Lets Talk African History: The Swahili Coast

[Max B]

my favorite part of Africa

why is Somalia part of it though, when they teamed up with the Portuguese to take down Lamu(luckily with assistance from the Turks, the Lamu residents got it back)?

Maybe because Mogadishu had very important and historical port?

 

[Premeditated]

Maybe because Mogadishu had very important and historical port?

yeah but they didn't speak the swahili language though. yall had your own language and culture

 

[Max B]

yeah but they didn't speak the swahili language though. yall had your own language and culture

Southern somalis speak swahili. North east kenya was once part of greater somalia thus one so many somalis live in kenya and speak Swahili

 

[Bawon Samedi]

Southern somalis speak swahili. North east kenya was once part of greater somalia thus one so many somalis live in kenya and speak Swahili

But Swahili is not the original language of Somalis...

 

[Max B]

But Swahili is not the original language of Somalis...

far southern somalis know..esp the bantu somalis and baravanese somalis( zanj mixed with arab and portugese. Bravanese people speak a dialect based off swahil)i

Of course but the countries we closes to learn each other languages due to living in the land once being part of greater somalia (ogaden,ethopia and north east kenya)

 

[MajorVitaman]

When you get that @KidStranglehold African History notification

Spoiler

 

[BigMan]

I've always been interested in the Swahili coast which was clearly apart of the greater Indian Ocean trade . I definitely want to go to Kenya and Tanzania especially since my first name is of Swahili origin

Good thread

 

[Sauanaffe Tustunnagee]

Though the downside of the Swahili civilizations is that a good number of them would be what we call "c00ns", especially those from Zanzibar who specialized in selling slaves from the interior to Arabs and were the main ones. But other than that Kilwa and Mombasa said to very beautiful by outsiders. And if I remember correctly the people of the Swahili coast were the Zanjs.

i

the bolded is why i could never really get into Swahili culture but it's good to see myth Middle Eastern carpet pilots were responsible for all the architecture and govenment structure of the Swahili civilization

 

[Bawon Samedi]

far southern somalis know..esp the bantu somalis and baravanese somalis( zanj mixed with arab and portugese. Bravanese people speak a dialect based off swahil)i

Of course but the countries we closes to learn each other languages due to living in the land once being part of greater somalia (ogaden,ethopia and north east kenya)

Interesting.

And btw I talked to some Somalis around the net and they state that Somalis were very big in the Indian Ocean trade(and I believe they were along with Ethiopians and Swahilis), but they also said Somalis had many island colonies throughout the Indian Ocean such as the Maldives. Is that true? I know Somali history is hard to come by on the net. I'm waiting for @Nomad1 to make that Somali thread.

 

[Bawon Samedi]

When you get that @KidStranglehold African History notification

Spoiler

 

[Bawon Samedi]

More in depth on trade between the Swahilis and Chinese. I swear these people were something else..

When we turn our attention to some of the more ancient Chinese writings we find evidence that Swahili sailors arrived on Chinese shores. An interesting passage can be found in the Ch'en-han-shu. This document discusses China's maritime trade links with other countries during the early Han Dynasty. It states:
* Going again by boat about four months, there is the country of Yi-li-mo. Going by land about ten days, there is the country of Fu-kan-tu-lu, two months beyond again, there was Huang-chih; and from Huang-chih Emperor P'ing received an envoy who brought a rhinoceros as a present.

Bear in mind rhinos are indigenous to Africa. In the past, a Swahili trading center existed on the island of Zanzibar. This is a small island located just off the coast of East Africa. "Zanj" or "Zaniji" was the term medieval Arabs used for east African peoples. Interestingly, the term "zanj" resurfaced in an Arab writing of 1154 AD. The passage speaks about India and China establishing trade links with one another. It stated India fell into a state of confusion and as a result the Chinese had to withdraw their trading post and establish them on the islands of a place it called "Zanedji".

Documents from China's Sung Dynasty (960-1279 AD) have also provided some details. The Sung records of 1083 AD speak of another foreign envoy visiting the imperial court. The last three characters in this envoy's name translate as "the zanj". The document stated since the envoy traveled such a long distance, the emperor decided to do something special for him: "...besides giving him the same presents for which he formerly bestowed on him, added thereto two thousand ounces of silver."

Historian Basil Davidson has actually discovered Chinese testimonials of Swahili sailors visiting their country. He writes: "A Chinese commissioner of foreign trade in Fukien province of southern China recorded in 1226 that the East African cities imported 'white cotton cloth, porcelain, copper, and red cottons' by way of ships that came every year..."

The Chinese made small sculptures of the Swahili merchants visiting their country. In his book, Black Jade: The African Presence in the Ancient East, art historian James E. Brunson displays a miniature clay figure of a Swahili sailor. This clay figure in the likeness of a merchant from the east African island of Zanzibar was actually unearthed in China. The piece dates back to China's Tang Dynasty (618-907 AD).

The most famed and well documented Swahili visits to China center around the trade links Chinese and African people established during the 1400s. On September 20, 1414 sailors from the east African city of Malindi had presented a very extraordinary present to the emperor of China. The ruler of Malindi ordered his ambassadors to tranship a giraffe to China. When the Malindi sailors unveiled this creature at the imperial court the court officials gathered closer "to gaze at it and their joy knew no end." The emperor was so impressed with the gift that he ordered a calligrapher named Shen Tu to paint the animal. The painting contains classical Chinese characters retelling the story of the giraffe being transported and presented to the court by African ambassadors. Shen Tu also composed a poem commemorating the animal...An interesting twist to the story about the Malindi giraffe is the fact that when ever Cheng visited Africa he usually returned to China with African ambassadors. And the ambassadors habitually brought exotic African animals to present to the imperial court.

After his fourth voyage Cheng returned to China with another group of ambassadors from Malindi. On September 16, 1416 these ambassadors presented another giraffe to the imperial court. Nearly two years after the giraffe painted by Shen Tu. At the palace gate in Nanjing the emperor also received from them zebras which the Chinese called "celestial horses" and "celestial stags" (probably oryx).

In his book, They Came Before Columbus, Dr. Ivan Van Sertima points out the Swahili were actually transporting elephants to the courts in China in the thirteenth century. This demonstrated the level of sophistication in their ship building and navigational capabilities. In East Africa's Fort Jesus Museum there is presently on display a model of a type of ship the Swahili used to sail across the Indian Ocean. It is also worth nothing Levathe's words on this matter:
"In 1498, when Vasco da Gama and his fleet of three battered caravels rounded the Cape of Good Hope and landed in East Africa on their way to India, they met natives who sported embroidered green silk caps with fine fringe. The Africans scoffed at the trinkets the Portuguese offered- beads, bells, strings of coral, washbasins-and seemed unimpressed with their small ships."

ISLAMIC AFRICAN EMPIRES

^But again the Original source is from the book, They Came Before Marco Polo.

And again so much for the idea of the primitive Africans never being able to sail.

And being able to sail as far away to China... Also their trade with China brings up another interesting point in that trade with China goes back further. I guess what we are seeing today is just a continuation of this... Meanwhile when Europe traded with Africa(and even to this day) things never went well...

 

[BigMan]

More in depth on trade between the Swahilis and Chinese. I swear these people were something else..


ISLAMIC AFRICAN EMPIRES

^But again the Original source is from the book, They Came Before Marco Polo.

And again so much for the idea of the primitive Africans never being able to sail.

And being able to sail as far away to China... Also their trade with China brings up another interesting point in that trade with China goes back further. I guess what we are seeing today is just a continuation of this... Meanwhile when Europe traded with Africa(and even to this day) things never went well...

I wonder how history would be different if the Chinese continue tradin with Africa and didn't close up

 

[Bawon Samedi]

I wonder how history would be different if the Chinese continue tradin with Africa and didn't close up

1. Africa or at least Eastern Africa(and no East Africa does not only mean the HORN!!!!) would be a power house economically and would still dominate the Indian Ocean trade or still be the vanguards of it. They would actually have control over their resources too.
2. The ancient trade networks would have never been disturbed by Europeans like the Portuguese and so everyone including East Africans, Indians, Arabs, Chinese. and any other place the trade effected would be eating good...
3. Africans , Arabs or Chinese(most likely Chinese) would have made it to the New World before Europeans. The Chinese were well on their way to finding Australia. This is if they never ended trading and going back into isolation.
4. The Portuguese would never be able to disrupt the trading.
5. Africans probably would have gotten the blue prints for the gun BEFORE Europeans if trade between Africans and Chinese continued to get better and better.
6. Chinese and Africans influencing each other more.
7. Europeans would probaby be isolated out of the trade.

The Indian Ocean trade was already one of the most important trades in history(which Europeans were late comers to and I mean VERY LATE.) that Europeans so desperately wanted to become apart of, by trading more with China I can't imagine what would have happened for Africa...

 

[thatrapsfan]

I have family in oman and went there for a week i notice alot people from zanzibar/somalis living oman as its easier for em to obtain omani passport through a relative in monrach or just working for one. But alot north sudanese to.

Most Omani Zanzibaris fled the island after the revolution in the 70's. Sultan Qaboos offered all of them passports, as he was trying to modernize Oman and most Zanzibaris were better educated than mainland Omanis at the time.

Ive been to TZ/Zanzibar, and really enjoyed visiting both from a historical perspective. Cool thread.

 

[Bawon Samedi]

Lets touch base on how these towns grew, especially Kilwa.

Swahili settlements spread all along the coast and islands of East Africa (Fig. 1). There were few settlements before the Swahili towns of the thirteenth century, mostly built with mud and wattle. Concentration of these towns seems to have first occurred in the Mafia‐Kilwa region on the coast of Southern Tanzania and on the Lamu Archipelago on the northern coast of Kenya. Individual settlements seem also to have flourished elsewhere on the coastal littoral and virtually on every island large enough to settle from Lamu archipelago to Madagascar. These early settlements are identified by archaeologists by remains there of early Islamic goods including Sassanian Islamic ware, Islamic copies of Chinese pottery and early Sgraffiato [decoration which is scratched through the clay surface coating to reveal the colour of the underlying clay].

The early towns of Lamu Archipelago were excavated later by Chittick (1984) and Horton (1996). Settlements like Gedi, Malindi, and Mombasa grew to compete with those to the north and even Kilwa at the time when Portuguese had entered the region. What is obvious in the archaeology of the coast of Eastern Africa is that the Swahili towns were related, and this is true whether or not Kilwa controlled affairs in the whole region between AD 1000 and about AD 1400.

In the later phase, from about AD 1300, or slightly earlier, larger Swahili towns were built by coral stones and lime mortar and roofed by mangrove poles, lime mortar and palm leaves. Archaeology also finds a profusion of many smaller settlements, which were built by mud and wattle; the larger settlements may also have had the majority of its population living in such simple houses (Horton 1996; Pradines 2002; Chami 2002). When Ibn Baṭṭūṭa visited the coast of East Africa in the AD 1330s, contrary to what archaeology suggests today, he did not see many stone houses even in larger towns such as Kilwa and Mombasa (Gibb 1939). Whether this was a personal bias against stone houses if he only saw simpler town places is not yet properly explained (see discussion by Sutton 1998).

It is also not quite certain whether each large Swahili town had its own trade and cultural link with foreign traders or if trade was only controlled by one or two larger towns which collected trade goods and distributed them to other towns. Ibn Baṭṭūṭa seems to have visited only two towns on the Swahili coast, Kilwa and Mombasa, suggesting that those were the larger ones. However, in the same time period a Chinese trip to East Africa led by Zheng He entered a town called ‘Malin’. Some scholars think this place was Malindi on the Kenya coast (Chittick 1975: 21; Wheatley 1975: 90–1); Fuwei (Fuwei 1996: 190) suggests that ‘Malin’ was Kilwa. A support for Fuwei comes from the fact that the wealthy clan at Kilwa at that time was known as Malindi and the most impressive tombs at the water front belong to this clan.

Probably each large town had its own trade abroad or a set of traders visiting particular ports in the Middle East and India. Archaeologists are now finding sites and many Swahili cultural materials in the Middle East, suggesting that the Swahili people sailed to those distant lands (Sutton 1998). It is likely that the profusion of foreign trade goods in all Swahili settlements could also suggest that individual towns engaged in long distant trade at least within the western Indian Ocean seaboard. This is testified by the fact that several towns are now known to have made their own coins and that when Vasco da Gama reached Northern Mozambique he had to get a person from Malindi, on the Kenya coast, to guide him to India. Probably the southern towns were not co‐operating with the Portuguese.

Cities and Towns in East Africa
Felix Chami

If all the towns were related, then it is less likely that either of them were originally founded by foreigners...