A History of the East African Coast

by Charles Cornelius

  The ten mighty guns of The Konigsberg were recovered by the Germans and used on land in the campaign led by Colonel Paul von Lettow-Vorbeck. He was to become the only German general to remain undefeated during the war, having had the sense to realise that, outnumbered, outgunned and isolated, his best option was to mount a guerrilla campaign against the British. Von Lettow-Vorbeck's makeshift army of around 12,000 men held out against a force of almost a quarter of a million British and colonial troops in East Africa, while the operation to sink The Konigsberg alone had tied down twenty British ships and ten aircraft, not to mention the coal they had to burn, pinning down British troops and resources desperately needed on the Western Front.

  After Germany's defeat in Europe, German East Africa became a League of Nations mandate administered by Britain and was renamed Tanganyika in 1920. The British retained Dar es Salaam as the mandate's capital and continued its expansion. Along with Tanga and Mombasa, Dar es Salaam continued to grow in economic importance. Sisal became Tanganyika's main export, and at its height a quarter of a million tons were being shipped out, mainly through Tanga, which reached her height in the 1920s. However Mombasa was the most prosperous port, something helped in the 1920s by improvements to the Mombasa-Nairobi railway. However, the recession of the 1920s and 1930s adversely affected much of the East African economy, particularly the fledgling agricultural economy run by up-country European farmers and after the 1929 stock market crash, the price of cloves collapsed so much that by 1932 Zanzibar and Pemba were earning just a quarter of the price they had been receiving for cloves three years earlier, leading to an attempt by African and Arab clove growers on the islands to exclude Indians from the clove industry. Malindi's exports fell by more than half between 1925 and 1938, but the economy here was helped by the development of a new form of commerce, tourism.

  From the 1930s onwards, up-country Europeans began to adopt the habit of British holidaymakers of taking in some sea air. The medical consensus at the time argued that too long in the Highlands under the equatorial sun could lead to madness, and so a trip to the seaside was thought to be just what the doctor ordered. And Malindi was the first to reap the benefits. In 1932, Brady's Palm Beach Hotel was opened, followed two years later by Lawford's Hotel, and Malindi quickly established itself as the seaside resort of choice for the up-country farming community, lured there not just by the beaches but by deep sea fishing. This fledgling tourist industry didn't have an easy infancy: five years after the opening of Lawford's, war broke out again and the tourists disappeared.

  The Second World War barely affected the coast. What little fighting there was, was limited to north-eastern Kenya and Italian Somaliland. On 1st July 1940 Italian forces invaded the British colony. Six months later, colonial forces from Nigeria, Britain, the Gold Coast, South Africa and India forced the Italians back and advanced into Italian Somaliland, capturing Kismayu and by the end of 1941 the Italians had surrendered.

  With the war over, tourism resumed. In 1946, Mombasa got its first seaside resort with the opening of Nyali Beach Hotel by John and Eva Noon. Another hotel was built in Malindi, while in 1956 in nearby Watamu, Ocean Sports opened its doors, mainly as a haunt for wizened, deep-sea fisherman rather than as an hotel. Tourism was still small-scale but it was growing, something helped by the visit, in 1952, of Princess Elizabeth of Britain to Mombasa, a visit commemorated by the erection of four giant steel tusks over the main road linking the town to the port at Kilindini. But it was not until the advent of long-haul charter flights from Europe in the mid 1960s that tourism really began to take off along the coast, and by that time, the political masters of the coast had changed yet again.

   

  Independence

  When the Winds of Change swept along the coast in the early 1960s to bring independence from colonial rule, it was a strange wind for the Swahili since it meant rule from what was, essentially, yet another foreign power. Admittedly rule now came from within Africa, rather than Arabia, Portugal, Oman, Britain or Germany, but it still took some getting used to. It was easier for the Swahili of Tanganyika and Somalia. At least for them the new capitals were coastal cities, but for the Swahili of Kenya, independence meant rule from Nairobi, an upstart city 600 kilometres inland. Further south in Mozambique, independence would have to wait more than ten years after the rest, and then only after a bloody civil war to rid themselves - and the coast - of Portuguese rule once and for all. What ethnic tensions existed were buried in the years following independence, allowing Kenya and Tanganyika to avoid the kind of civil strife that beset so many African countries. However, on Zanzibar it was a different story.

  Ethnic tensions had been growing in Zanzibar between the Arabs of Omani ancestry and African communities since the war. Power and influence was still firmly in the hands of the Arabs despite the fact that 85% of the population was African. The British made things worse by refusing to accept any African representatives on to Zanzibar's Legislative Council until 1947, and when elections to the council were finally allowed by the British in the 1950s, they rigged the elections in favour of the Arabs. In the 1957 council elections, all but one seat was won by the African party, but since the elections were only held to elect six of the twenty-five council members, the Arabs were still in the majority. Tensions continued to grow and, virtually blind to the problems, Britain granted independence to Zanzibar on 9th December 1963 with little attempt to address the situation. In effect, independence meant power being handed back to the Arabs. On January 12th 1964 these tensions erupted into a night of terror when John Okello, a Ugandan migrant, led six hundred supporters on a bloody rampage through the city's streets, massacring 12,000 Arabs and Indians. Thousands more fled, including the sultan, Seyyid Jamshid bin Abdulla bin Khalifa, who fled to Britain with his family and later took up residence in the somewhat calmer surroundings of Portsmouth. Three months after the revolution, an act of union between Tanganyika and Zanzibar was signed and the Republic of Tanzania was formed. In 1973 the capital of Tanzania was moved from Dar es Salaam to Dodoma, a move which made not the slightest bit of difference to Dar since most of the government ministries remained there. Even the National Assembly remained there until 1996 and Dar remained Tanzania's main city and commercial centre despite having lost its status as the country's political capital.

  During the 1970s and 1980s, the coast enjoyed an economic boom almost entirely the result of the tourism industry. A side-effect of this was a continuation in the steady flow of migrants from the African interior, but on a larger scale, lured there by employment opportunities in the growing number of tourist resorts along the coast, especially in Kenya, and by the 1990s the ethnic mix of the coastal population had changed beyond recognition. By the early 1990s, around a third of a million tourists arrived on the Kenyan coast each year. Malindi had become the in-place for Italians, Diani for the Germans, the coast north of Mombasa for the British and Americans while Zanzibar's history and beaches attracted everyone.

  This was just as well since other local trades had gone into precipitous decline, not least the sisal industry which had embarked upon a steady downturn in the years after the war in the face of competition from such synthetic fibres as nylon. Then in the late 1990s, the tourist industry collapsed as well. Faced with growing competition from other long-haul destinations, not least post-apartheid South Africa, it may have happened anyway, but the rot set in during the run-up to the 1997 General Elections in Kenya when ethnic clashes claimed the lives of dozens of people at Likoni on the mainland south of Mombasa Island. Tensions had been brewing between the local Swahili and up-country migrant workers for years, but then government cronies started to stir things up in order to avoid the re-election of an opposition MP in Likoni, someone whose main support came from the migrants. The Likoni Clashes resulted in the death of seventy people and an exodus of 100,000 people from the coast. International news coverage of the clashes had a catastrophic effect on the tourist industry and by the end of the 1990s, tourist arr
ivals had dropped to 150,000, half of the level ten years earlier.

  The following year, international terrorism came to the coast. In August 1998 a car bomb exploded outside the American embassy in Dar es Salaam, killing eleven people. A few minutes earlier, another car bomb had exploded underneath the American embassy in Nairobi, killing 263. Then in November 2002, the Kenyan coast again became a terrorist target. On the same day, missiles were fired on an Israeli airliner taking off from Mombasa's Moi International Airport while around the same time, a car bomb exploded at the Israeli-owned Paradise Beach Hotel in Kikambala, half way between Malindi and Mombasa, killing ten Kenyans and three Israelis. But this was nothing compared to the tragedy to the north in Somalia which was plunged into civil war after the overthrow of its military dictatorship in 1991. Fighting amongst the various clans for resources and influence devastated the country and reduced much of ancient Mogadishu to rubble, while the collapse of central government authority enabled piracy to emerge off the Somali coast.

  So today, the coast is faced with the challenges of ethnic differences and occasional outbreaks of violence. And of beautiful beaches and enterprising people. Which is, really, as it has always been.

   

  EPILOGUE

   

  One of the greatest works of Swahili literature is an epic poem called the ‘Al-Inkishafi’, the ‘Animation of the Soul’. Written by Seyyid Abdullah Ali Nasir (1720-1820), it laments the fall in power of Pate and the death of its once-great rulers.

   

  Their old homes stink of silence

  Making homes for eerie bats

  No talk no laughs

  Just spiders spinning webs above their beds.

  The china holes are birds' nests now

  And owls hoot out while walking birds nod by

  Vultures fill the ebony shelves

  And young doves coo to emptiness then flap away unflustered

  Wild birds haunt the halls

  Cockroaches climb the staircase

  In these men's halls the cricket whines and whines.

   

  And now where are the noblemen of Pate,

  Those bright faced glorious men?

  Locked up in the mansions of the ageless sand

  And shorn of all their sovereignty and strength.

  There were noble lords and viziers

  Who marched in front of mighty troops

  But soon the grave ensnared them

  and the manacles of death closed round their limbs

   

  (Translation by Stephen Derwent Partington, 1999)

   

  Wandering through the ruins of the Swahili coast, one cannot help thinking on similar lines to Nasir, to what life must have been like when these ruined stone houses and stone mosques were full of life. The history of the Swahili coast is peppered by the rise and fall of towns like Pate, sometimes in quite appalling circumstances. War, invasion, disease and, more recently, political conflict and terrorism, have taken a heavy toll on Swahili life.

   Some towns survived everything: Mombasa endured sackings, sieges, bombardments and attacks from cannibals to take its pre-eminent place on the coast. But the real survivor is Swahili culture. United by its language and religion it has formed a bond between peoples a thousand miles and a thousand years apart. Truly, this is one of the world’s great cultures and its story one of the great histories of our world.

  COPYRIGHT

   

  Kindle Edition | Copyright 2013 Charles Cornelius

   

  This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only.  This ebook may not be re-sold, copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed or given away to other people except as specifically permitted under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased.  If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient.  If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please purchase your own copy.  Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

   

  Charles Cornelius is a British-born historian and teacher. He taught in Kenya from 1998 to 2005, firstly at the Mombasa Academy at the coast and then at The Banda School in Nairobi, where he taught History, Latin and ICT. Since then, he has taught in Bratislava, Budapest and Moscow, and he is currently working for the British Council in Bangkok. He gained his Bachelor’s degree in History and Classical Studies at Keele University, where he won the Wedgwood History Dissertation Prize, and his Masters degree in Education with the University of Bath.

   

  http://www.facebook.com/charles.cornelius.58

  FURTHER READING

   

  Over the years there has been a wealth of writing about the East African coast. Sadly, many of these books are now out of print. I was fortunate enough to find many of these books in some of Mombasa’s and Nairobi’s bookshops while I was teaching in Kenya, but my main debt is to the Fort Jesus Museum Library in Mombasa and the library of the British Institute in Eastern Africa. Many of the older books need to be read with care as they take a somewhat ‘colonial’ perspective on Swahili history.

   

  James de Vere Allen (1974), Lamu. National Museums of Kenya

   

  James de Vere Allen (1993), Swahili Origins: Swahili Culture and the Shungwaya Phenomenon. East African Educational Publishers and the Ohio University Press.

   

  C.R. Boxer and Carlos de Azewado (1960), Fort Jesus and the Portuguese in Mombasa. Hollis and Carter.

   

  Chryssee and Esmond Bradley Martin (1970). Quest For The Past: An Historical Guide to Lamu. Woolworths.

   

  Esmond Bradley Martin (1975), Malindi: the Historic Town on the Kenya Coast. Marketing and Publishing Company

   

  Esmond Bradley Martin (1978), Zanzibar: Tradition and Revolution. Hamish Hamilton

   

  Neville Chittick (1965), The 'Shirazi’ Colonisation of East Africa. Journal of African History (6:3 pp.275-294)

   

  R. Coupland (1956), East Africa and its Invaders. Oxford University Press

   

  Basil Davidson (1968), Africa in History: Themes and Outlines. Weidenfeld and Nicolson

   

  Basil Davidson (1970), The Growth of African Civilisation: East and Central Africa to the Late Nineteenth Century. Longmans

   

  J. Duffy (1959), Portuguese Africa. Harvard University Press.

   

  G.S.P Freeman-Grenville (1962), The East African Coast: Selected Documents from the first to the earlier nineteenth century. The Clarendon Press.

   

  G.S.P Freeman-Grenville (1962), Medieval History of the Coast of Tanganyika. Oxford University Press

   

  G.S.P. Freeman-Grenville (1963), The Coast 1498-1840. In The Oxford History of East Africa Volume 1. Oxford University Press.

   

  John Gray (1962), History of Zanzibar from the Middle Ages to 1856. Oxford University Press

   

  John Gray (1963), Zanzibar and the Coastal Belt 1840-84. In The Oxford History of East Africa Volume 1. Oxford University Press.

   

  Ahmed Hamoud al-Maamiry (1988), Omani Sultans In Zanzibar. Lancers Books.

   

  L.W. Hollingsworth (1949), A Short History of the East Coast of Africa. MacMillan

   

  Usam Ghaidan (1975), Lamu: a study of the Swahili town. East African Literature Bureau

   

  Mark Horton (1986), The Land of Zanj: Recent Archaeological Discoveries in East Africa. Paper presented to the Society of Antiquaries, April 1986.

   

  Mark Horton (1996), Shanga: th
e archaeology of a Muslim trading community on the coast of East Africa. The British Institute in Eastern Africa

   

  Mark Horton and John Middleton (2000). The Swahili: the social landscape of a mercantile society. Blackwell.

   

  John Jewell (1976), Dhows at Mombasa. East African Publishing House

   

  James Kirkman (1964), Men and Monuments of the East African Coast. Praeger

   

  James Kirkman (1975), Gedi: historical monument. Museum Trustees of Kenya

   

  Ira M Lapidus (1988), A History of Islamic Societies. Cambridge University Press.

   

  Robert Nunez Lyne (2001), Zanzibar In Contemporary Times. The Gallery Publications.

   

  Robert Maxon (1986), East Africa: An Introductory History. East African Educational Publishers and West Virginia University Press.

   

  Charles Miller (2001), The Lunatic Express. Penguin.

   

  Gervase Mathew (1963), The East African Coast until the Coming of the Portuguese. In The Oxford History of East Africa Volume 1. Oxford University Press.