then Director of the British Institute of Eastern Africa, Neville Chittick, in 1966, who identified the site as dating from 800AD due to pottery and Chinese porcelain dated to the ninth century. Again, Manda is likely to have been settled on the same temporary basis as Shanga.

  The oldest site known outside the Lamu Archipelago, apart from the mainland site of Ungwana, is the town of Unguja Ukuu, the old capital of Zanzibar Island, locat
ed seventeen miles south-east of the modern capital. In 1865, a horde of 500 Middle Eastern coins was unearthed there, with one dated as early as 794. In 1965, Neville Chittick uncovered some shards of Islamic pottery and, after comparing his finds with pottery manufactured in the Middle East, Chittick was able to date the pottery, and therefore the site, to the ninth century.

   

  The Foundation Tales

  Archaeology has taught us much over the last sixty years about the origins of the oldest Swahili towns, but the Swahili coast, almost uniquely on the African continent, has also been the subject of many written accounts. Several Arab and Chinese writers, dating as far back as the ninth centuries, record information about life there. So too did Marco Polo. But for the greatest entertainment value, nothing beats the civic chronicles of the Swahili towns themselves, brimming as they are with tales of court intrigue, warfare, scandal, deceit and wily business-making. Handed down by word of mouth from generation to generation, most of these Swahili Chronicles came to be written down at the end of the nineteenth and start of the twentieth centuries, often at the bequest of colonial officials with a passion for history. Lamu, Dar es Salaam, Mombasa, Mogadishu and Pate all have such a chronicle, but the most important of them all is the sixteenth century Chronicle of Kilwa, the only one that can claim any kind of antiquity.

  The persona of one of the early Islamic caliphs, Abdul Malik, figures large in many of these chronicles. Abdul Malik was the ninth caliph of the Islamic Empire, reigning from 685 to 705, barely half a century after the death of the Prophet, Mohammed. He ruled through tumultuous times. When he became caliph, Muslim factions were waging a brutal civil war against one another, a war that would result in the emergence of the rival Sunni and Shi'ite sects that prevail to this day. The Islamic Empire was also undergoing a quite breathtaking expansion. Having already conquered Syria, Persia and Egypt, Islamic armies were now marching through North Africa and would soon enter India in the East and Spain in the West, only failing to conquer the whole of Western Europe after a rare defeat on a battlefield in France in 732. And if the tales in some of the Swahili chronicles are to be believed, this period of expansion also reached East Africa.

  The Pate Chronicle says that Abdul Malik's “soul longed to found a new kingdom. So he brought Syrians, and they built the cities of Pate, Malindi, Zanzibar, Mombasa, Lamu and Kilwa.” This story is retold in a Swahili poem, the Kitab al-Zanuj, which tells of how Abdul Malik sent Syrians to the coast under the leadership of Amir Musa. The Lamu Chronicle tells a related if less glamorous story, suggesting that Abdul Malik actually sent men to the coast on a quest for perfume flasks made out of copper, although it seems the Syrians in this case ignored his orders and instead built a new town on Lamu Island called Hedabu, blissfully unaware of the existence of another Arab settlement on the island called Weyuni. When the two towns discovered the other’s existence, they came to blows and, as a kind of peace deal, built a new town between them which they called Lamu. No mention is made of whether Abdul Malik ever got his copper perfume flasks.

  In all, thirty-five towns claim their foundation to Abdul Malik, including Mogadishu, Shanga, Manda, Watamu, Wasini and a town on the island of Nzwani in the Comoros Islands. If true, this was an impressive piece of colonisation, particularly given that at the same time Abdul Malik was busy crushing and beheading rivals in Persia while also conquering North Africa.

  However, some of the Swahili chronicles tell a totally different story, one in which the East African coast was a haven for Islamic heretics and outcasts persecuted in the Middle East. The Chronicle of Kilwa tells of the Zaidites, fanatical followers of Zaid, the grandson of Ali, the defining historical figure to Shi'ite Muslims. When Zaid was defeated by the caliph, Hisham, in 739, his followers fled, dispersing around the Middle East and, according to the Chronicle of Kilwa, some reached the coast of East Africa where they sought refuge in existing towns. Indeed, according to the chronicle, they were the first people from overseas to settle on the coast, an assertion which does rather contradict the tales of Abdul Malik's hard work half a century earlier. The image of the coast as a haven for asylum seekers is also supported by a chronicle from Oman which tells the story of two Omani leaders, Suleiman and Said, who fled the army of Abdul Malik with their families and followers following the Arab conquest of Oman at the end of the seventh century. It's a story in stark contrast to that of Abdul Malik's attempts at colonisation, for in this one, the newcomers to the coast are escaping Abdul Malik.

  More exiles came. Another story from the Chronicle of Kilwa describes how seven brothers brought a large number of their followers on three ships from el-Hasa, a town in the Persian Gulf in order to flee the persecution of the local sultan. Upon arriving in East Africa, late in the ninth century, they established the towns of Brava and Mogadishu on the Somali coast, which again contradicts Mogadishu's claim to have been founded during the reign of Abdul Malik.

  The Chronicle of Kilwa attributes Kilwa’s Muslim takeover to one Ali bin Hasan, son of the Sultan of Shiraz in Persia. According to one of the two versions of this chronicle, Ali bin Hasan was regarded as the black sheep of the family, having as he did an Abyssinian slave for a mother (always a chain around one’s neck when you have six brothers who could call a Persian noblewoman as Mum.) Fed up being ridiculed, he set out in the middle of the tenth century with his wife and children for East Africa, lured by tales of gold, and reached Mogadishu. He didn't linger there long “because his purpose was to found a new town of which he should be lord” and so he pushed on until reaching Kilwa. Finding an African landowner in possession of the island, Ali bin Hasan bought the island for as much cloth as it took to stretch from the island to the mainland opposite. The other version of the chronicle says that Ali came to East Africa with his father and five brothers, and he bought Kilwa for as much cloth as it took to encircle the entire island. Either way, it was a lot of cloth. Meanwhile his brothers stopped off en route in their own ships: the first brother at Manda Island in the Lamu Archipelago, the second at nearby Shanga, the third at a town called Yanbu, the fourth at Mombasa and the fifth at Pemba Island. Their father settled in the Comoros Islands and was thus at least far enough away to give his sons a degree of freedom in their attempts to rule in towns, towns which the chronicle fails to identify as either new or existing ones.

  The foundation tales told in the Swahili chronicles therefore contradict each other. Some suggest the early caliphs pursued a deliberate policy of colonising the East African coast. Others suggest the caliphs had nothing to do with it and that instead, Muslims fled there for safety from civil war, ridicule and persecution, perhaps encouraged by the lure of gold, some settling in existing towns, some building new ones.

  But these tales are not meant to be history in the sense that modern historians understand it. In the stories involving Abdul Malik, for example, they were intended to give prestige to a town by associating it with an important historical caliph in the same way that many early Christian churches attributed their foundation to one of the apostles of Jesus. The foundation tales are not to be taken literally, although many historians up until the 1960s did exactly that, depicting the Swahili towns as Arab and Persian colonies and entirely excluding Africans from the early history of the coast.

   

  Chinese and Arabic descriptions of the coast

  In addition to archaeological finds and the Swahili chronicles, the early history of the Swahili coast is also illuminated by overseas writers, some of them dating from the time of the foundation of Shanga and Manda. In the middle of the ninth century, a Chinese writer, Duan Chengshi, decided to write a factbook about the world called the ‘Miscellaneous Morsels from Youyang’, which includes, among other things, information about tattoos and one of the earliest versions of the story of Cinderella. (In his version of Cinderella, the heroine is a Chinese girl called Ye Xian who enjoys the assistance of a magical fish instead of a fairy godmother and whose wicked stepmother and ugly sisters are
eventually stoned to death.) The ‘Miscellaneous Morsels’ also included a section on the East African coast, a land Duan Chengshi called Po-pa-li. The Chinese referred to the Swahili as the Seng-chi, possibly an adaptation of the Arabic term for the coast, Zanj. In all likelihood, Duan Chengshi would have gained his knowledge of the Swahili coast third-hand from Indonesian traders, who themselves would have learned of the coast from Persian and Arab traders; China had no direct contact with the coast at this time (and only rarely did later).

  In his account he described a land frequented by Arab and Persian traders, lured there mainly by the trade in ivory and ambergris. While the Persians and Arabs may have been economically important, there is no indication that they had any kind of political influence since Duan Chengshi remarked that “from of old, this country has not been subject to any foreign power.” While he mentions no settlements on the coast, Duan Chengshi does briefly describe its inhabitants as cattle-owning, pastoral people who lived on a diet of milk mixed with blood, whose weapons included “elephant's tusks, ribs and wild cattle horns” and whose women, to their eternal credit, “are clean and well-behaved.”