A History of the East African Coast Read online

  A HISTORY

  OF THE

  EAST AFRICAN

  COAST

   

  Charles

  Cornelius

   

  CONTENTS

  INTRODUCTION: The Swahili

  PART 1: EARLY HISTORY

  The Land of Punt

  The Periplus of the Erythraean Sea

  Azania and Rome

  PART 2: THE MEDIEVAL SWAHILI CIVILIZATION

  Gede and James Kirkman

  The First Swahili Towns

  The Foundation Tales

  Chinese and Arabic descriptions of the coast

  The Rise of Islam

  Al Idrisi

  New Towns and Economic Boom

  Ibn Battuta

  The Golden Age

  PART 3: THE PORTUGUESE

  European Exploration and Vasco da Gama

  Portuguese Conquest of the East African Coast

  The Decline of Portuguese Control

  PART 4: THE OMANI

  Omani Rule and the Mazrui

  Seyyid Said

  Owen's Protectorate

  The Zanzibar Sultanate

  Suppression of the Slave Trade

  The Scramble for East Africa

  Swahili Resistance

  PART 5: THE TWENTIETH CENTURY

  Colonial Rule

  Independence

  EPILOGUE

  COPYRIGHT

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  FURTHER READING

   

  For Mum and Dad

  INTRODUCTION: The Swahili

   

  Living along the narrow coastal strip where the African continent meets the Indian Ocean, the Swahili people are a result of the coming together of two distinct cultures: African Bantu and Middle Eastern Arab. It is a unique culture. For the last thousand years, while most African people followed a nomadic lifestyle, the Swahili have developed a thriving urban civilisation that has been engaged in maritime trade on an intercontinental scale, used one of Africa's first written languages, enjoyed a sophisticated, deeply religious culture based around a string of stone towns and whose leaders lived in palaces inlaid with gold, silver and ivory. Here is one of Africa's oldest and greatest civilisations.

  The development of the Swahili civilisation is inextricably linked with trade. The Swahili, and the people who lived here before them, have been engaged in overseas trade for the last three millennia, providing a range of luxury goods unsurpassed anywhere in the world. The northern parts of the coast, in modern Somalia, had a limitless supply of spices, such as cinnamon, and aromatic gums like frankincense and myrrh. Further south could be bought goods harvested from wild animals such as ivory, rhinoceros horn, tortoiseshell and leopardskin. Ambergris, the waxy secretion of sperm whales washed up on East Africa's beaches, was valued highly by perfume makers. Slaves, too, have been exported for centuries to the countries of the Middle East and beyond. Gold was brought out of the mines of Zimbabwe and the Transvaal for export from towns on the southern parts of the coast such as Sofala, Mozambique and Kilwa. And eventually, often via the markets of Egypt, the Levant, Arabia, Persia and India, these goods found their way to wealthy courts as far apart as England and China. The East African coast was an integral part of a trading zone of near-global proportions.

  Stretching along 3000 miles of coastline from Somalia in the north to Mozambique in the south and encompassing offshore islands as distant as the Comoros Islands, the Swahili coast has been blessed with a combination of geographical gifts that have made the region ideal for settlement, navigation and commercial exploitation. The coast is protected by an almost unbroken line of coral reef, keeping much of the force of ocean waves and currents at bay, making navigation behind the reefs much easier and providing sheltered beaches for offloading cargo. The coral itself made an excellent building tool. In places, rivers flowing from the distant African highlands break out into the ocean, forming deep inlets which provided excellent natural harbours and a base for larger towns, while offshore islands, some close to the mainland, others further offshore, provided good harbours and a degree of protection from marauding tribes from the interior.

  The East African coast begins at the tip of the Horn of Africa, the peninsula jutting out at the end of the Red Sea, a point known as Cape Guardafui. The coastline around and to the south of the Horn is a dry area with few natural harbours where sand dunes extend far inland, but in the hinterland beyond is a land that was, from ancient times, so rich in spices and aromatic gums that it was known as the Cape of Spices or the Cape of Cinnamon. Waves of immigrants from nearby Arabia and settlement by inland tribes has altered the population to such an extent that it cannot today be called part of the Swahili world, but it is where our story begins.

  The spartan, northern Somali coast eventually breaks into the more lush Benadir coast, along which towns like Warsheikh, Mogadishu, Merca, Brava and Kismayu are located. Further south, a string of thin islands sits close offshore and, just beyond the frontier with modern Kenya, lies the Lamu Archipelago, three small, sandy islands whose creeks act as beds for huge crops of mangrove trees, whose wood was used as a valuable construction material for thousands of years. Here, the mainland is still sandy, but it soon gives way to a more lush and fertile coastal plain where agriculture thrives and through which the Tana and Sabaki Rivers flow out into a great bay, watched over by the town of Malindi, whose harbour water is dyed red by the soil carried to the ocean from far inland. After another fertile stretch of deeply forested land lies Kilifi, looking out over a grandiose bay of brilliant blue and further south, the island of Mombasa, nestling between two arms of the mainland coastline. South of Mombasa lies a long stretch of sandy beach, popular amongst tourists today and home to a number of scattered settlements all the way up to the border with Tanzania. The northern Tanzanian coast is home to the bustling port of Dar es Salaam, Tanzania's former capital and still an important commercial centre. The great islands of the Swahili coast lie off the coast of Tanzania including Pemba, and the queen of them all, Zanzibar. Mafia Island stands close to the delta formed by the outpouring of the Rufiji River and further south lays Kilwa. A string of small settlements line the fertile coast that stretches into Mozambique, where a number of important ports are located, including Quelimane, Maputo and, lying just south of the point at which the Great Rift Valley breaks out into the ocean, Sofala, while 300 kilometres offshore lie the Comoros Islands. Beyond lay the giant island of Madagascar and the coast of South Africa, beginning with the province of Natal.

  Until the twentieth century, the East African coast looked out to the Indian Ocean and the world beyond for its raison d’être. Travelling by water used to be, the world over, the preferred method of travel and the East African coast was no exception. Here, the people of the Indian Ocean invented a sewn boat with triangular sails, the dhow. Able to navigate both deep oceans and shallow coastal waters, it was ideally suited to conditions in the Indian Ocean. The journey across the ocean was made possible by a hugely helpful weather condition, monsoon winds that blew away from East Africa for one part of the year, before turning 180 degrees and blowing back the other way. These winds have been blowing with metronomic regularity for aeons, carrying dhows laden with cargo. From October to April, the wind blows from the northeast. Known to the Swahili as the kazkazi, it carried dhows from India, Persia and Arabia to the East African coast, carrying goods to sell in exchange for East Africa's luxuries. Then the wind turns, and for the rest of the year the northwest monsoon blows. Known as the kuzi, it carried dhows away from East Africa, laden with gold, ivory, and all the other produce of the land. Before the age of steam, this force
was the power that drove trade around the Indian Ocean world and without it, the story that follows would not have been possible.

  Only with the construction of railways and roads at the end of the nineteenth century from the coast to the new towns of the interior such as Nairobi, did the coast start to look more to the African hinterland. Roads and railways overcame some of the difficulties of travelling overland, a journey previously made almost impossible by an uncompromising expanse of arid desert that cut the coastal plains off from the fertile highlands.

  The history of the East African coast is a story of pioneers, pirates, adventurers and entrepreneurs, horrors, tragedies and comedies, scandal and political intrigue, international commerce, lost cities, invasion, rebellion, terrorism and reconstruction, an African success story that provides us, not only with a history of the past, but an understanding of the present and a hope for the future.

   

  PART 1: EARLY HISTORY

   

  The Land of Punt

  Deep inside the Temple of Queen Hatsheput at Thebes on the banks of the River Nile is a relief depicting an Egyptian expedition to the 'Land of Punt', an ancient land thought to lie in the Horn of Africa in modern-day Somalia. The expedition of five ships was sent out to collect incense trees and myrrh in response to the prophecy of an oracle. The relief itself is around 3500 years old, and mentions that the expedition was the first Egyptian voyage to the Land of Punt for five hundred years, meaning Egyptians were going there to trade at least as long ago as 2000BC. While the voyage in those days may rarely have been made by Egyptians, it is likely that traders from south-western Arabia made regular trips across the Red Sea to barter for the luxury goods of Punt, goods that included spices and aromatic gum resins such as frankincense and myrrh; from the markets of Arabia, these goods would then have exported to the wealthy courts of Arabia, Egypt and beyond.

  One of the most famous ancient customers for East Africa's produce would have been King Solomon, one of ancient Israel's first kings, a man famed for his wisdom and wealth, who ruled around the year 1000BC. During his reign he was visited by the Queen of Sheba, whose empire included south-western Arabia and the African coast on the other side of the Red Sea. Quite how far south her coastal empire stretched is open to debate - some think it reached as far as modern-day Mozambique - but a story, told in the Biblical Book of Kings, tells that in return for receiving his wisdom, the Queen of Sheba provided Solomon with huge quantities of spices, gold and precious stones, luxury goods found along the East African coast. The Solomon and Sheba relationship didn't end there: every three years after her first visit, Solomon sent ships to gather gold, silver, sandalwood, precious stones, ivory, apes and peacocks from Ophir, a market town probably within Sheba and thought by some to be modern-day Sofala in Mozambique. The Bible says that Solomon imported a colossal 23 tons of gold a year, much of which paid for the construction of his Temple in Jerusalem, with the rest lavished upon his magnificent court: King Solomon is said to have had made shields hammered from gold and to have sat upon an ivory throne, while his courtiers drank from golden goblets. This was one seriously rich king, and, almost certainly, these products came from East Africa.

   

  The Periplus of the Erythraean Sea

  These early trading stories are sketchy and laced with legend, but there can be little doubt that by the second century AD, a well-organised trading system, served by coastal settlements, had been established along the coast of East Africa. We know this because of a guide book, by far the most important written source for the coast that survives from ancient times, called The Periplus of the Erythraean Sea. A Periplus is a kind of ancient guide book and the Erythraean Sea was the name given by ancient Greeks and Romans to the Indian Ocean. This Guide Book to the Indian Ocean, written around 40BC by a Greek merchant, described a journey from the Red Sea south along the East African coast. A century later, a Greek from Alexandria in Egypt called Claudius Ptolemy, wrote one of the greatest ancient works on geography, which included information about the East African coast, giving us a text with which to compare and supplement the Periplus. Together, these two texts give us a fascinating, all-too-brief glimpse into life at the coast in the first half of the second century AD.

  Both the Periplus and Ptolemy referred to the East African coast using the ancient Greek name for the region, Azania. They named several settlements but these cannot be easily identified with any towns today. We cannot even be sure if they were permanent settlements because many of them may well have been temporary trading bases, growing as traders arrived with the kazkazi, dying once the kuzi began to take traders home.

  The most important town in Azania was Rhapta, “the last mainland emporium of Azania” according to the Periplus, a town named after the small sewn boats used there, where a large amount of ivory and tortoiseshell could be found. Rhapta is also mentioned by Ptolemy, who gave Rhapta the grandiose title of metropolis, and says it was “set back a little from the sea” near a river that flowed out into a bay which took three days and nights to cross.

  Since the first English publication of the Periplus in 1912, historians and archaeologists have speculated and searched in vain as to the precise location of Rhapta. The most likely location would have been in the delta formed by the outpouring of the Rufiji River opposite Mafia Island. Mark Horton has calculated, using the information about sailing days contained in the Periplus that Rhapta was in the vicinity of modern-day Bagomoyo in northern Tanzania, but others have suggested it was as far north as the coast opposite the Lamu Archipelago or somewhere in the delta of the Tana River: Ungama Bay, with its headland at Kipini, just west of which flows the Tana River, bears a striking resemblance to Ptolemy's description: “This bay begins with the market town called Toniki; and beside the promontory is the river Rhapton and the metropolis of the same name set back a little from the sea.”

  Essina, Sarapion, and Toniki are towns mentioned by Ptolemy that lie along the coast, but again, their location is unclear. The Periplus also mentioned Sarapion, a town called Nikon, an island called Diorux and the Pyralaae Islands, which are generally thought to be the islands of the Lamu Archipelago. But all of these are just given passing mention.

  Ptolemy knew little of the world beyond Rhapta, except for a brief mention that further south lay the island of Menouthias. In the Periplus of the Erythraean Sea, Menouthias is described as a flat, wooded island with many rivers, whose inhabitants caught mainly fish and tortoise using small sewn boats and dug-out canoes and where crocodiles lived. This description of the island doesn't exactly give the impression of a vibrant trading community, and the place remains something of a mystery, not least because it is even harder than Rhapta to pinpoint on the map. Ptolemy places it to the south of Rhapta while the Periplus places it two day's sail to the north. Menouthias could be Pemba or Zanzibar. It might be Mafia. It could even be Madagascar. We simply don't know.

  Neither the Periplus nor Ptolemy are particularly helpful when describing the inhabitants of the coast. The Periplus described them as “men of the greatest stature, who are pirates” while Ptolemy called them “Man-Eating Ethiopians”, which doesn't give us a great deal to go on, but the Periplus does suggest a quite significant fact, that Arab merchants were intermarrying with the Africans and learning their language, suggesting that Arab settlement on the coast began at least 2000 years ago.

  The Periplus describes in some detail the goods traded: in the north, around Cape Guardafui, cinnamon, slaves and tortoiseshell were common; further south, ivory, rhinoceros horn and tortoiseshell were important commodities. No mention was made of gold, which, a thousand years earlier and a thousand years later, were noted exports. In return for these goods were sold such items as iron tools and weapons, together with small glass vessels. Wine and wheat were also provided by Arab merchants “to gain the goodwill of the barbarians.”

  The Periplus is very clear on the political situation at the coast, saying that “the country has no
sovereign but each emporium is ruled by its own chief.” Independent of each other, they were all, however, subject to whoever was the most powerful ruler in Arabia, a long-standing tradition, which, at the time of the Periplus, handed suzerainty over the coast to the chief of Al Ma'afir in modern-day Yemen.

  Ptolemy extended his geography to the African interior too, describing that to the west of Azania “lies the Mountain of the Moon, from which the Lake of the Nile receives snow water”, providing sceptical Europeans the impossible image of a snow-capped mountain in the tropics, an image that would take another 1700 years to be confirmed.

   

  Azania and Rome

  The Periplus was written in Egypt, a country which, following the death of Antony and Cleopatra in 30AD, had been formally annexed to the Roman Empire and was ruled by the emperor himself. Using Egypt as a hub, Rome was able to extend her influence, if not direct control, into the Middle East and the Red Sea. Rome often made alliances with kings on the fringes of her empire, so it's not impossible that Azania's Arabian overlord had such a relationship with Rome. In any case, Roman influence, via Egypt, would have afforded safe passage to Greek, Roman and Egyptian vessels down the Red Sea and into the Indian Ocean, drawing Azania into the Roman sphere of influence. The Periplus is evidence that trade with Roman Egypt did exist. And the extent to which this trade took place, the sophistication of this trade and its longevity, are attested to by remarkable discoveries, in several places in East Africa, of coins from Rome, Greece and beyond.

  In the 1940s, a coin of the Roman emperor, Victorinus, who ruled in the middle of the third century, was found near Nairobi. Quite what a Roman coin was doing in the middle of Kenya is anyone's guess. There is evidence of inland trade routes connecting the Kingdom of Axum, a Roman ally in the Ethiopian highlands, with the gold mining areas of central Africa, or perhaps the coin is simply what an archaeologist would call a stray. However, at Port Durnford on the southern Somali coast. a substantial collection of Roman coins was also unearthed, including no less than forty-six Roman coins dated to the first half of the fourth century AD, minted in places as far apart as Rome, Alexandria, Antioch, Constantinople and Thessalonica. Another six earlier Roman coins, covering the reigns of emperors from Nero (54-68) to Antonius Pius (138-161) were also found, in addition to sixteen coins from Egypt, six of them from the reign of Ptolemy III (247-221BC). On Zanzibar in the 1950s, another startling find was made by a man who turned up at the local museum with a handful of coins. The collection included Roman coins from the reigns of Diocletian (284-305), Licinius (308-324), Justin (518-527) and Justinian (527-565), together with five Parthian and Sassanian coins minted at Ctesiphon in Mesopotamia, the latest of them being dated to the reign of Ardashir I (227-241). In addition to these were two Hellenistic coins dated to the second century BC.