However, Omani attacks began to occur with increasing frequency, usually orchestrated by Pate, and by the end of the seventeenth century most of the major towns of the coast had formally recognised Omani overlordship, even if there were not actually any Omani troops in their towns. There was not a great deal the Portuguese could do about it, apart from sudden acts of frightening brutality. In January 1679, after Pate had sent another request for military help from Oman, a Portuguese force rounded up the leaders of Pate, Siyu, Lamu and Manda and had them beheaded in Pate town. However, just as the Portuguese were in the process of looting the towns, the Omani fleet arrived and a battle raged before the Portuguese fled south to Mombasa. They returned seven years later, seizing the king of Pate and twelve of his counsellors and, having taken the trouble of transporting them to Goa, had them executed on Christmas Day. By then Mombasa was the only place along the coast the Portuguese could really call their own, and even that would not last for much longer.
On 15th March 1696, a huge Omani fleet arrived off Mombasa and a force of three thousand troops stormed the island, besieging a Portuguese force, including their Swahili followers, of 2500 people in Fort Jesus. The Portuguese were now entirely reliant on help from Goa, but a relief force did not arrive until September 1697, by which time an outbreak of plague had almost entirely wiped out the garrison there. Fort Jesus finally fell in December 1698. When the Omani entered the fort, they found that the defenders consisted of eight Portuguese soldiers, three Indians and two African women. That such a meagre force had been able to hold the fort for thirty-three months is testimony to the strength of Fort Jesus, a strength that would come in useful to the successors of the Portuguese.
With Fort Jesus gone, the Omani were able to pick off the remnants of Portuguese bases in Pemba and Kilwa. Only Mozambique remained in Portuguese hands, as it would for the best part of another three centuries.
The Swahili coast had been controlled by the Portuguese for exactly two hundred years and in that time Portuguese influence had been almost entirely negative. They had inflicted some quite appalling acts of brutality upon the Swahili, partly the result of posting Portuguese captains to the coast for terms as short as three years which encouraged them to make their fortunes in as short a time as possible by exacting tribute, enforcing trading duties and looting towns, all at the expense of the Swahili economy. They had managed to dislocate the traditional trading system of the coast, with Portuguese merchants being allowed to usurp the Swahili as middlemen trading between Africa and Asia, and, by focusing on the gold trade at the expense of other commodities, many towns suffered to the point of extinction, Kilwa being the most notable casualty.
Archaeology suggests that during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, many mainland settlements were abandoned including all those between the Juba River in the north to Mtwapa Creek just north of Mombasa, including Malindi. The trade recession caused by the Portuguese was only partly responsible for this. Another factor also at work was attacks from warlike mainland tribes such as the Zimba, Segeju, Nyika and Galla. The Galla, a tribe originally from modern-day Somalia, became a notorious problem in the seventeenth century and may have been responsible for the abandonment of Gede.
Another major change along the coast during the Portuguese period is the shift in power from Kilwa, the leading power in 1498, to Mombasa, which, by the end of the seventeenth century, had become the leading economic power of the coast. This, in itself, was a remarkable achievement given the number of times she had been sacked, burned, looted and bombarded by the Portuguese and eaten by the Zimba. It was testament both to the will of her people to survive and of her strong strategic position, strengths that would ensure she remained a town worth fighting for.
PART 4: THE OMANI
Omani Rule and the Mazrui
If the Omani had expected the Swahili to welcome them with open arms, they would be sorely disappointed. Despite their common religious bonds and the fact that they had freed them from the Europeans, the Omani sultans, based in Muscat, were still outsiders and the last thing the Swahili wanted was to continue to be ruled by foreigners. Besides, with the Portuguese gone, there was now a great opportunity to return to the good old days when the towns of the coast could engage in the occasional bout of internecine warfare. Pate and Lamu, for example, seized this opportunity and began the eighteenth century fighting over the ownership of a cache of Portuguese guns discovered on Lamu Island. However Pate's attacks, masterminded by her ruler, Tamu The Great, were far from impressive. In one seaborne assault on Lamu, Pate's dhows sank under the weight of their own guns, and in another, the Patean troops were beaten back by women wielding grain pestles. However, Pate eventually gained the upper hand, once again confirming her status as the senior town of the archipelago.
Nevertheless, the Omani were intent on controlling the East African coast, a region they claimed as theirs by right of conquest. Governors, known as liwali, were appointed in all the main towns of the coast, supported by military garrisons, some of whom were stationed in purpose-built fortifications such as the fort built by the Omani in Zanzibar around 1700. But so determined were the towns of the coast to stave off Omani rule that they were prepared to take some extreme measures, even to the point of asking their old enemies, the Portuguese, for help. In 1724, the Portuguese sailed north from their base in Mozambique to help Kilwa boot out the Omani. Four years later, they did the same for Pate and Mombasa, allowing the Portuguese to retake Fort Jesus, which they held for two years before being besieged yet again and expelled from the town for the last time. The politics of the Swahili coast were going to be as unfathomable to the Omani as they had been to the Portuguese before them and, when domestic disputes and threats from her Persian neighbours threatened stability back in Oman, their will to control the coast waned, leaving most of the Swahili towns effectively independent.
In 1741, in a fresh attempt to exert his authority over the Swahili, the Omani ruler, Sultan bin Seif, appointed as governor of Mombasa a member of one of Oman's oldest and most powerful families, the Mazrui. Three years later, Oman erupted into civil war, Sultan bin Seif was assassinated and his family, the Yorubi, were thrown from their positions of power and influence. This event had tremendous repercussions for the Swahili towns since the new rulers of Oman came from one of the Mazrui's great dynastic rivals, the Busaidi family. The last thing Mombasa's governor, Muhammad bin Uthman al-Mazrui, planned to do was acknowledge Busaidi overlordship, so he declared Mombasa's independence from Oman, a move that went down so well that soon all the Swahili towns followed suit.
In response, the new Busaidi sultan, Ahmed bin Said al-Busaidi, sent a fleet from Muscat to enforce his authority in Mombasa. The Omani troops assassinated Muhammad bin Uthman before occupying Fort Jesus and going on to reinforce the garrison on Zanzibar. But once again, Mombasa refused to lie down and the following year, the murdered governor's brother made a daring escape from Fort Jesus and was able to restore Mazrui control over Mombasa.
Ahmed bin Said never made another serious attempt to control the coast. The Swahili refused to pay his taxes and occasionally murdered his governors, but the situation in Oman was never stable enough for him to launch a determined effort at control, and because of this the Mazrui were able to extend their authority to the north and south of Mombasa during the second half of the eighteenth century. By 1780, the Mazrui claimed the coast from Pate in the north to Tanga in the south, although the Pate Chronicle, in one of its frequent attempts to exaggerate the place of Pate in Swahili history, suggests the Mazrui had actually agreed to carve up the Swahili coast between them, the boundary line being fixed at the Sabaki River north of Malindi.
The only real rival facing the Mazrui in East Africa was the el-Harthi family who ruled Zanzibar and remained loyal to the Busaidi. One of the main battlegrounds between the two dynasties was Pemba Island, the fertile 'Green Island' whose traditional role as Mombasa's bread basket made it
a key pawn in the coastal game of chess, but the Mazrui held it, not without a struggle, throughout the second half of the eighteenth century and into the nineteenth. However, Zanzibar's loyalty to Oman would ultimately be rewarded with interest.
The eighteenth century was one in which, free from foreign interference and taxation, the Swahili towns enjoyed a period of economic expansion. Mombasa thrived under her Mazrui rulers, developing trading links far inland to secure ivory, rubber and livestock for export. Pate was also a success story. Her traditional trade with the Red Sea flourished and the town underwent something of a literary renaissance. Lamu began to prosper too, initially because of a friendly Patean sultan, Bwana Mkuu, who lived in Lamu and improved her harbour, enabling larger dhows to visit the town. The Swahili houses of Lamu began to develop the distinctive style that can be seen today. Arts, crafts and literature blossomed. One noted poet was Mwana Kupona, a woman who wrote, amongst other things, ‘Advice on the Wifely Duty’. Zanzibar town expanded rapidly in the shadow of the Omani fort on an area cleared of bush in the 1720s. Political stability there encouraged merchants from Mafia and Pate to settle in the growing stone town. Kilwa enjoyed an economic boom towards the end of the eighteenth century as a major new source of slaves when in 1776 a French trader, Maurice, signed a treaty with the town's sultan, granting him exclusive rights to buy slaves from the island. These slaves were shipped to the sugar plantations on the French-held island of Mauritius and to the West Indies. The treaty was also meant to have promised Kilwa French protection against Oman, but in 1780, undoubtedly attracted by the economic boom there, Oman restored her control over the island and established a new garrison there, before capturing Mafia Island, the first steps in a sudden Omani resurgence.
Mazrui control of the coast further north was finally challenged in the mid 1780s. After the death of the Omani sultan in 1784, a fierce succession dispute erupted between two Busaidi brothers. The defeated claimant, Seif bin Ahmad, left Oman with his son and attempted to establish an independent sultanate along the Swahili coast. Seif bin Ahmad captured Kilwa and his son, Ali, seized Zanzibar, forcing the sultan in Muscat to put on a major display of strength. In 1785 he sent a force to the Swahili coast that not only overthrew the rival sultanate, but forced all the towns of the coast to submit to rule from Oman. Even the Mazrui fell into line. Seif bin Ahmad was exiled to Lamu and Oman's military garrisons along the coast were strengthened, especially on Zanzibar which became an even greater Omani stronghold.
Seyyid Said
When the sultan of Oman died in 1804, Muscat was once again thrown into one of its frequent bouts of instability due to the fact that his son and heir, Said bin Sultan, was only thirteen years old. This minor crisis was resolved by appointing Said's cousin, Badr, as regent. The regency ended three years later in violent circumstances when Badr, having made the mistake of teasing Said for crying like a girl, was killed on the spot by his irate cousin. Sixteen year old Said was now sultan, or seyyid, of Oman.
Seyyid Said bin Sultan was to have a greater influence on the development of the Swahili coast than any other individual in history. Nevertheless, his first years in control were not all that promising. By the time he became sultan, the Mazrui had begun to reassert themselves after the Omani attacks of the 1780s, while in Oman Said's control was still precarious, threatened both by pirates on the seas off Arabia and by tribes threatening Oman's borders on the mainland. In such circumstances, the teenage sultan was more concerned with consolidating his authority in Oman to worry about the growing power of the Mazrui, whose power was spreading north, right into the heart of the Lamu Archipelago. But here, suddenly immersed in the age-old internecine conflicts and complex politics of Pate and Lamu, they were about to take a step too far.
In 1807, at around the time Seyyid Said was murdering his cousin, the Mazrui deposed the pro-Omani king of Pate, replacing him with one of their supporters. It rather upset things in the Archipelago. Lamu, fearing a joint invasion by troops from Pate and Mombasa, adopted a somewhat risky form of deception in order to try to break the new alliance. They invited the Mazrui into Lamu and asked them to build a fort in the town to protect them against Pate, hoping that this would so incense Pate that their new alliance with the Mazrui would collapse. The Mazrui agreed to Lamu's request and began construction.
Lamu may have felt their ruse was working, but in actual fact the Mazrui had decided to help Lamu with Pate's connivance, hatching a plot on the lines of the Trojan Horse. The Mazrui would, indeed, build a fort in Lamu town, but they would use it to conquer Lamu from the inside. Luckily for them, the people of Lamu got wind of the plot and, with the fort only half-built, they expelled the Mazrui. Not to be outdone so easily, a massive Patean-Mombasan invasion force landed to the east of Lamu town on the beach at Shela and advanced as far as Hedabu Hill before surprisingly being driven back by Lamu's troops with heavy losses. According to the Pate Chronicle, the surprise defeat was due to the burial of a brass pot and gong by a local magician which had the power to prevent the invasion force from advancing over it, forcing them into an embarrassing retreat back to Shela. If that was not bad enough, by the time they returned to Shela, the tide had gone out and with the Patean and Mombasan dhows now stranded on the beach, the invaders were unable to escape to safety. A bloody battle was waged on the sand dunes at Shela and the forces of Pate and Mombasa were annihilated. The Swahili chronicles don't say how many died, but they do say that among the dead were forty men with the same name, and given that the bleached bones of the slain were still being unearthed in the dunes of Hedabu and Shela up to a century later, it must have been a slaughter. In any case, Pate never bothered Lamu again, and the once-mighty city state was never to recover.
The Battle of Shela was a turning point, not just for the Lamu Archipelago, but for the entire Swahili coast. Fearing that Pate would soon attempt to gain revenge for her defeat, Lamu threw herself into the protective arms of the Omani. Seyyid Said's men came to the town, helped Lamu finish the fort that the Mazrui had begun, and left a governor there, giving the Omani for the first time a secure foothold on the north coast from which to take on the now-bruised Mazrui.
With the help of British ships based in India, Oman was able to defeat the pirates that threatened navigation off the coast of Arabia and by 1817 Seyyid Said had strengthened control in Oman enough to consider extending his authority from his base in Lamu. That year, he sent a fleet containing four thousand men to wrest Pate from Mazrui control, and after three attacks they succeeded in taking the town. With the Archipelago in his hands, Seyyid Said issued a decree forbidding any of his subjects in East Africa to trade with Mombasa, a sanction made many times worse in 1822 when Omani forces seized control of Pemba Island, cutting Mombasa off from her main source of food. Now sandwiched between Omani blocs to the north and south, and with their coastal empire slipping away, it was clear that Seyyid Said would soon be strong enough to launch an attack on the Mazruis in Mombasa. In desperation, the Mazrui sought outside protection - and found it in the arms of some very surprised British naval officers.
Owen's Protectorate
As early as 1807, the Mazrui had sent an embassy to the British headquarters in Bombay, offering them overlordship of Mombasa in return for protection against Oman. It was not a good time to try to make such a deal with Britain since she was in the middle of the Napoleonic Wars and the last thing Britain wanted was to antagonise Oman, a country that could potentially be used by Napoleon as a staging point for an invasion of India and which was consequently being cultivated as an ally of Britain. The Mazrui offer was therefore rejected.
In 1823, with an Omani fleet expected to strike soon, Mombasa's ruler, Sheikh Abdullah Mazrui, offered his entire coastal realm - or what was left of it - to Britain. Unfortunately for the Mazrui, even though the Napoleonic Wars had been over for eight years the British were still keen to cultivate diplomatic relations with Oman, this time as part of an entir
ely new mission. In the same year as the Mazrui had made their first offer, Britain's parliament, stirred by the powerful arguments of one of its members, William Wilberforce, had passed a law prohibiting the trade in slaves within the British Empire. Enforcing this meant ensuring that no slaves were imported into British possessions, and in the Indian Ocean this meant India and Mauritius, the former French colony which had been given to Britain following Napoleon's defeat. Therefore in 1822, just a year before the Mazrui's second offer, Britain and Oman signed the Moresby Treaty which not only prohibited the transport of slaves to British possessions, but prohibited Oman from exporting slaves outside the sultan's domains in East Africa and Arabia. The Mazrui request for protection against Oman therefore came six months too late and there was no way the British government would upset Oman in order to help the Mazrui, a family heavily involved in the slave trade. But the Mazrui were not about to take no for an answer.
In the wake of the Moresby Treaty, two British ships under the command of Captain William Fitzwilliam Wentworth Owen were dispatched to the Indian Ocean to survey the East African coast and Arabia with an eye to monitoring the slave trade in the region. Owen, a man committed to the cause of ridding the world of slavery, sailed to Muscat on his ship, HMS Leven, for a meeting in which he hectored Seyyid Said about the horrors of the trade, while the other ship under his command, HMS Barracouda, paid a visit to Mombasa to stock up on supplies.
A History of the East African Coast Page 7