OF THE
EAST AFRICAN
COAST
Charles
Cornelius
The Periplus of the Erythraean Sea
PART 2: THE MEDIEVAL SWAHILI CIVILIZATION
Chinese and Arabic descriptions of the coast
European Exploration and Vasco da Gama
Portuguese Conquest of the East African Coast
The Decline of Portuguese Control
Suppression of the Slave Trade
For Mum and Dad
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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, located 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.
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.
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.”
An even older source, the Hsin Tang Shu, points to another distant connection between the coast and China, the use of Negro slaves. The account described how envoys from Java brought two “Seng-chi” women to the Chinese imperial court in 614 as a tribute to the emperor. Negro slaves also appear to have been taken to China around the time Duan Chengshi was writing: a terracotta figure of an African slave was found in a ninth century Chinese tomb and we know from another Chinese source that many wealthy Cantonese households had African slaves.
In addition to Chinese sources, the East African coast is also described by several Arab writers. The Arab geographer, Al Jahiz, writing at about the same time as Duan Chengshi, names Kanbalu (probably Pemba Island) as being a centre of the slave trade. The export of slaves from Africa to the Middle East was certainly on a significant scale at this time, the numbers being large enough to make an African slave revolt in the marshes of the Shatt al Arab big news in the ninth century.
Al Masudi - or, to give him his full name, Abdul Hasan Ali Bin Hasan Bin Ali Al-Masudi – was a remarkable Arab scholar born in Baghdad in the final decade of the ninth century. A prolific writer and traveller, he wrote 34 books during his lifetime including a colossal 30 volume history of the world, the Muruj-al-Zaman, together with works on topics as diverse as earthquakes, Arabic music and a recent Persian invention, the windmill. As well as this, Al Masudi put forward, a thousand years before Charles Darwin, a theory of evolution. Because of the critical, scientific approach he applied to his studies of history and geography, he is known as the Herodotus of the Arabs and, like the ancient Greek historian, travelled to many of the places he described. In a breathtaking three year period from 915 to 918, Al Masudi travelled through Persia, into India, across to Sri Lanka and on through south-east Asia and China, before crossing the Indian Ocean to reach Madagascar, and sailing up the East African coast until he reached Oman. Finally settling down in Cairo, Al Masudi penned his greatest work, Meadows of Gold and Mines of Precious Stones, in which he described the people and culture of the places he had visited on his epic trip. The many accounts and legends Al Masudi recounted included the tale of a Muslim ship that set out in 889 from Spain, sailing west until it reached a previously unknown land named Ard Majhoola, from where he returned with fabulous treasures, a tale that has led some Arab scholars to suggest that Muslims reached America six centuries before Christopher Columbus.
In Meadows of Gold and Mines of Precious Stones, Al Masudi gave a detailed description of life at the East African coast, a region he called the Land of Zanj. Kanbalu and Sofala seem to have been the most important destinations for traders from Arabia and Persia. Described as an island one or two day's sail from the coast, Kanbalu was probably Pemba Island, but, despite having visited the island at least twice in his lifetime, Al Masudi failed to describe the island in any detail. However he did say that it had a mixed population of Muslims and non-Muslims, and that it had a Muslim royal family, providing us with the first contemporary written evidence of Muslim leadership anywhere along the coast, as well as clear evidence of Muslim settlement.
Sofala, however, was clearly the most important settlement on the coast. Al Masudi called it the Zanj capital, and from here its king, the Mfalme (meaning Son of the Great Lord), ruled the coast to the north, supported (if Al Masudi is to be believed) by an army of some 300,000 troops. Linguists have identified Mfalme as a Bantu word, suggesting that here, Africans were in charge.
While there clearly were Muslims on the coast, particularly at Kanbalu, it is likely that early in the tenth century they only formed a small and isolated minority of the population. Indeed, another tenth century Arab traveller, Ibn Hawqal, wrote that south of the Horn of Africa, the land “departs from the regions of Islam”. He described how the Zanj followed a pagan religion in which “every man worships what he pleases, be it a plant, an animal or a mineral”, presumably a kind of idol worship.
Some of the main exports of the coast at this time would have included gold, ambergris, timber, leopardskin and tortoiseshell, but Al Masudi only pays passing interest to these products. Of far greater interest to him is ivory, possibly the most lucrative export of Zanj.
In demand in Al Masudi's day as far afield as China and India, ivory tusks, carried to the coast from far inland, were shipped to the Middle East and re-exported at a huge profit. Al Masudi wrote that one of the main uses for ivory in China was in the construction of covered litters for carrying the wealthy of Chinese cities, and for burning as incense. The main use for ivory in India was carving, particularly in the manufacture of chess and backgammon pieces as well as handles for knives and scabbards for swords. (The ivory of Indian elephants was too tough and brittle for carving and, besides, the Indians preferred to use their elephants as domesticated working animals.) Al Masudi described a novel strategy the Zanj used to get their hands on the ivory: according to him, they would leave out the leaves, bark and branches of a tree that seems to have had powerful narcotic effects and, after eating the vegetation, the elephant would quickly become drunk and collapsed, whereupon the Zanj would descend upon the inebriated animal with their spears and knives. It must have taken a degree of patience, but earnings from ivory were definitely worth the effort.
It's clear that by the tenth century, the East African coast was engaged in a lucrative international trade that reached markets thousands of miles away. Chinese annals even reported a tribute-bearing mission from “Zongstan” to the Chinese imperial court in 1071 and 1083. And as trade changed the East African coast, so too did religion.
It is likely that by Al Masudi's time, Islam was starting to gain a foothold along the coast in a number of places, brought there by an ever-increasing number of Muslim merchants from Arabia and Persia. Since Muslims are required to pray five times a day, and since the merchants would have remained at the coast for many weeks and months while they traded and waited for the monsoon winds to shift direction and take them home, Muslim worship would have been a feature of life in the Swahili towns since the time of Mohammed. By the tenth century, however, Islam was starting to take on a more permanent feel. Shanga is thought to have had a stone mosque by the middle of the tenth century and evidence of its repeated expansion in size suggests that by 1000AD most of the population of Shanga were Muslim. The traditional date for the Muslim takeover of Kilwa is 975AD, when Ali bin Hasan bought the island in return for a huge consignment of cloth. Mogadishu, further up the coast, was regarded as an Islamic centre of regional importance, and may have been a sponsor of continued Islamic expansion further south. Indeed, a later writer described Mogadishu at this time as the sovereign city of all Muslims along the coast. So while Islam was probably still a minority religion at the end of the tenth century, it was beginning to win converts among the African population rather than merely being the religion of overseas visitors.
The oldest archaeological evidence for Muslim leadership on the coast, indeed, the oldest piece of writing found in East Africa - is to be found at Kizimkazi, a town on the southern tip of Zanzibar Island, where there is an eighteenth century mosque rebuilt around the remains of one dating from the twelfth century. The only surviving part of the original mosque is the mihrab, a niche built into a thick wall at the front of the mosque facing Mecca from which the imam leads the prayer. The mihrab at Kizimkazi contains an Arabic inscription dated to 1107 and tells how the construction of the original mosque was ordered by the local ruler, Sheikh al Sayid Abi Amran.
The rising status of the East African coast eventually caught the attention of a court geographer and cartographer in Sicily, a Muslim called Muhammad Al Idrisi. Al Idrisi is something of a renegade figure in Arabic history because he worked for a Christian ruler on Sicily, an island at the time being fought over by Christians and Muslims. Born in Spain in 1099 and educated there at the great centre of Islamic learning at Cordoba, Al Idrisi settled in Sicily to work at the court of King Roger II. His greatest written work was the aptly titled, ‘Roger's Book’, which had the slightly less snappy but certainly very honest subtitle, ‘The Book of the Travels of One Who Cannot Travel Himself’. As this subtitle suggests, Al Idrisi never actually set foot outside Sicily to write his book, relying entirely upon other writers and informers paid at royal expense. Parts of his account are not terribly reliable: he seemed convinced, for example, that tigers roamed the shores of the East African coast and had a rather exaggerated idea of the size of some of its offshore islands. However, his is a crucial account, particularly as it gives us our first glimpse of life at two of the coast's most famous towns, Malindi and Mombasa.
By the time Al Idrisi put pen to paper in the middle of the twelfth century, Malindi and Mombasa both seemed to be well established towns, gaining much of their income from iron mining, an export which, rather surprisingly, is the only one Al Idrisi felt worthy of mention. Malindi is described as a large town, Mombasa as a small but highly prestigious one due to the fact that the ‘king of Zanj’ lived in the town.
The only other part of the Swahili coast to be described by Al Idrisi were the Comoros Islands, which he called the Djawaga, a group of islands 100 miles offshore which received scant attention from other writers of the period. The Comoros do seem to have been an active player in the Swahili world, trading with the coast in exports that included pearls, aromatic plants, perfumes and rice. Significantly, they are described as having a predominantly Muslim population, suggesting that by this time, Islam was starting to have a serious impact.
In 1984 and 1985, a large horde of gold and silver coins was found at Mtwambe Mkuu on Pemba Island, a find dated to the middle of the eleventh century. Given that a community making use of coinage must have been economically sophisticated, and that they lived in what appeared to be a large, rapidly built, new town, the suggestion is that the settlement may have been founded by a group of refugees from further north. Indeed, the Chinese annals that reported the visitors from ‘Zongstan’ in 1071 and 1083 also described how the Swahili rulers minted coins for its people to use.
Similar evidence of large, new towns comes from sites at Mkumbua on Pemba Island and Tumbatu, an island next to Zanzibar, which a thirteenth century Arab writer described as being populated by refugees. Settlements on nearby Mafia Island have also been dated to the early eleventh century. Mark Horton has speculated that this wave of settlement in the Zanzibar Archipelago was the result of refugees coming from the Lamu Archipelago in the middle of the eleventh century. It does seem as if something catastrophic must have happened in Shanga around that time, because stone buildings there appeared to have been destroyed and replaced with huts of mud and timber. Archaeology suggests a similar thing happened at Manda and so suddenly, albeit only briefly, the islands of the Zanzibar Archipelago had gained pre-eminence over those of Lamu.
Back in the Middle East, a new star was rising: a legendary Kurdish prince in his late twenties called Saladin. In 1169 Saladin conquered Egypt and, with his brother's help, seized control of south-western Arabia, giving him control over the Red Sea trading route. He soon united the fractured Muslim region and by the early 1190s had pushed the crusaders back from their strongholds in Jerusalem and the surrounding desert until they had been reduced to controlling a 100 mile long, thin strip of coastal land. Saladin had created a Pax Islamicus, a peace over the Islamic world which would facilitate trade across the region for years to come. With the same leader controlling the Red Sea and the major Islamic cities of the Middle East, trade between East Africa and the major Islamic cities of the Middle East was made far easier. Peace also meant prosperity - and a greater demand for the luxury goods of the coast.
Europe was also becoming a more peaceful and orderly place. The Dark Ages were a thing of the past and an era of economic and intellectual expansion was underway. Imports flowed into Europe through Mediterranean ports such as Venice, Genoa and Marseilles and it is during this period that the first sizeable imports of ivory can be dated. Much of this ivory would have come from East Africa. Rising demand for luxury goods, including gold, both in Europe and in the vibrant Islamic courts of Persia from this time would have resulted in economic expansion along the coast and it is no surprise that from the eleventh century, evidence of settlement along the coast becomes more readily available.
Archaeological work shows an increase in the remains of imported goods, particularly expensive Chinese porcelain, and also points to growing use of cowrie shells, used as a form of currency throughout the Indian Ocean world. Many stone buildings date from the twelfth century, as do a number of settlements; it is likely that the town of Malindi was founded some time in the twelfth century and by the time of Al Idrisi was already important. However, some of the older towns appear to have fared less well, and Manda, one of the earliest towns whose remains we can still see today, was in decline.
One of the greatest beneficiaries of this new world order was Kilwa. For centuries, Mogadishu had controlled the gold trade coming out of the Zimbabwe gold mining region. The Swahili cities may have gained something from charging Mogadishu's ships fees for harbouring in their own ports, but it seems that not until the twelfth century did any of them try to control the actual trade for themselves.
Since its foundation, Kilwa had remained relatively unimportant. The town’s rise was not helped by unpopular rulers whom the townspeople quickly overthrew: a twelfth century sultan, Hasan Suleiman, was thrown alive into a well after a despotic reign of six years and his nephew fared even worse; within two years of becoming sultan, he had been beheaded. Fortunately for Kilwa, his son, Daud, and grandson Suleiman al-Hasan, proved to be outstanding sultans and during the second half of the twelfth century they transformed Kilwa from a town of mud and wood, based on small-scale, local trade and fishing into a magnificent sultanate with an empire stretching along the coast. The cause of this sudden change was Kilwa's successful attempt to seize control of the trade in gold coming through Sofala.
Sofala had first come to Kilwa's attention when - according to the Chronicle of Kilwa - a lone fisherman snared a rather large and stubborn fish which then proceeded to drag the equally stubborn fisherman and his boat southward through the open seas. The fish and the sea currents helped to take the fisherman further away from Kilwa until eventually, hopelessly lost and more dead than alive, he happened upon the port of Sofala where he saw traders from Mogadishu exchanging cloth for gold mined in the African interior. It was a lucrative trade and Kilwa was well positioned to access it and so, from the second half of the twelfth century, Kilwa gradually sidelined Mogadishu until she controlled the trade with Sofala and with it the huge profits that were to be made. Daud's son, Suleiman al-Hasan, then used this new found wealth to establish Kilwa's political authority over Pemba, Mafia, Zanzibar and a large part of the mainland.
Further north, the town of Pate was undergoing a more modest revival. Still dwarfed by its neighbour on the other side of the island, Shanga, Pate slowly started to rise in importance during the thirteenth century. According to its chronicle, the main reason for this revival was the coming to the town of a new dynasty of rulers from Oman, the Nabahani, who arrived there from Muscat in 1204 having been ousted from positions of leadership by a rival Arab dynasty. The Nabahani leader, Suleiman, quickly won over the Patean population by dishing out gifts to all the influential men of the town including its chief, who responded by agreeing to his daughter's marriage to Suleiman. The chief’s wedding present to Suleiman was certainly on the generous side, it being the kingdom of Pate itself.
By the end of the thirteenth century, the coast was predominantly Muslim. Peace in the Middle East and a growth in trading opportunities had no doubt encouraged an increase in immigration from the Middle East - the Nabahani may be one example of that - bringing with it their religion, and the wealth enjoyed by the Swahili residents was pumped into increased stone construction, some of which came in the form of mosques.
Kilwa was by then the pre-eminent town on the coast. Its sultans had used revenue from the gold trade to build a walled city of stone. In 1270, a huge mosque was built in the town and fifty years later a palace was constructed there, by which time Kilwa's sultans were minting their own coins.
The Pax Islamicus which may have assisted this expansion was not entirely without its hiccups, especially when Muslims in the Middle East awoke to find hordes of mounted and highly violent men from Mongolia at their gates. Baghdad fell to Genghis Khan in 1258 and much of the Middle East followed in its wake. However, the speed of the Mongol invasion was such that, within a few years, a new peace reigned, only this time over a much wider area. The Mongols ruled the greatest empire the world has ever seen, stretching from China in the East to Russia in the North, India in the South and the Balkans in the West. It now meant safe trade and travel was possible over a much wider area and, indeed, coins of the Mongol sultans of the Middle East, dated to the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries, have been found on both Mafia and Zanzibar islands. One man to take advantage of this new world order was the Italian traveller, Marco Polo.
Despite globetrotting on such a vast scale, Marco Polo never actually made it to the Swahili coast but, having heard of the region on his travels felt it important enough to mention when he sat down to write his memoirs in Venice in 1295. Unfortunately, whoever told him about the coast doesn’t seem to have been there either because Marco Polo's information is seriously at odds with all the other writers of his age. He described its population as “all idolaters” and made no mention of any Islamic influence nor of any towns on the coast, but he did mention ivory and ambergris as key exports. He also described Swahili men as horrible to look at, with the appearance of devils, and the women fared no better. According to Marco Polo, they had breasts quadruple normal size with enormous facial features. Fortunately, other writers were better informed.
In the 1320s, a Syrian prince, Abu al Fida who, as an 18 year old soldier in 1291 had helped expel the crusaders from their last stronghold in the Holy Land, wrote a geographical work describing the physical features of the Muslim world. This, and a book outlining the history of humanity, were to become bestsellers among European orientalists of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Preferring to concentrate on physical geography, Al Fida did not shed a great deal of light on life at the coast but it is significant to note that, like Al Idrisi, he focussed on Malindi and Mombasa. By Al Fida's time, Malindi seemed to have superseded Mombasa in importance since the king of the Zanj now lived there.
At around the time Abu al Fida was writing his geography, a 21 year old Moroccan was setting out on a pilgrimage to Mecca. His name was Abu Abdallah Muhammad Ibn Battuta. After crossing North Africa and completing his pilgrimage, Ibn Battuta seems to have developed the most monumental case of itchy feet the world has ever known. Instead of returning home, he embarked upon travels of global proportions, spending the next thirty years on an odyssey of some 75,000 miles. It is likely that until the invention of the railway, no human had travelled further. Ibn Battuta visited all the countries of North Africa and the Middle East, sailed down the East African coast, calling on Mogadishu, Mombasa and Kilwa, and then travelled on through southern Russia, the Black Sea and the Ukraine, Constantinople, the steppes of central Asia and the Hindu Kush, India, the Maldive Islands, Sri Lanka, Sumatra, Cambodia and China. Returning briefly to Morocco after twenty three years, he then visited Spain and, at a point when most people would have settled down to a quiet retirement, crossed the Sahara to visit the kingdom of Niger. Once he had sat down long enough, he dictated the story of his travels to one Ibn Juzay, a chronicler at the court of the Moroccan sultan in Fez. The resulting book, ‘The Travels of Ibn Battuta’, expanded both Muslim and Christian knowledge of the world in one colossal step. Ibn Battuta was, quite simply, a colossus in the expansion of human knowledge.
He visited the coast in 1331. At that time, Mogadishu was a large, sophisticated, wealthy town and an important Islamic city inhabited by many sharifs. Once they learned that Ibn Battuta was an Islamic legal scholar, the people of Mogadishu rolled out the red carpet for him. Ibn Battuta described Mogadishu's elders as splendidly dressed, adorned in silk tunics and turbans, and described cloth manufactured in the town as one of its major sources of income - in fact it was the only item of export mentioned by Ibn Battuta.
He described in detail one of Mogadishu's weekly events, a civic procession following Friday prayers involving many of the town's elders. The sultan, accompanied by emirs, wazirs, lawyers, sharifs, military commanders and the Islamic qadi, made his way to his palace under a silk canopy whose poles were adorned with golden birds, while people played drums, trumpets, oboes and flutes. Mogadishu was evidently a city that took its culture seriously.
Further south, Mombasa and Kilwa appeared to be Muslim oases amidst a pagan population. Indeed, Kilwa was, at the time of Ibn Battuta's arrival, involved in what he termed a holy war against the pagan Zanj. The people of Mombasa were described as “devout, chaste and virtuous”, living primarily on a diet of bananas and fish. Little farming went on there and grain was imported from further south, probably from Pemba Island.
Kilwa was the main town of the coast at the time of Ibn Battuta's visit. In the previous half century, she had undergone massive expansion, both in terms of wealth and construction, due to acquiring control of the gold trade, something Ibn Battuta failed to mention. Ibn Battuta was evidently impressed by the town, writing that “Kilwa is one of the most beautiful and well constructed towns in the world. The whole of it is elegantly built”, a huge accolade from one who had already visited many Arab and Persian cities. Kilwa was visited by sharifs from Iraq and Arabia, some of whom Ibn Battuta knew by name, so it must have been regarded as an important city by outsiders. The sultan of Kilwa at this time was al-Hasan bin Suleiman III, described as a pious and generous man, a man nicknamed the Father of Gifts: “this Sultan is very humble: he sits and eats with beggars and venerates holy men and descendants of the Prophet.” Ibn Battuta recounted a story in which the sultan had given up his clothes to a beggar he had passed in the street. Inspired by his father's generosity, the sultan's son then bought the clothes back from the beggar for the princely sum of ten slaves. Not to be outdone in charity, the sultan then gave the beggar another ten slaves and two loads of ivory.
Two years after Ibn Battuta's visit, this great sultan died and was succeeded by his brother, Daud. Charity ended there. According to Ibn Battuta, Daud would tell beggars that “the giver of gifts is dead, and has nothing more to give.” Daud was said to be such a miser that he only gave gifts to people who had stayed at his court for months, and even then they would only be grudgingly-given, token gifts. Eventually, people just stopped visiting.
Ibn Battuta was the first writer to use the term Swahili to describe people at the coast, but curiously, he only applied it to the people of Kilwa, not to those of Mombasa who were also Muslim, so it is unclear why he distinguishes between the inhabitants of the two towns. Perhaps it is used to indicate Kilwa's mixed population, for he mentioned that there were many Zanj among the population of the island.
The fourteenth century saw more towns founded. Gede was established by the start of the fourteenth century, quickly growing in size. Still visible amongst its mysterious ruins today is a tomb with an inscription dating it to 1399, the only written chronological pointer we have to the town's age. At some point in the middle of the fourteenth century, Jumba la Mtwana was founded on a site above a beach just north of Mombasa. Lamu was also growing in importance: the mihrab of the Pwani Mosque, still frequented in the town, has been dated to 1370.
Kilwa's fortune lay in being located far enough south to exploit the gold trade coming out of Zimbabwe. However, this location also made it difficult for her to quickly exploit any alternative trading opportunities with India and the Middle East and from the 1330s Egypt, in particular, was keen to develop its trade in the Red Sea and along the East African coast. It was the most northerly of the Swahili towns, particularly those in the Lamu Archipelago, that became the main beneficiaries of this. Mark Horton's excavations suggest that by the fourteenth century, Shanga was at its height, potentially strong enough to be considered a rival to Kilwa. It had 200 stone houses, along with many more made of mud and wattle, together with three mosques and some 350 stone tombs. But if one Swahili chronicle is to be believed, the real superpower of the fourteenth century was Shanga’s neighbour, Pate.
According to its own town chronicle, Pate is said to have conquered the whole of Pate Island during the reign of its sultan, Muhammad bin Ahmad (1293-1343). This might not seem such a breathtaking feat, but given that she shared the island with mighty Shanga it was a notable jump forward. The chronicle then goes on to describe how Sultan Muhammad went on to conquer Mogadishu to the north. Muhammad’s son, Omar, ruled throughout the second half of the fourteenth century and was apparently even more successful than his father. First to fall to Pate was the ancient town of Manda. At the time, Pate was apparently seething over a prohibition that had been imposed by Manda some years earlier against the construction of ships in the morning and evening (Manda's king had become fed up from having his beauty sleep disturbed by the constant hammering of the dhow builders of Pate), but now Pate, emboldened by her conquest of Mogadishu, had had enough of being told what to do by their neighbours and decided to annihilate the town. This they did, with the help of a treacherous Mandan elder, fuming because his fellow elders had failed to tell him about a council meeting when he had gone on a fishing trip. He let the Patean troops into Manda by the main gate and the town quickly fell to Pate. It was sacked and abandoned soon after - archaeology does indeed suggest that the town was abandoned around this time - while its remaining inhabitants moved to Pate, and later to Shela on Lamu Island. Omar then led his forces to nearby Takwa which, according to one legend, couldn't be found as a magician had rendered the town invisible. Another town on Manda Island, Kitao, fell more easily to Pate since its population seems to have descended into civil war - the whole lot of them - because of a dispute over the ownership of a chicken that had strayed into the mosque during Friday prayers. Unable to resolve this dispute, the population dispersed, most of them to Shela which seemed to have suddenly become a sanctuary for traumatised refugees. What happened to the chicken is unclear.
With Shanga, Mogadishu, Manda, Takwa (once they'd found it) and Kitao in Patean hands, Omar then went on a blitzkrieg-like offensive to the south. Malindi quickly made an alliance with Omar. Mombasa is said to have fallen to Pate because its entire population had abandoned the town to its fate and fled to the mainland. And then one-by-one, all the other towns of the coast capitulated to Pate, even Kilwa. Only Zanzibar was free from Patean control because, so the chronicle says, “at this time the town had no fame.”
Given that this story comes from the Pate Chronicle's own pages, there is every reason to believe that this incredible tale of conquest is somewhat exaggerated. However, Pate was certainly growing in commercial importance since Sultan Omar is also said to have dispatched merchants to India to establish trading links there, a proactive commercial policy that may well have been the real reason behind the rise of Pate.
By the start of the fifteenth century, 37 towns existed along the coast between Mogadishu and Kilwa. They all had stone buildings, their people were primarily Muslim and all were engaged in brisk and profitable trade. Exports from the Swahili towns were reaching China, India, Persia, Iraq, Arabia, Egypt and Italy. Gold was probably reaching the markets of northern Europe, even as far as England. In return, imports were flowing into the Swahili towns. Contacts with the outside world grew and grew, and in 1415, Malindi sent an ambassador to China, bearing a gift of a giraffe for its emperor. Two years later the Chinese emperor, Chengzu, repaid Malindi's gift by sending an embassy of its own to the town. Chinese annals suggest that this embassy was enormous, comprising as many as 300 ships commanded by the legendary Chinese admiral, Zheng He. Finds of Chinese porcelain and Chinese imperial coins from this period, most recently at nearby Mambrui in 2010, provide evidence for this voyage.
This period of peace, prosperity, trade and diplomacy, dominated by the powerful city states of Pate and Kilwa, can well be described as the Swahili Golden Age. But it was not without its problems. In 1441, an Arab biographer called Abu al-Mahasin described how Mombasa, Mogadishu and Lamu had been taken over by aggressive and organized bands of monkeys. According to his, probably overly imaginative source, monkeys had ruled Mombasa since 1402, stealing food and goods from homes and markets, attacking men in their own homes and having sex with women, while in Mogadishu, a civic meeting had descended into uproar when the local sultan had mysteriously turned into a monkey.
Other problems must have beset the coast during the second half of the fifteenth century because many stone towns seem to have been abandoned, among them Jumba la Mtwana, Mtwambe Mkuu and once-mighty Shanga. Pate's power was also on the wane. Kilwa was becoming stronger again, perhaps because of Pate’s decline in fortunes. However, at the very end of the fifteenth century, Kilwa's power began to be undermined by internal power struggles: several times in the 1490s, sultans were overthrown and by 1498, Kilwa was in the hands of a despot called Mir Ibrahim.
Weakened and divided, Kilwa was therefore in no position to offer leadership to the Swahili towns just at the time they would need it most.
Before the middle of the fifteenth century, European knowledge of the African continent was almost non-existent. Most of Africa would remain a ‘Dark Continent’ right up until the late nineteenth century, but in the fifteenth century, knowledge of the coastal regions finally began to be revealed, almost entirely due to the pioneering work of a Portuguese prince, Henry The Navigator.
Henry's motives in sponsoring the exploration of Africa's coast came partly from a desire to conquer. He had, as a young man, been on crusade, generally a rewarding experience for Spanish and Portuguese Christians since they were using the crusading ideal to successfully push Muslims out of the Iberian Peninsula. However, the ultimate destination for crusaders was Jerusalem, and there the crusading movement had, in the previous century and a half, lost all momentum. Prince Henry, and many others, therefore began to argue for an alternative crusading strategy: if Europeans could sail around Africa, they would be able to attack Islam from the south and east. And while they were at it, they might also be able to seize control of the lucrative trade in silks and spices with India. Exploration was also encouraged by thoughts of an alliance with a legendary Christian king, Prester John, whose kingdom, thought to lie somewhere in eastern Africa, had managed to withstand centuries surrounded by Islam. Religious zeal and international commerce were therefore the pillars upon which the Portuguese age of exploration was built.
By the time of Henry The Navigator's death in 1460, the Portuguese had explored and established a profitable trade with West Africa, but progress had been slow and after Henry's death it became spasmodic. Then in 1487, a giant leap forward took place when Bartholomew Diaz, thrown southwards for fourteen days by a violent storm, finally reached the southern tip of Africa. He named it, understandably, the Cape of Storms, something quickly rejected by the Portuguese king, John II, who preferred the far more optimistic name, the Cape of Good Hope. Diaz's discovery had, after all, flung open the door to India.
In the same year, John II had dispatched to India a man who would become, as far as we can tell, the first European to explore the Swahili coast. Pedro de Covilhao was sent on a covert intelligence gathering mission, under orders to find out as much as he could about the sea route to India and the location and identity of Prester John. Under the guise of a honey merchant, de Covilhao reached Cairo and travelled to India, where he collected information about the spice trade. From there he set out in a dhow for the Swahili coast and made it as far south as Sofala, before travelling inland where he discovered the long-sought Prester John, who turned out to be the Emperor Alexander of Abyssinia, the latest in a long line of Christian kings whose power had clearly been exaggerated by the medieval myth-makers.
The Portuguese did not immediately extend the discoveries of Diaz and de Covilhao, but in 1493, when news arrived that the Spanish, led by Christopher Columbus, had apparently reached China by going west across the Atlantic, John II decided it was time for the Portuguese to make one final push to reach India and ensure they got there before the Spanish. When John II died in 1495, it was left to his successor, Manuel, to finish the job.
Vasco da Gama, a Portuguese nobleman in his late twenties, was the man chosen by King Manuel to undertake the voyage to India. Two years earlier, da Gama had been appointed a commander of the Order of St James of the Sword, a Christian military order borne from the crusading movement. Given that the voyage to India was perceived as a form of crusade, da Gama's membership of the military order, together with his experience captaining voyages to West Africa during the 1490s, made him an ideal choice.
Bartholomew Diaz organised the fleet and their equipment. Two new ships, the San Gabriel and the San Rafael, were built for the voyage, and these would be joined by a caravel, The Berrio, and a supply ship. The San Gabriel was to be da Gama's flagship, a 25 metre long galleon with 20 cannon while the San Rafael was captained by da Gama's elder brother, Paolo. The supply ship was packed with three years' supply of food, together with gifts to exchange with the people they would meet en route, amongst which were beads, bells, knives, weapons, silver ornaments and cloth. The crew comprised 148 men, among them doctors, priests, interpreters and twelve convicts sentenced to death, dispensable men who could be dropped off at promising-looking points on the coast to act as scouts and see if the locals were friendly or not.
Da Gama's fleet departed from Lisbon on 8th July 1497, escorted initially on another ship by Bartholomew Diaz. Diaz left them soon after they had got underway, but da Gama had the use of the navigator that had been with Diaz on his voyage to the Cape of Good Hope, Pero Dalanques, so they had little difficulty getting that far. Beyond, that, everything was unknown.
On 19th November the fleet rounded the Cape of Good Hope. On Christmas Day the ships passed a land they named Natal, in commemoration of the birthday of Jesus. A month later they reached Quelimane, a port lying in modern Mozambique, where the inhabitants of the town, to the delight of the Portuguese, were wearing loin cloths to cover their private parts and whose elders wore more voluminous cloth garments. Excited at finding some trace of civilisation, the Portuguese, who seemed to have got along well with the locals, remained at Quelimane for a month to make repairs to their ships.
Towards the end of February, the Portuguese sailed north, bullying any boats they found on the way. It was hardly the greatest gesture of public relations and word of the antics of these Europeans spread so quickly along the coast that by the time the Portuguese arrived in Mombasa on Saturday 7th April 1498, they were already seen as a hostile enemy. An account, written by a member of da Gama's crew, recounts their arrival in Mombasa:
“At midnight there approached us a small craft with about a hundred men, all armed with cutlasses and bucklers. When they came to the vessel of the captain-major they attempted to board her, armed as they were, but this was not permitted. They paid us this visit merely to find out whether they might not capture one or the other of our vessels.”
The following day, the king of Mombasa, Shahu bin Misham, changed tactic and sent goodwill gifts of oranges, lemons and sugar cane, together with a sheep, to the ships, which remained at anchor some way off the island. Two men from da Gama's fleet were even taken on a tour of the city, but da Gama remained suspicious and decided to torture two Muslims on board his ship, sailors picked up in Mozambique, to find out what the king of Mombasa was really planning. The same writer says:
“At night the captain-major questioned two Moors whom we had on board, by dropping boiling oil on their skin, so that they might confess any treachery intended against us. They said that orders had been given to capture us as soon as we entered the port.”
During the night of 10th April, an unsuccessful attempt was made to sabotage the Berrio and the San Rafael. Coming to the conclusion that, at least for the time being, staying in Mombasa was more trouble than it was worth, the Portuguese departed.
The following evening, having spent another day harassing dhows, da Gama's fleet reached Malindi where they received a totally different reception. For nine days, the Portuguese were treated as honoured guests with da Gama and the king of Malindi becoming close friends. Both showered gifts on the other, they held a conference on board the San Gabriel, the Portuguese fleet fired salutes to Malindi's king and da Gama promised to send an ambassador to the town at some time in the future. The Portuguese account even talks of mock battles and musical performances.
Crucially, the king of Malindi also supplied da Gama with an experienced pilot who knew the route to India, possibly Shihab al-Din Ahmad bin Majid al Najdi, a man well into his sixties who, as well as being the most celebrated Indian Ocean navigator of the fifteenth century, was also a prolific writer of prose and poetry. With the kuzi starting to blow, the Portuguese were able to make it to India within a month, arriving at Calicut on 18th May 1498.
The Portuguese had a difficult time in Calicut. Muslim merchants were, not altogether unexpectedly, hostile to what they saw as rival traders and the Portuguese soon found themselves under attack; to start their long voyage home, they were forced to fight their way out of Calicut harbour. The return journey from India was a near disaster. Without a navigator, the ships ploughed through violent storms while many men died from disease. But when they reached Malindi again, the Portuguese were soon able to recover. Once again, the king treated the Portuguese like royalty, and lavished fruit upon the sick. Five days later, the Portuguese set out on their long journey home, but before they did, da Gama asked that a pillar be erected as a sign of the friendship between Portugal and Malindi. The pillar erected by the king of Malindi was one of only four erected in Africa and India to mark da Gama's voyage, and the only one that can be found today, on a headland just south of Malindi town, although its original location was near the present law courts close to the king's palace.
The friendship established between the Portuguese and Malindi in 1498 and 1499 continued throughout the Portuguese time on the Swahili coast. One reason for the striking difference in the welcome afforded to the Portuguese by Mombasa and Malindi may lie in the fact that at the time of the Portuguese arrival, Mombasa and Malindi were at war with one another. The King of Malindi must have heard of the attempts by Mombasa to attack the Portuguese fleet, and deduced that any enemy of Mombasa was his friend. It was a deduction that would serve Malindi well in the future, and it cost Mombasa dearly.
In the quarter of a century following da Gama's discovery of the Swahili coast and the sea route to India, two hundred and forty seven Portuguese ships entered the Indian Ocean. The first fleet, comprising thirteen ships, was dispatched within months of da Gama's return to Lisbon, and was led by Pedro Alaves Cabral.
Cabral's voyage is perhaps most famous for his discovery of Brazil. Taking a route far to the west of Africa, possibly to avoid strong currents that had delayed Vasco da Gama, he sighted land, and Brazil was added to the European's map of the world. This was a bonus, for what Cabral had been sent to achieve was to establish a trading post in India, and to send ships to Sofala to investigate the possibility of exploiting the gold trade that came through the port. Since it quickly became clear that Sofala and the gold trade were controlled by Kilwa, Cabral headed there, arriving on 26th June 1500.
The Portuguese visit was initially calm enough and Kilwa's ruler, Mir Ibrahim, did at least not make the mistake of attacking the Portuguese. But when he sailed out to meet Cabral, he mistook a Portuguese cannon salute for a military attack and fled back to the island. Nothing more of note seems to have taken place since the Portuguese fleet soon set sail for Malindi.
Once again, the Portuguese were well received in Malindi and Cabral presented the king with a present, from King Manuel of Portugal, of a riding saddle, bridle and silver stirrups. Manuel treasured the friendship with Malindi, considering it important enough to mention in a letter to the king and queen of Spain the following year.
After a few days in Malindi, Cabral left for Calicut where he established a Portuguese trading base, but almost as soon as Cabral left, those he had left behind were massacred. When news of this reached Lisbon, Vasco da Gama set out with a large fleet on his second voyage to the Indian Ocean.
Alerted by his old friend, the King of Malindi, to an anti-Portuguese plot being hatched in Kilwa, da Gama decided to head straight for the town and force it to recognise Portuguese rule by paying a financial tribute to the King of Portugal, the age-old way of enshrining subject status. According to one Portuguese writer, the people of Kilwa were unnerved at the size of da Gama's fleet:
“There was great alarm among the people on seeing so great a fleet enter the port; and on knowing that it was ours, of which they already knew so much from the events of Mozambique and Malindi, all the people felt great fear.”
Da Gama sent a message to Mir Ibrahim, summoning him to his ship so that he could “establish with him good peace and friendship and trade,” which essentially meant recognising Portuguese overlordship of Kilwa. Mir Ibrahim replied that while he was more than happy to have the friendship and protection of Portugal, he wasn't particularly keen about the idea of becoming its subject. So in order to win him over to the idea of paying a tribute, da Gama threatened to burn the city, murder its inhabitants and send Mir Ibrahim in chains to India. Not surprisingly, Mir Ibrahim agreed to pay up - although he asked for time to get the money together - and the Portuguese set sail for Malindi. Kilwa breathed a sigh of relief and, once rid of the Portuguese, soon forgot about the promised payment of five thousand cruzados. Unfortunately for Kilwa, the Portuguese had a better memory.
Da Gama’s love-in with the King of Malindi then resumed:
“ ... the king ... was ready with great joy at the arrival of his great friend Dom Vasco da Gama ... and both embraced as if they were brothers and great friends, exchanging great courtesies.”
The king was treated by the Portuguese as his royal title deserved, seated upon a dais on board da Gama's galleon where he received the greetings of the captains of each of the ships in the fleet. Meanwhile the Portuguese ships restocked with large quantities of gifts provided by the king before setting sail for Calicut, where they re-established the Portuguese trading base and exacted revenge for the massacre of the one left by Cabral.
The following year, Antonio de Saldanha was appointed commander-in-chief of India and set out from Lisbon. En route to East Africa, one of his ships, commanded by Ruy Loureno Ravasco, became separated from the fleet in a storm. Alone and unable to find a port prepared to sell him provisions, Ravasco turned to piracy and in a two month period off the island of Zanzibar captured twenty dhows and their cargoes. When Ravasco entered a harbour on Zanzibar Island, the king of Zanzibar, fearing an attack, assembled a force of four thousand men on the beach, but a burst of Portuguese cannon killed thirty five Zanzibari, including the son of the king, and the rest of the force fled. The king then agreed to pay a tribute of 100 miticals of gold per annum as a subject of the king of Portugal.
Laden with food and gold, Ravasco set sail for Malindi, no doubt hoping to find his colleagues. However, when he reached Malindi, Ravasco learned that the only recent visitors to the town had been warriors from Mombasa. So he set off back down the coast, capturing a boatload of Swahili nobles from Brava on the way which enabled him to force another town into subject status, and reached Mombasa. Ravasco resumed his piracy, seizing more dhows as they attempted to enter Mombasa’s harbour, before Saldanha and the rest of the Portuguese fleet finally appeared. Facing overwhelming odds, the King of Mombasa promised to leave Malindi alone. Malindi’s friendship with Portugal was starting to reap rewards.
Compared with what was about to happen to the coast, the first seven years of Portuguese incursions were merely toying with the Swahili towns. In 1505, the kid gloves came off and, led by the newly-appointed governor of India, Dom Francisco De Almeida, a fleet of twenty ships, containing perhaps 1500 troops, set out from Lisbon. It was time to make it clear to the Swahili that Portugal was the new master of the coast.
Sofala fell without a struggle. This was hardly surprising since its king, Sheikh Yusuf, was more than happy to use the Portuguese as a means of gaining independence from Kilwa, the town that had controlled Sofala and the gold trade since the twelfth century. However the Portuguese, dreaming of securing massive fortunes, had no intention of allowing Sofala to be independent of them. Preparations for the construction of a fortress there were begun before the fleet sailed further north.
Kilwa was next. Almeida had orders to exact retribution for Kilwa's failure to pay the tribute promised to da Gama, and to construct a fortress on the island. Eight ships entered the harbour and Almeida summoned Mir Ibrahim to his ship for a meeting the following day. The day came and Almeida waited. Then news came that Ibrahim wouldn't be coming; apparently a black cat had crossed his path as he had risen, and Mir Ibrahim claimed that this was an omen that nothing lasting could be accomplished that day. He would not turn up for the meeting.
Upon hearing the news, Almeida’s face is said to have cracked into an evil grin, and he announced:
“Let us return in our true finery because, as you are aware, the Moors have always paid greater honour to our iron than to our gold.”
At daybreak on 24th July, around five hundred Portuguese troops stormed Kilwa. They met no resistance until they entered the narrow streets of the town.
“After Dom Francisco [de Almeida] had entered the streets, as these were narrow and high, before, behind and above them, from the top of the terraces such a volley of stones and arrows rained down on them that they were sorely pressed, and suffered great damage from being so closely packed together.”
The Swahili were well prepared and determined to resist, but they could not hold out for long against armoured Europeans. The palace soon fell while Mir Ibrahim and his entourage fled to the mainland. The Portuguese looted the town. Those who had not fled were either imprisoned or murdered.
The Portuguese appointed a new king, Mohamed Ancony, a Swahili who had helped the Portuguese. Then they began the construction of a fortress, leaving behind a garrison of eighty troops when the Portuguese fleet departed. Mombasa was next.
Mombasa was better prepared than most Swahili towns to face the Portuguese threat. The arrival of the Europeans had prompted her to fortify her harbour, partly using cannon from a shipwrecked Portuguese ship that had been with Cabral's fleet. So when the Portuguese entered the harbour a week after leaving Kilwa, they were surprised to be greeted by a volley of cannonballs. Two ships were badly damaged, but they were able to return fire and, with good luck on their side, hit a store of gunpowder which destroyed the Mombasan fortification. The Portuguese fleet was now free to bombard the town.
The following day, Portuguese troops invaded the island, killing, burning and looting wherever they went. It was a massacre. Fifteen hundred Mombasans were killed and a thousand imprisoned. The king fled, but he was able to send news to the king of Malindi:
“This is to inform you that a great lord has passed through the town, burning it and laying it waste. He came to the town in such strength and was of such cruelty, that he spared neither man nor woman, old nor young, nay, not even the smallest child. Not even those who fled escaped his fury. He not only killed and burnt men but even the birds of the heavens were shot down. The stench of the corpses is so great in the town that I dare not go there.”
Almeida had unleashed European iron and gunpowder upon Kilwa and Mombasa, two of the most powerful trading towns on the coast. Huge amounts of goods had been seized, thousands died and the towns were temporarily deserted. Kilwa would never fully recover. Forbidden to trade in gold, her economy collapsed and a year later her Portuguese-appointed king was assassinated. A dispute over the succession led to civil war. Even when the Portuguese lifted the trade restrictions, Kilwa remained a shadow of her once dominant position.
Two years after Almeida's brutal visit, the towns of the Lamu Archipelago fell into line. Lamu and Pate gave in after a Portuguese blockade. Brava, which had promised to pay a tribute back in 1503, had since claimed allegiance to Egypt, so the Portuguese sacked the town. In 1509, Mafia Island submitted to Portuguese rule. Zanzibar resisted but was sacked. The inhabitants of Pemba Island fled to Mombasa.
By 1510, the Portuguese had a vice-like grip on the coast. The Swahili towns, totally unable to unite against the Europeans, had been picked off one-by-one. Some towns formed temporary alliances with Portugal as a way of gaining an advantage over a rival neighbour. Some fought to gain a greater share in the gold trade now that once-mighty Kilwa had been cut down in size. Disputes over royal successions in the towns led to outbreaks of civil war. This was nothing new, but it made resistance to the newcomers impossible. Chaos reigned.
Portugal was now in a position to consolidate her control. North of Cape Delgado, authority was placed in the hands of the Captain of Malindi. South of the Cape, the Captain of Mozambique took responsibility. But neither captain commanded more than a few hundred troops and a few ships. Fortresses built at Kilwa, Sofala and Mozambique had small garrisons, and these men were highly vulnerable to outbreaks of malaria and other tropical diseases. The Portuguese abandoned their fortress in Kilwa soon after 1506, while a fortress in Mombasa had only got as far as the foundation stage before it too was abandoned. And if real trouble arose, the Portuguese at the coast had to rely on support from their viceroy in India, whose headquarters had by then been established at Goa.
In any case, apart from the promise of fortunes to be made from the gold mines of Zimbabwe, Portugal’s interest in the Swahili coast was merely as a series of stopover points en route to India. The Portuguese wanted to be sure they could rely on these ports for supplies and came to the odd conclusion that by forcing them to pay financial tributes, recognise the King of Portugal as their overlords and suffer the occasional sacking, the towns would remain loyal to Portugal. It wasn't just East Africa that was approached in this way. So too were ports in Arabia and the Persian Gulf, such as Muscat and Ormuz. Towns in western India were also captured, including the stronghold of Goa. The Portuguese even went beyond India, soon controlling Ceylon, Malacca and the Malay Archipelago. Territory was only captured by the Portuguese in order to facilitate their control of Indian Ocean commerce. Wealth is what the Portuguese really wanted.
Many towns – Kilwa being the most obvious example – suffered under the initial Portuguese onslaught, but many prospered, including Malindi and Pate. Pate seems to have gone through a resurgence in the first decades of Portuguese occupation. Her sixteenth century sultans were on friendly terms with the Portuguese and according to the Pate Chronicle:
“[Portuguese] influence grew great in the town of Pate, and they taught people how to excavate wells in the rocks by means of gunpowder. The Portuguese built houses on the rock and made an underground passage to Pongwa rock. For a long time they lived together in friendship and traded with goods and every kind of thing.”
The people of Pate also prospered:
“They made large houses and put in them brass lamps with chimneys, and they made ladders of silver to climb up into bed with, and silver neck chains. Into the pillars of the houses they beat silver studs and nails of gold on top of them.”
Many Portuguese merchants are said to have settled in Pate (and in fact some families there today claim descent from the Portuguese). Then things started to go wrong. In the 1560s, the Portuguese, perhaps realising that the gold trade was not as lucrative as they had once dreamed, started to impose hefty import duties on goods entering the ports of the coast. This was nothing new - Kilwa had been doing the same thing for centuries - but then they introduced a passport system in which all African and Asian ships had to hold a trading permit from the Portuguese authorities. This simply reduced the number of ships plying the old trade routes. Some towns refused to pay the tax. Pate was one of them. In retaliation, Portugal blockaded and bombarded the town. Fortunately, two sons of a sharif were visiting Pate at the time and, according to the Pate Chronicle, because they had exhorted the people of Pate to pray to Allah, the cannonballs passed harmlessly overhead. Unable to damage the town, the Portuguese eventually agreed to a truce. Not all the towns who refused the Portuguese tax were so lucky.
Trouble also came from the African interior. From the 1540s, some inland tribes were showing severe signs of restlessness and occasionally raided the towns of the coast. One such tribe were the Segeju, notorious for cutting off and swallowing the foreskins of their slain enemies. The Segeju had attacked Malindi in 1542 and the fact that many ruins date from this period does suggest that they were adding to the woes of the Swahili.
In 1569 a Jesuit priest, Father Monclaro, visited the coast. His account of life there makes depressing reading. Zanzibar was in a state of destruction, the result of attacks from a mainland tribe who had been hunted down and wiped out by the Portuguese. Kilwa had been reduced to the status of a minor trading settlement, engaged solely in commerce with the Comoros Islands and selling ivory to the Portuguese, while Malindi had been partly destroyed by tidal flooding. Pate still enjoyed a brisk trade exporting silk to India and Arabia, but her relations with Portugal had reached a low. An attempted uprising against the Portuguese had been put down, but as soon as the Portuguese ships had left, many of the Portuguese merchants in the town had been massacred. Mombasa seems to have been the only town still thriving. It was described as large and populous, was still visited by big trading ships, and was apparently on good terms with the Portuguese. Monclaro summed up the dire situation:
“The principal kings here used to be those of Kilwa and Malindi, but all are now petty rulers, poor and without power, more worthy to be called sheikhs than kings. The people are generally poor and wretched in nearly all these parts, and the Portuguese are already becoming so through the loss of commerce and navigation taken from them by their enemies.”
Monclaro did not explain who these “enemies” were, but if they were outsiders they were almost certainly connected with the Turks. The fact is that Portugal had chosen the worst possible moment to try to assert her power and influence in the Indian Ocean because at the very same time as she was doing this, Turkey, one of the world superpowers of the sixteenth century, began to do precisely the same thing.
Turkey, under her Ottoman sultans, had been a rising power ever since the fourteenth century, when Turkish forces had crossed into south-eastern Europe. Early in the fifteenth century, Syria, Arabia and Egypt fell under Ottoman rule. The great Greek citadel of Constantinople fell in 1453. During the reign of Suleiman The Magnificent, the Ottoman Empire reached its height. Hungary fell to the Turks and Vienna was besieged. Persia was captured in 1534. By 1547, Turkish ships controlled the Red Sea, while North Africa had been subjected to client status. By mid-century they were able to launch raids on southern Arabia.
They then turned to the Swahili coast. Shortly before 1569 there had been a Turkish attack on Cambo, a town situated on the mainland opposite the Lamu Archipelago. Her queen had been friendly to the Portuguese and refused to hand Portuguese merchants over to the Turks when they raided her town, so the Turks took her instead. The queen escaped by diving overboard and became something of a heroine to the Portuguese. This raid was a one-off, but twelve years later the Turkish attacked and destroyed the Portuguese fortress in Muscat. By then, the Turkish presence off the coast was something that could no longer be ignored.
Then in August 1585, a Turkish admiral named Ali Bey, a former prisoner of the Spanish who had been involved in the attack on Muscat, arrived in Mogadishu with two ships. He claimed to have been sent by the sultan of Turkey and promised his fellow Muslims help freeing them from the Portuguese. A renowned pirate and privateer, he was almost certainly acting under the orders of no-one but himself. Nevertheless, within weeks, most of the towns of the northern coast had come out in open support for Ali Bey including Mogadishu, Brava, Pate, Faza, Lamu, and Mombasa. During the uprising, around fifty Portuguese were imprisoned, including the former Captain of Malindi, Roque de Brito Falcao, who was captured in Lamu. In nearby Faza, a Turk was proclaimed king and a Portuguese inhabitant murdered. The few Portuguese on the coast were unable to offer much in the way of resistance, but they did dispatch a dhow to Goa, urgently requesting help from the viceroy in India. Meanwhile, Ali Bey returned to the Red Sea, laden with tributes from the Swahili towns, various forms of booty, a motley collection of prisoners and a promise to return the following year.
It took time to arrive, but when a Portuguese fleet of eighteen ships finally arrived from Goa in January 1587, it quickly made up for its delay with brutality. Faza, which had been particularly enthusiastic in her support for Ali Bey, was singled out for the most brutal retribution. Every human - men, women and children - and every other living creature was massacred. An account of a Portuguese soldier describes how Faza's men held out to the last, fighting on until the last of them was dead. The town was looted and burned, and all the dhows in the harbour were destroyed. Then the Portuguese tore up the plantations near the town, the mainstay of the town's economy. Ten thousand palm trees were said to have been pulled up in ten days. The town's king, Stambul, was beheaded and his head preserved in salt before being sent to Goa where it was paraded through the streets on the end of a lance. When the Portuguese reached Mombasa, they found an almost deserted town, its inhabitants having fled upon hearing of the devastation in Faza. Nevertheless, they burned the town and tore up her plantations, before the fleet sailed to Arabia in order to monitor Ali Bey's next move. Next time, the Portuguese would be better prepared.
Word reached the Portuguese at the end of 1588 that Ali Bey was on the move again, this time with a slightly larger fleet of five ships. Once again, most of the towns supported him as he sailed down the coast, although he demanded a somewhat hefty military levy in return for his anti-Portuguese services. The Turkish fleet sped past Malindi when the Portuguese garrison began firing upon Ali Bey's ships so instead they headed for Mombasa where they started to build strong fortifications to fend off the expected Portuguese attack. Even though the Turks sailed no further than Mombasa, the coast further south was also in turmoil. The sultan of Pemba, having refused to support Ali Bey, was thrown from office and, in one night of bloodletting, all the Portuguese on the island were massacred. Meanwhile, a Portuguese fleet of twenty ships, containing nine hundred men under the command of Thomé de Souza, had set sail from Goa. Both sides were ready for a final showdown.
It just so happened that at the same time as the coast was in rebellion, a warlike, cannibalistic tribe called the Zimba was busily killing and eating its way northwards towards Mombasa. The Zimba seem to have emerged from the interior of Africa south of the Zambezi River and had massacred a Portuguese garrison of a hundred and thirty people at Sena the previous year. Five thousand Zimba warriors then attacked Kilwa where they killed or captured three thousand Swahili. The prisoners were later eaten. Then they headed for Mombasa.
When the Zimba arrived on the mainland south of Mombasa, they found five Turkish ships protecting the island. The Turks, realising they now faced two potential threats, moved their best troops to the south of the island and attacked the Zimba with two of their ships. A few days later, the Portuguese arrived.
When the Portuguese fleet entered Mombasa harbour, the quickly-built Turkish fortifications opened fire. They were no match for the Portuguese cannon, whose power caused many of the Turks to abandon their guns for the relative safety of the town's streets. The three Turkish ships remaining in the harbour were quickly captured. Unaware of the presence of the Zimba, the Portuguese then moved to attack the two Turkish ships defending the south of the island. Turkish resistance here was stronger but the Portuguese again prevailed.
At this point, a message reached Thomé de Souza from the Zimba chief. Realising the predicament of the Mombasans and the greater power of the Portuguese, he politely requested that, once the Portuguese had finished their attack, the Zimba be allowed to enter the town in order to “to kill and eat every living thing on the island”. De Souza agreed.
On 7th March 1589, five hundred Portuguese troops landed on the island. Most of the inhabitants had already fled the town for the interior of the island and so the Portuguese were left relatively free to loot and burn. A few days later, the Zimba swept across the island to sample the culinary delights of Mombasa. The few Turks and Mombasans who could escape hurled themselves into the arms of the Portuguese. Since the Portuguese were at sea, many drowned in the attempt. Only two hundred escaped the slaughter. Ali Bey was one of them, seen riding his horse into the sea towards a Portuguese ship. He was taken to Portugal where he converted to Christianity.
Meanwhile, the Zimba continued hungrily up the coast to Malindi. At the time, the town was protected by just thirty troops and would certainly have fallen had it not been for the arrival of the foreskin-swallowing tribe, the Segeju, normally a constant menace to Malindi. As the Zimba attempted to scale the walls of the town, three thousand Segeju attacked the Zimba from the rear and annihilated them.
The Lamu Archipelago was first to feel the full force of Portuguese revenge for the uprising. In Lamu, the king, Bashir, who was held responsible for the capture of Roque de Brito four years earlier and his handing over to the Turks, was put in chains and taken to Pate, where he was joined by the kings of Pate, Faza and Siyu together with the entire population of the town. Bashir was declared a traitor and publicly beheaded, along with some nobles of Kilifi and Pate. Their mutilated bodies were put on public display. Pate and Siyu were ordered to demolish their fortifications. The Portuguese then attacked Manda, but finding that her inhabitants had already fled, destroyed the town's houses and plantations instead. In Pemba, the mere arrival of a few Portuguese ships was enough to convince the rebels to end their uprising. The previous king was restored - for the time being.
The uprising was over, but it made clear to the Portuguese that if a small Turkish fleet crewed by a few hundred poorly armed men could overthrow Portuguese rule along much of the Swahili coast simply by sailing into its ports, they would have to start taking the job of garrisoning the towns much more seriously. So it was that in 1592 the Portuguese took the drastic step of moving her coastal headquarters from her ally, Malindi, to the backyard of her enemy, Mombasa. The King of Malindi, al-Hasan bin Ahmad, was declared King of Mombasa and plans were made for the construction of a permanent fortress on Mombasa Island.
The construction of Fort Jesus began in 1593 on a site which overlooked the town and harbour. The Portuguese employed the renowned Italian military engineer, Jao Batista Cairato, to construct the fort. Cairato had built many such fortifications for the Portuguese but Fort Jesus was his last and perhaps greatest achievement. Brilliantly designed, it was in itself a small, fortified town, almost impregnable with walls built at such an angle that anyone attempting to scale them could always be attacked from one of the towers. Fort Jesus was ready for occupation within two years, while a customs house and Augustinian chapel were built nearby.
It seemed that with the completion of Fort Jesus, Portugal's control of the Swahili coast was unassailable. However, it simply marked the high point in her authority and despite the stronghold Fort Jesus gave them in Mombasa, the Portuguese grip on the coast began to slip away.
If the Swahili, Turks, Zimba and Segeju weren't already enough of a threat, new rivals to the Portuguese began emerging at the end of the sixteenth century. In 1591, three English ships under the command of the Elizabethan privateer, Sir James Lancaster, were sent to investigate opportunities for breaking the Portuguese monopoly on trade in the Indian Ocean. The merchants of London, whose confidence exploiting commerce in new parts of the world was fast growing as a result of ventures in North America, were starting to view India as the next target. The Portuguese, still licking wounds inflicted by the Turks, certainly did not relish the prospect of another rival and warned the Swahili that this new breed of whites were, in fact, cannibals. The Swahili kept their distance, but Lancaster's reports of the riches of Zanzibar and India encouraged the formation, nine years later, of the East India Company, a commercial organisation that would later become the dominant military and political force in the sub-continent. Soon after, the French formed a similar trading company in the region, as did the Dutch who later gave herself control of access to the Indian Ocean from Europe by establishing a territorial colony at the Cape of Good Hope.
In the north, Portuguese control in Arabia was gradually being eroded by the Omani and Persians, powers at the fringes of the Turkish empire which would grow as Ottoman control of the region began to diminish during the seventeenth century. In 1622, the Portuguese suffered a psychologically devastating defeat at the hands of the Persians which cost them control of Ormuz, the port that controlled access to the Persian Gulf. In 1643, the Portuguese fort at Sohar fell to Oman under her ruler, Nasir bin Murshid. The seventeenth century therefore saw Portugal become just one of many players in the commercial and political world of the Indian Ocean.
As if the complications of these new rivals were not enough, the Portuguese even managed to develop strained relations with the usually loyal King of Malindi. Things had become so bad that in 1614, the king sailed to Goa to complain of Portuguese arrogance. On his return he was murdered by Nyika tribesmen employed by the Captain of Malindi. As a means of ensuring that the king's eight year old son, Yusuf bin Hasan, would turn out to be a more reliable successor, the Portuguese sent him to Goa to receive a western upbringing. Converting to Catholicism, Yusuf adopted the name Don Geronimo Cinghallia and married a Portuguese woman, returning to Mombasa in 1630.
The Portuguese were confident that this Christian Swahili would prove to be a reliable puppet. Then, on 15th August 1631, when many of the Portuguese merchants, soldiers, priests and administrators were gathered in the town for the Day of the Feast of the Assumption, Don Geronimo paid a visit to the Portuguese commandant of Fort Jesus. A Portuguese account describes their meeting:
“The king sent to the Commandant of the fortress, Pedro Leitao de Gamboa, to say that he wished to pay him a visit. He came, and the Commandant handed him the keys of the fortress ... Sitting down and putting on his hat, the king drew a knife, and attacking the aged and innocent captain, cut his throat without giving him time to shout. The followers of the king entered the gates of the fortress and killed every Portuguese in it. Then the king went to the walls of the fortress and gave the signal to those outside, in order that they might keep all the Portuguese occupied by setting fire to their houses. And whilst they were trying to extinguish the fire, they were shot down with arrows by these treacherous barbarians, who thus set fire to every house of Christians in the land.”
The Portuguese in Mombasa fled to the safety of the Augustinian convent, among them Don Geronimo's wife, and sent a priest to negotiate with the king. Don Geronimo ordered the priest to convert to Islam but when he refused, he was murdered and hanged from the walls of Fort Jesus. Then Don Geronimo went after his Portuguese in-laws, killing his wife's father and brother. The following day, concerned at the disappearance of the priest, Don Geronimo's wife left the safety of the convent to speak with her husband. She was promptly imprisoned and the Christians with her were sent off to Pate. Don Geronimo then continued his anti-Christian bloodletting, decapitating any who refused to convert to Islam.
If Don Geronimo had been planning a general uprising of the coast against the Portuguese, it didn't happen. Pate joined in, but few others appear to have become involved with such a maverick and brutal person as Don Geronimo. News of the revolt reached Goa via some merchants from Pate on 28th September and a fleet of eighteen ships was organised with remarkable speed, arriving in Mombasa on 8th January. By now, of course, Fort Jesus was in the hands of the Swahili, allowing them to use it to keep the very people who had built it at bay. After a few weeks, the Portuguese abandoned their attack and returned to Goa.
In May of that year, fearing a larger Portuguese force - or possibly because he had been expelled by his fellow Swahili - Don Geronimo abandoned the island. His followers moved inland while Don Geronimo himself sailed north to enlist help from the Turks. None came and the Portuguese sent a fleet to reoccupy the town, although the viceroy in India was initially concerned to hear that thirteen Dutch ships had been sighted heading for Mombasa, presumably with the intention of beating the Portuguese to it. Nevertheless, the Portuguese were able to reoccupy Mombasa and Fort Jesus without further complication while Don Geronimo toured the Middle East, continuing to agitate in vain for an uprising against the Portuguese. He died five years later at Jeddah. His uprising was recorded in an inscription placed over the gateway of Fort Jesus which can still be seen today.
After 1650, Portuguese control in the Indian Ocean collapsed. By then Portugal had lost much of her wealth and, having suffered serious losses to her European rivals during the Thirty Years War from 1618 to 1648, was less able to support her Indian Ocean possessions. At the same time, Oman was growing in ambition and in 1651, led by Sultan bin Seif, she drove the Portuguese from Muscat. It was a devastating blow to Portugal's strategic interests in the Indian Ocean, making the crossing to India a far more hazardous undertaking. It also encouraged the Omani, now that they had consolidated control in southern Arabia, to look for conquests further afield. The Swahili towns, led by Pate and Mombasa, began to view Oman as a potential new saviour and they started to bombard the Arab sultanate with pleas for help against the Portuguese. Eventually Oman came to their assistance, raiding Portuguese bases in Pate and Zanzibar in 1652 and occupying Mombasa and Fort Jesus in 1660. The Omani also drove the Portuguese from Faza, but this occupation was not adequately enforced and the Portuguese soon recovered, butchering those who had gone to Oman to enlist her support.
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.
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.
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.
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 entirely 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.
The Barracouda sailed into Mombasa harbour on December 4th 1823. At the time, a lone Omani ship was attempting to enforce a blockade of the harbour, but The Barracouda, being the ship of an ally, was allowed in. The Mazrui were prepared to provide the British ship with a lot more than food and water, once again offering the coast to Britain. Again the offer was turned down, although the officer who was forced to spurn the Mazrui felt in fear for his life when he gave them the bad news in a room in Fort Jesus. Rejected a third time, the Mazrui now opted for a different tactic. As The Barracouda sailed over the horizon, the Mazrui hastily knitted their own home-made version of the Union Jack and hoisted it above Fort Jesus, much to the consternation of the Omani watching from a distance. If this had surprised the Omani, it was nothing compared to the reaction of Captain Owen when he sailed into Mombasa two months later.
Owen would have had no more love for the Mazrui than for the Omani. He later described the sheikh as “an old dotard who had outlived every passion but avarice”, but when investigating why a Union Flag - albeit a rather odd-looking one - was fluttering above Fort Jesus, he was presented with the desperate pleas and offers of the Mazrui and saw in them a golden opportunity to rid much of the Swahili coast of slavery. Owen agreed to establish a British protectorate over Mombasa, along with a 200 mile stretch of coastline that probably wasn't even the Mazrui's to give away. In return, the Mazruis agreed to end the slave trade within the protectorate.
The Omani were now forced to back off. Owen departed leaving his deputy, a South African lieutenant called John James Reitz, in command of Britain's latest imperial possession. The Mazrui gave Reitz a sizeable plot of land on the mainland north of Mombasa, an area still known today as English Point, but, slightly less generously, Owen only gave him a garrison of five men, a force totally incapable of enforcing the terms of the deal, which the Mazrui broke almost as soon as Owen had left. Reitz, having embarked upon a suicidal inspection of the malaria-infested coastline, was dead within four months, leaving the governorship of the protectorate in the hands of a sixteen year old midshipman, George Philips, whom the Mazrui never liked, especially after he managed to seize a slave dhow, free its cargo and establish the first colony for freed slaves on the coast.
Eventually, Britain's first imperial venture into East Africa came to an end. Seyyid Said made a polite complaint to the British headquarters in Bombay, which, when they heard what was going on in Mombasa must have regarded Owen's actions as little short of gross insubordination, given that he had put at risk the delicate alliance between Great Britain and Oman. In 1826, the protectorate was annulled, leaving the Mazrui to face the Omani alone.
Seyyid Said bided his time. In 1828, he paid his first visit to his East African realm and, while taking in the delights of the islands and beaches there, set out to oust the Mazrui from Mombasa. This he did after considerable fighting and before returning to Muscat forced the Mazrui to sign a treaty recognising Busaidi overlordship, leaving behind a force of 300 troops in Fort Jesus under the command of Nassir bin Suleiman. Yet again, the Mazrui refused to lie down and, with Seyyid Said back in Muscat, they besieged the Omani troops inside the fort, starving them into surrender. Nassir was murdered and the Mazrui were once again back in control of Mombasa. The Omani made two attempts to recover Mombasa in the years that followed, but it was not until the Mazrui fell out amongst themselves in 1837 that Seyyid Said was finally able to occupy Mombasa without a drop of blood being spilt. The Mazrui were rounded up, arrested and deported to Persia. Some fled to Pate and Siyu where, in 1843, a briefly successful attempt at resistance was made in which one of Seyyid Said's greatest generals was killed by a hail of poisoned arrows. Said ordered the construction of a fort at Siyu to subdue any further resistance, leaving him in total control of the Swahili coast from Pate to Cape Delgado, a position he now used to exploit and develop the commercial opportunities of the region.
For a man brought up in the sun-scorched, barren wastelands of Oman, Seyyid Said must have felt he was in paradise when he first visited the East African coast in 1828. In January of that year he visited Zanzibar, an island that had been a loyal subject of Oman for almost a century, and so taken was he by the place that two years later he decided to abandon Muscat and move the entire headquarters of his sultanate to the island. Now it was time for Zanzibar to reap the benefits of loyalty to Oman.
It wasn't just the lush climate and the fertile soil, the warm sea and the vivid colour that attracted him there. Seyyid Said was a visionary and he recognised that Zanzibar was the ideal location from which to control the turbulent political situation right along the coast. Ships could reach Mombasa, Pate or Kilwa in days if rebellion flared; it would take weeks from Muscat, and then only if the wind was blowing in the right direction. Miles of sea between her and the mainland offered Zanzibar protection from attack by mainland tribes, making his headquarters virtually impregnable. The island had more than enough fertile farmland to make her self-sufficient in food - unlike islands such as Lamu, Pate, Kilwa and Mombasa - and fresh water was in ample supply.
All of this was enough to turn Zanzibar into the political and military superpower of the coast. But Seyyid Said wanted more for the island. He planned to turn it into the commercial hub of East Africa, a market through which fortunes in ivory, slaves, gums, skins and all the other products of the region would pass before being exported to the markets of the Indian Ocean.
He quickly established himself, his family and his countless concubines in two large palaces he had built on the island, one at Mtoni in the bush to the north of Zanzibar town, and another in the town itself, the Beit al-Sahel, or House of the Coast, on a site now occupied by the Palace Museum. He later added another palace at Kidichi to the east of the town which included Persian baths that can still be seen today. Together with his domestic slaves, they would have housed a number in excess of a thousand people and from his palaces Seyyid Said transformed Zanzibar.
To bring about his vision, he swept away the old Swahili duties and replaced them with a flat-rate tax of 5% on all items imported into Zanzibar. This simplified system, together with the support Seyyid Said provided for commerce, soon saw merchants and bankers flocking to the island and from the end of the 1820s to the end of the 1850s, Zanzibar's customs revenues increased fivefold.
It wasn't simply an expansion of the traditional trade with Arabia, Persia and India that caused this economic boom. Traders from North America and Europe quickly took an interest in Seyyid Said's new commercial hub, something fuelled by a startling rise in demand for ivory amongst wealthy westerners. In 1833, the year after Seyyid Said made Zanzibar his capital, the island's main port was visited by nine American and four British ships. By 1859 this number had risen to thirty-five American, twenty-four French, twenty-three German and three British ships. Ivory was so popular in the USA that one town in Connecticut, famous for manufacturing piano keys and billiard balls out of the stuff was named Ivoryton. In 1833, the USA concluded a trade treaty with Zanzibar and four years later the American president, Martin Van Buren, appointed a New Englander, Richard Waters, as Zanzibar's first foreign consul. Three years later a Zanzibari trade embassy was sent to New York headed by Ahmed bin Naam to further develop contacts between the two nations. The Europeans soon followed suit and the following year Britain appointed Colonel Sir John Hamerton as her first consul. The French consul arrived in 1844 and within a couple of decades most European nations had an official representative on the island.
Along with ivory, another ‘commodity’ brought from the African interior to Zanzibar was doing well, much to the consternation of some of the Europeans attracted there by the tusks of dead elephants. The slave trade had been carried out in Zanzibar for centuries, just as it had been going on elsewhere along the coast, but in Seyyid Said's new commercial capital, the trade expanded at a startling rate. At the end of the eighteenth century, around 4,500 slaves passed through the slave market at Shangani every year. In the 1830s this had risen to 60,000, earning the market square the name kelele, meaning noisy. With his import duties earning him 5% on every sale made there, Seyyid Said was raking in a fortune, but with the trade increasing under the eyes of the growing number of westerners on the island – literally: their consulates were just yards from Kelele Square - this trade would ultimately prove to be the undoing of Seyyid Said's successors.
The British tried to halt the trade in 1845 when their consul produced a treaty which, had Seyyid Said signed it, would have ended it there and then. Somewhat concerned, the sultan sent an embassy to England headed by his liwali in Mombasa, Ali bin Nassir, and after this Arab prince had sufficiently wowed royalty and government ministers with his oriental mystique, Hamerton was forced to revise his treaty to allow the movement of slaves between the towns of the East African coast. While this should still have ended the export of slaves from East Africa to the Middle East, the British did almost nothing to enforce it save for posting a couple of dhow-chasing frigates off the coast, which could, in any case, do nothing to stop slave dhows sailing south of Lamu. The Hamerton Treaty had actually managed to create a safe haven for the slave traders from which dhows could wait until the coast was clear before launching themselves north to Arabia, something which gave Lamu's economy a massive boost.
In any case, many of these slaves remained in Zanzibar and Pemba to work on another of Seyyid Said's great visionary ventures, the development of clove plantations. As early as 1818, Seyyid Said had passed a decree ordering that for every coconut palm, farmers on Pemba and Zanzibar islands had to plant three clove trees. While it took some years to get off the ground, the results of this venture were staggering. From 1843 to 1859, clove exports from Zanzibar and Pemba rose from 30 tons a year to well over 2,000 tons, turning the two islands into the world's biggest producer of cloves, jointly accounting for 80% of the world's entire clove crop early in the twentieth century.
In less than a quarter of a century, Seyyid Said had transformed Zanzibar from a sleepy fishing village of mud huts nestling at the foot of the Omani fort into the political, military and commercial master of East Africa. By the middle of the nineteenth century, Zanzibar's influence even extended far into the interior of Africa, via thousand mile long trade routes that stretched from the coastal towns as far inland as Lakes Victoria, Tanganyika and Nyasa. Trade with the interior had been going on for centuries, but largely through a string of informal markets which exchanged goods bought in neighbouring locations. From the 1830s however, large trade caravans, financed by Zanzibar's Indian bankers, led by Swahili merchants and sometimes numbering a thousand porters, began to penetrate the interior of Africa, primarily in the hunt for a fortune in ivory and slaves. Bearing with them the blood red flag of the sultan, these caravans brought about the first direct contact between the coast and the ancient chiefdoms of Central Africa and ultimately, the sultan of Zanzibar would claim these lands as part of his realm.
As these pioneering caravan routes were developed, so too did the ports connecting them with the international market in Zanzibar. Bagamoyo, from where caravans made the epic 1,200 mile march to the town of Ujiji on the shores of Lake Tanganyika, had been founded in the eighteenth century to facilitate access to Zanzibar, and by the nineteenth century was expanding rapidly. Further north, so too was the port of Tanga, which by 1850 may have been even bigger than Mombasa. And even though Kilwa was some way south of Zanzibar, she went through another of her periodic booms as the starting point of the caravan route to Lake Nyasa. Even Mombasa, dazed from the sudden shock of losing her pre-eminent position to Zanzibar, continued to expand in response to the boom in demand for ivory.
But not everybody was touched by this economic boom. After the Battle of Shela, the Omani looked on Lamu as the main town of the northern archipelago and developed it as their northern headquarters. While Lamu benefited greatly, helped by the Hamerton Treaty which made it the starting point for the illegal slave route to Arabia, the other towns of the Lamu Archipelago fared less well and Pate went into a precipitous decline. Some time around 1840, the Nabahani, having ruled Pate for six centuries, were deposed and their last sultan, Ahmed bin Famoluti, fled to the mainland where he set up a rival sultanate at Witu, embarking on a campaign of attacking the mainland farms that supplied Pate.
In 1854, Seyyid Said made one of his increasingly rare visits to Oman in order to deal with a Persian attack on Bandar Abbas. It was the last time he would see Zanzibar. Two years later, having left Muscat for the return journey to Zanzibar aboard his flagship, Victoria, the 67 year old sultan contracted dysentery and died six days later near the Seychelles.
Seyyid Said's body arrived in Zanzibar six days after his death on 19th October 1856, accompanied aboard Victoria by his third son, Barghash, who, in time-honoured Omani tradition, had every intention of seizing the sultanate from under the nose of his older brother, Majid. Burying Seyyid Said's body in secret, Barghash set out to capture Majid in his palace at Mtoni, only to find that he'd already left having learned of the arrival of the Victoria from some fishermen, forcing Barghash to abandon his attempt to usurp the crown - for the time being.
The succession to the sultanate was still a contentious issue though, particularly when the oldest brother, Thuwain, who had ruled Oman in Seyyid Said's absence, learned that the sultanate was to be divided: Thuwain was to stay in Muscat, ruling as Sultan of Oman, while Majid was to rule the East African dominion as Sultan of Zanzibar. Thuwain was furious, understandably so given that his inheritance had become, by 1856, the poorer half of the sultanate, and so he set out with a fleet of ships to seize control of Majid's portion. The British intervened, negotiating a peace treaty in 1861 between the two feuding brothers which granted Thuwain financial compensation of 40,000 Maria Theresa Dollars per annum. Thuwain, however, only had to put up with this situation for another five years, before being murdered in his sleep by his own son.
Meanwhile, Barghash embarked upon a second bid to wrest the sultanate from Majid. Egged on by the French, Thuwain and the el Harthi family, Barghash plotted and schemed against his brother until Majid felt it best to confine Barghash to a house in Zanzibar town. Barghash escaped, dressed as a woman, with the help of his two sisters, Khola and Salme, and took up residence at his fortified and heavily armed plantation which he had named Marseilles in honour of his Francophile leanings. When Majid attacked the plantation, Barghash quickly escaped and, with Majid still at Marseilles, headed straight for Zanzibar town and the seat of government...where he came face-to-face with a force of British troops who had no intention of letting this family dispute upset their growing influence over the sultanate. Barghash surrendered to the British, who sent him into a leisured and comfortable exile in Bombay.
The intervention of the British and French in the Omani succession dispute shows how far European influence had grown in Zanzibar. European consuls, particularly the British, were not afraid to use the threat of military force to get their way. For his part, Seyyid Majid was more than happy to cultivate his relationship with the British if it meant they upheld his claim to the sultanate. However, many Swahili subjects felt that European influence was beginning to become too strong and that the sultan was showing too much respect for the growing number of white merchants and officials in the town. Then in 1866, one European went too far, causing a scandal which threatened the lives of every European on Zanzibar.
In part, it all happened because the new British consul wanted a house in the country. Eager to please the British, Seyyid Majid asked his younger sister, Salme, to move out of her house in the middle of the island, forcing her to take up residence in a house in Zanzibar town. Her new next door neighbour was Heinrich Reute, a German merchant from Hamburg, and in the densely packed streets of Zanzibar town it meant the two were effectively living in adjacent rooms. They talked through windows that faced each other, fell in love and began an affair that, while carried out discretely, quickly became scandalous gossip around the town. For any Muslim woman to take up with a Christian man was bad enough; for her to be the sister of the sultan made the scandal many times worse.
Then she became pregnant. Realising the danger - if news of this broke out, he would probably have been lynched - Reute smuggled her out of Zanzibar aboard a British ship, HMS Highflyer, and she fled to Aden while Reute wound up his business dealings in Zanzibar hoping that no one would notice the princess was missing. When the scandal became public knowledge, the entire white community of Zanzibar was under threat, and only the presence of a hastily despatched British naval frigate prevented potential reprisals. The baby was born that December and a few months later Reute joined Salme in Aden where they married, Salme having converted to Christianity and adopting the name Emily. Although the baby that caused all the scandal died young, they had another three children back in Germany until Heinrich's untimely death in a tram accident in 1870. As far as Princess Salme's family back in Zanzibar were concerned, she was herself as good as dead for having committed such a sin and even though she returned twice to Zanzibar on brief visits, no sultan would ever speak to her again.
Sex scandals weren't the only thing to provide Zanzibar with a reputation for lurid goings-on. There was plenty more besides, and as more and more westerners visited the island, stories about Zanzibar started to make their way into European consciousness, giving the island a unique reputation. While ships sailing into the harbour at Zanzibar could smell the sweet fragrance of cloves wafting in the air, they could also pick up a somewhat decidedly less savoury aroma. Dr David Livingstone called the place Stinkibar, noting in one of his journals that “the stench at night is so gross or crass one might cut out a slice and manure a garden with it.” Dr James Christie, an English physician who visited Zanzibar in 1869 wrote that “no stranger ever lands at Zanzibar without expressing extreme disgust at the odious state of the sea beach .... to some it occasions nausea and vomiting, and both olfactories and optics are most painfully affected. Except at high tide no one ever thinks of boat exercise and it is only at that time that European ladies can approach the shore.” In effect, the seafront was the town's toilet and dustbin, into which drained the open sewers of the densely-packed town. Combined with the tropical air that bred disease, the filth deposited in the harbour occasionally erupted into cholera outbreaks that swept away people in their thousands, such as those of 1858 and 1869 which were thought to have claimed 50,000 Zanzibari.
Decomposed or bloated corpses also lay strewn along the seafront, often victims of the infamous and feared Northern Arabs who, when not buying slaves for export to Arabia would simply go and kidnap them, killing those who resisted and dumping their bodies into the harbour. While locals feared the Northern Arabs' tactics, the activities of more peaceable slave traders was accepted by them as the normal state of affairs, and as the slave trade through Zanzibar grew inexorably during the reign of Seyyid Majid, his coffers began to spill over. By the 1860s, Zanzibar was the hub of one of the world's most effective slave trading systems, with tens of thousands of Africans marched from the interior, often carrying loads of ivory led by Swahili merchants and sold in Zanzibar's crowded market in Shangani. One of the greatest of these slave traders was Hamed bin Mohammed, a Swahili born in Zanzibar better known as Tippu Tip because of a facial twitch that resembled a bird of the same name. In the 1860s and 1870s Tippu Tip effectively ruled a region in the Upper Congo half the size of Europe which he bled dry of people in order to supply the insatiable demands of Zanzibar's slave market. In the late 1860s the slave market in Shangani was relocated to Mkunazini on the outskirts of the stone town where it not only had more space but was also fortuitously well away from the eyes and ears of the British consul whose pressure on the sultan to end the trade was gradually becoming more intense, something encouraged by the trickle of European explorers and missionaries who passed through or stayed in Zanzibar from the 1860s, most notably Dr David Livingstone, whose accounts of his expeditions through Africa included lurid descriptions of Zanzibar and the slave trade.
By the end of the 1860s, Seyyid Majid was spending more and more time away from Zanzibar, preferring to reside at his new palace on the mainland opposite Zanzibar Island. Located to the south of Bagamoyo, he named it Bandur ul Salaam, the Palace of Peace, a name that became contracted to Dar es Salaam, from which the town that grew up around the palace came to be called. Construction of the palace, on a site now occupied by State House, began in 1865, and by 1867 it was complete enough to stage a lavish banquet for the British, French, German and American consuls whose friendship Majid was always keen to court. Majid planned to turn Dar es Salaam into the administrative and commercial centre of the sultanate but his dreams were cut short in October 1870 after he fell badly in the palace and broke his neck, dying shortly afterwards aged 37.
Majid was succeeded by his brother, Barghash, whose time in Bombay had turned him into something of an Anglophile. In the same year that he took over the sultanate, Dr John Kirk, a surgeon turned diplomat who had considerable experience as a botanist, took over as British consul. Kirk had been with Dr David Livingstone on his five year expedition to the Zambezi from 1858, and the famous explorer played a role in nurturing Kirk's career in East Africa. Barghash and Kirk were to make a great team, displaying immense respect for each other and together they modernised Zanzibar's army, administration and the town itself, with Kirk ensuring Barghash's philanthropy provided Zanzibar with lighting, sanitation and an improved water supply. The high point of Barghash's building spree was the construction of the Beit al-Ajaib, or The House of Wonders, a stunning palace complete with colonnades, balconies and a clock tower which, when completed in 1883, served as Barghash's headquarters. By then, though, the close ties between Barghash and Britain had resulted in another transformation in Zanzibar, this time seeing the end of the slave trade.
Without military patrols, the Hamerton Treaty's attempt to limit the slave trade had been utterly ineffective, but by the early 1870s, stirred by Dr David Livingstone's reports of the horrors of the slave trade in Central Africa, demands in Britain to end the slave trade had become such a popular war cry that no British government could afford to ignore it.
In 1871 a British Parliamentary Select Committee was set up to examine East Africa's slave trade and two years later, in January 1873, with the committee having reported back, a high-powered British embassy arrived in Zanzibar led by a former governor of Bombay, Sir Bartle Frere. Technically, all they sought was Barghash's ‘assistance’ in putting an end to the slave trade, but in reality it hardly mattered whether the sultan complied or not. They intended to stop the slave trade with or without his agreement. Barghash was presented with a treaty that would halt the slave trade along the coast and close down the slave markets of East Africa. When he refused to sign, Barghash was threatened with a blockade of Zanzibar which, if carried out, would have brought the island's economy to her knees.
The precarious state of the island's economy, something exacerbated by a devastating cyclone the previous year which had destroyed much of the island’s plantations, made accepting an end to the slave trade even harder for Barghash, who was well aware how strongly Swahili traders and farmers wanted him to resist the British. But the British delegation had not come this far to take no for an answer. Deluged by threats both from pro-slavery Swahili and abolitionist Britons, Barghash pleaded to Frere: “a spear is held at each of my eyes; with which one shall I choose to be pierced?”
As Barghash continued to resist, fourteen British warships moved in and imposed a blockade around all the major slave-exporting ports along the coast. Finally, Kirk informed Barghash that Frere intended to carry out the threat of a blockade around Zanzibar and explained to him in no uncertain terms what effects he might expect should the island be cut off from the mainland. The following day, June 5th 1873, Barghash signed the treaty. That same day the slave market in the town was closed and Frere, fresh from his successful use of gunboat diplomacy, moved north to Mombasa where, on the mainland, he established a town for freed slaves named Freretown in his honour.
Barghash had done his bit. Two years later he was rewarded with a state visit to England and in the space of four weeks he captivated the nation. Barghash paid visits to Brighton, Birmingham, Liverpool and Manchester, but spent most of his time in London on a whirlwind social tour, taking in theatre and opera, having dinner with Queen Victoria at Windsor Castle and with the Prince and Princess of Wales at Marlborough House. Sir Bartle Frere, who accompanied Barghash, made sure the visit was carefully orchestrated, among other things ensuring that one uninvited guest to England, Barghash's sister, Emily Reute, was denied the chance to meet the sultan. She had travelled from Germany in the hope of a reconciliation with her brother but was warned by Frere to keep her distance lest she upset the carefully-laid diplomatic plans.
Back in Zanzibar, it soon became clear that treaties and patrols alone would still not be enough to end the slave trade. Indeed, while the slave trade in Zanzibar, under the watchful eye of the British consul, was extinguished, in other parts of the coast the 1873 treaty actually boosted the trade. In Lamu the slave trade grew since, far away from Zanzibar and close to the lucrative markets of Arabia, slave traders were able to operate with less chance of detection. Slave trading out of Mombasa and Kilwa were also still big business. In 1877, Kirk convinced Barghash of the need to reorganise the Zanzibari army if it was to be used against the slave traders, and so the old Baluchi soldiers were dumped in favour of African troops who were transformed into a crack unit by the British general, Sir Lloyd Mathews. So successful was General Mathews that the semi-independent chiefdoms of the coast, many of whom were involved in slave trading, were removed from power, strengthening the authority and autonomy of the sultan of Zanzibar. In 1883 British vice-consuls were appointed in Lamu, Mombasa and Kilwa to keep a closer eye on the trade there. In Lamu, the appointee was D.C. Haggard, whose brother, Rider, the writer of 'King Solomon's Mines', penned his great novel, Alan Quartermain, while visiting the island. The combined efforts of Mathews' African troops, the vice consuls and naval patrols gradually forced the slave traders out of the towns, pushing them underground - in some cases literally to places like the caves at Shimoni, which were used to hide slaves from the authorities until they could be loaded on to dhows for the increasingly perilous journey north.
While men like Mathews, Frere and Kirk used guns, boats and treaties to end the slave trade, others came armed with the Bible, not just to eradicate slavery but in a sometimes pompous desire to ‘civilise’ Africans. In 1844 the German Protestant, Johan Ludwig Krapf, arrived in Zanzibar with his wife and baby daughter and soon after established a mission post at Nyali on the mainland north of Mombasa. Tragically, his wife and daughter died within a day of each other of malaria just two months after their arrival at Nyali - their graves can still be seen there - but Krapf bravely continued his mission, joined later by two other Germans, Johann Rebmann and Jakob Erhardt. They journeyed inland and in 1849 Krapf became the first European to see Mount Kenya. Their missionary work was not particularly successful but they established a foothold on the coast upon which others would later build. Two months after the signing of the anti-slave treaty with Seyyid Barghash, the father of the missionary movement, Dr David Livingstone, died near Lake Bangweulu in central Africa. His embalmed body was carried 2,500km to the coast by his servants, Susi and Chuma, on an epic eleven month journey before being shipped back to London for burial in Westminster Abbey. Livingstone's example inspired countless other missionaries and explorers. The night before his body was taken to Zanzibar it rested in the church of the Holy Ghost Mission in Bagamoyo, the headquarters of a group of Catholic priests who had spent the last five years using all the money they could get their hands on buying slaves their freedom. High profile missions like these must have added to the pressure on Barghash in 1873.
The greatest symbol of the closing of Zanzibar's slave market in June 1873 was the vision of Bishop Edward Steere, the third Anglican bishop to Zanzibar, who secured the financial backing of the Universities Mission in Central Africa for the construction of a cathedral on the site of the old market. To the Victorians, this basilica symbolised the triumph of Christian values over the horrors of the slave trade and its most poignant reminder of what had once been there is a red circle in the floor in front of the altar, marking where once had been the slave market's whipping post.
Many European Christians had in their anti-slavery arsenal more than just the Bible. Some sought to promote ‘legitimate trade’, an idea that aimed to provide the Swahili with lucrative and morally acceptable forms of commerce as a way to encourage slave traders to abandon their age-old living. Foremost among them was a self-made Scottish Protestant, William Mackinnon.
Mackinnon was a remarkable man, having risen from the job of a grocer's assistant to become one of Britain's wealthiest men. In 1856 he started a steamship service on the Indian coast, the British India Steam Navigation Company, and in 1872 his ships began operating between Aden and Zanzibar. In 1876 he began the construction of two roads into the interior from Dar Es Salaam, one to Lake Victoria, the other to Lake Nyasa - though they only made it seventy miles inland - and then in 1878 he approached Barghash with the idea of setting up a trading company to develop trade on the mainland on the lines of the British East India Company. Barghash agreed, granting Mackinnon trading rights within the sultanate as well as the power to make laws and treaties on his mainland possessions, but the move collapsed, most likely because the British Foreign Secretary suddenly got cold feet, fearing such a company might eventually need direct government support to survive.
The fact is that in the 1870s, Britain had no more desire to create British overseas protectorates than they had had at the time of Captain Owen, an attitude shared at the time by every other European country. In the mid 1880s, that situation suddenly changed.
The event that led to direct European control in East Africa actually started in the Congo, but at its root was the growing tension between the major European powers over attempts to extend political and commercial interests in different parts of Africa, a tension that, in the space of a few years, erupted into the biggest land grabbing exercise in human history.
It all began when Belgium's King Leopold came to verbal blows with Portugal over his dream of a personal empire in the Congo basin. The Portuguese disputed Belgium's rights to control the mouth of the River Congo, and then Germany, Britain and France decided that, even though they had absolutely no interest in the region, they had to become involved. The result was an international conference held in Berlin in 1884 which carved up a region of Central Africa the size of western Europe between Belgium and Portugal. Soon, every major European power wanted a piece of the continent too. First to pile in was the Chancellor of Germany, Otto von Bismarck, who, in the same year as the Berlin conference, announced a German protectorate over a region to the north and west of the British Cape colony, modern Namibia, in order to protect the interests of German traders there.
The Scramble reached East Africa at the end of November 1884 when Kart Peters, a founding member of the Society for German Colonisation, arrived in Zanzibar with two colleagues, all disguised as mechanics. Within a month the three men had signed treaties with a dozen tribal chiefs in the region around Mount Kilimanjaro, an area that had long been regarded as belonging to the Sultan of Zanzibar. The following February, the German emperor ratified the treaties and declared a German protectorate over the inland region. Two months later, having informed an astonished Barghash of the annexation, the Germans declared a protectorate over Witu, a town on the mainland opposite the Lamu Archipelago whose ruler, Ahmed Abdullah Simba, was keen to cut his ties with Zanzibar. Barghash threatened to send troops north to force Simba to recognise Zanzibar's supremacy, so the Germans, none too subtly, sent five warships to Zanzibar and suggested that if Barghash didn't accept the German protectorates, they would flatten the island. Aboard one of the ships was none other than Emily Reute, so it seemed as if the Germans were ready to stage a coup. Barghash might reasonably have expected support from the British, but they had no desire to risk conflict with Germany. Bigger global crises, such as the possibility of war with Russia over Afghanistan, completely overshadowed the dispute over Witu and the Kilimanjaro region, so Barghash was forced to back down, also agreeing to a German request for control of the port of Dar es Salaam, a vital point from which to access and exploit the new mainland protectorate.
To avert future disputes, the British and Germans sat down around a large map and together carved up East Africa. Barghash was not invited. The result was the Anglo-German Agreement in October 1886. It recognised the territory of the Sultan of Zanzibar as consisting of a mainland coastal strip ten miles inland stretching from Cape Delgado in the south to Kipini in the Tana Delta, together with the islands of the Lamu Archipelago, Pemba, Zanzibar and Mafia, and the northern towns of Kismayu, Brava, Merca, Mogadishu and Warsheikh. The vast hinterland that lay behind this strip was divided between Britain and Germany by a straight line drawn from Lake Victoria to the coast at a point close to the Umba River, although as a parting gesture, the British agreed to redraw the line so it skirted the northern slopes of Mount Kilimanjaro, granting Africa's tallest mountain as a present to the German emperor. South of the line was the German ‘sphere of influence’; to the north was the British sphere, apart from the area around Witu which remained a German protectorate.
Since neither government was prepared to become directly involved in running their new domains, trading companies were set up to carry out administrative, judicial, military and economic functions. In the German sphere of influence, trading rights were granted to the Society for German Colonization, which later became the German East Africa Company, and to the German Witu Company. The German East Africa Company set up their headquarters in Bagamoyo. Within the British sphere of influence this task was handed over to the British East Africa Association, a company run by William Mackinnon, who had finally succeeded in his desire to create a legitimate trade company. Upon receiving a royal charter in 1888, it became the Imperial British East African Company (IBEA), with their headquarters in Mombasa.
That Seyyid Barghash was prepared to delegate so much of his authority to three foreign trading companies is startling proof of how far the power of the sultanate had declined since the heady days of Seyyid Said. Barghash, surrounded by European consuls and threatened with force if he refused their wishes, did the only thing he could to safeguard the territory of the sultanate and his family's inheritance. But by surrendering independence so meekly, it was bound to stir up protest amongst the Swahili, especially after Seyyid Barghash's death in March 1888.
The new sultan, Khalifa, did not try to hide his dislike for the Europeans but his authority on the mainland was little more than symbolic, and a month after succeeding to the sultanate, Seyyid Khalifa granted the German East Africa Company full administrative rights along the coastal strip adjacent to the German sphere of influence, surrendering even more of his authority.
In the wake of the new agreement, the Germans entered the coastal region in force and in a breathtaking display of arrogance managed to alienate the local population with a speed that would have embarrassed even the Portuguese a few centuries earlier. One culprit was Emil von Zelewski, an official of the German East Africa Company who, in August 1888, thought it would be a good idea to march into Pangani, tear down the sultan's flag and then announce to the town that he had replaced the local governor as the Sultan of Zanzibar's highest representative. Von Zelewski then decided to have the governor arrested and marched a company of armed German troops, accompanied by a hunting dog, into the town's mosque, an appalling act of desecration in Muslim eyes. Similar acts happened elsewhere along the German-controlled coast and, combined with the sudden imposition of new customs duties and violation of local laws, the coast was soon up in arms, not just against the Germans but against all Europeans. In Tanga, the poet Hemedi bin Abdallah wrote that “at Kilwa and Dar es Salaam, there was a plague of wazungu [white men]. There was no free speech. They had throttled the country.”
Part of the problem was the inability of the sultan's representatives to do anything to contain German and British actions, so the Swahili took matters into their own hands. The leader of the uprising was Abushiri bin Salim el-Harthi, after whom the uprising, the Abushiri War, was named. Abushiri quickly drove the Germans out of Pangani and Bagamoyo, but even he soon lost control of the uprising and within a short time mob rule had taken over, spreading into the British-controlled region with European mission stations becoming as much a target as trading and administrative posts. Thousands of Africans, as well as many Europeans, died in the uprising.
An Anglo-German blockade of the coast, supported by the Italian and Portuguese, began early in 1889 on the pretext of suppressing the slave trade. The German army under Major Hermann von Wissmann began the fight back, suppressing the revolt north of Dar es Salaam and chasing Abushiri around the countryside, and by the end of 1889 the uprising had been contained. Abushiri was captured and hanged at Bagamoyo on 15th December.
Following the sudden death of Khalifa in February 1890, another son of Seyyid Said, Ali, became Sultan of Zanzibar. Within five months, Ali found himself stripped of even more of his authority when the British and German governments negotiated a new treaty between themselves. Germany bought the ten mile wide coastal strip south of the Umba River from the sultan for four million marks, while a British protectorate was declared over the northern coastal strip, together with the islands of Pemba and Zanzibar, effectively confirming a situation that had existed in all but name for years. The Germans also agreed to hand Witu over to the British in return for Heligoland, a tiny island in the North Sea.
Zanzibar was now just a pawn in the great game of international politics and the treatment meted out to successive sultans even met opposition in the British parliament. One MP scoffed at the idea of protectorates, denouncing the British and German governments as robbers who, “having stripped a man of all that belonged to him, discussed who should protect him.” Another MP, Labouchere, accused the British government of being the most thorough land grabbers in history, asserting that “Africa belongs to the Africans”.
The new agreement changed little as far as the Swahili were concerned, so it's hardly surprising that resistance continued. In 1890 a group of Germans set up a camp near Witu and started chopping down the forests that surrounded the town. This may not have seemed much of a crisis, but the fact that they were heavily armed and spending much of their spare time engaged in military exercises led the Witu sultan, Fumo Bakari, to fear they were about to launch a coup attempt. So he stole their weapons. Naturally this upset the Germans, so they marched on Witu and with their remaining guns opened fire. In the ensuing battle, two Swahili and ten Germans lost their lives.
Soon a full scale uprising was in motion with Fumo Bakari determined to overthrow the so-called British protectorate that had been established earlier that year. Facing 3000 armed Swahili, the British mobilised no less than 13 ships and in October 1890 landed 1000 troops at Kipini from where they advanced on Witu. The British sacked the town when they got there, burning everything including the sultan's palace which contained the ancient court chronicles of Pate. Unrest in Witu continued for four years until Fumo Bakari's successor was arrested by the British.
Then the Mazrui took up arms. The remnants of the family that had once ruled Mombasa and resisted the Omani so successfully were still an influential power, but they had been remarkably quiet as German and British power grew, perhaps happy that it was being done at the expense of Zanzibar's sultans. But when the British intervened in a Mazrui succession dispute, the rejected claimant, Mbarak bin Rashid, decided that enough was enough and took up arms against the British authorities. By the end of 1895 he had an army of 1600 troops which roamed the coast attacking European mission stations, trading bases and British troops. The uprising was only put down by an Indian regiment brought to Mombasa in March 1896, forcing Mbarak to flee into the German protectorate.
Then things suddenly got much worse for the British. Up till now, the uprisings had been confined to the mainland, while Zanzibar had quietly succumbed to British dominance. However, anti-European sentiments on the island were growing and when the sultan, Hamid, died suddenly on the morning of 25th August 1896, these tensions erupted into open rebellion. The British had already decided upon a successor to Seyyid Hamid but one of those passed over for the sultanate made an attempt to seize the sultanate for himself. He was one of Hamid's cousins, Khalid, and the popular choice for sultan amongst the island's population. Khalid's attempt to seize the sultanate was, of course, what any worthy Omani royal was expected to do, but in the wake of the Witu and Mazrui uprisings, the British were in no mood to play along.
When the British authorities heard the news of Hamid's death, the acting consul marched with General Mathews to the main palace, the Beit al-Sahel, only to find Khalid and fifty of his supporters with their guns trained on them. With a threatening mob gathering, the consul and general made as dignified a retreat as they could in the circumstances.
Khalid was in a reasonably strong position. He could count on the assistance of the sultan's personal army consisting of 2500 troops and the support of most Zanzibaris, while in the harbour he had his own gunboat, The Glasgow. He stationed some troops in the Omani fort and trained his guns and cannon on the English Club, where most of the Europeans had now gathered, and on two British gunboats, The Thrush and The Sparrow, anchored in the harbour. However, the following day two British warships arrived including the St George, commanded by Rear Admiral Rawson and at 7am the following morning, Rawson issued an ultimatum to Khalid to pull down his flag from over the palace, have his followers lay down their arms and present himself at the Customs House. Failure to do so by 9am would lead to the British ships opening fire.
Perhaps Khalid had not expected the British to resist with force. They had always preferred negotiation and in recent months had been displaying more of a laissez-faire attitude in Zanzibar. But the ultimatum did not leave Khalid with any doubt as to British intentions. At 8am he sent an envoy to Rawson requesting negotiations, but the admiral was not moved.
As the palace clock struck at 9am, The Thrush and The Sparrow, and a cruiser, The Racoon, opened fire. The American consul, Dorsey Mohun, described the scene:
“Shells and splinters of shells were screaming and whistling through the air ... great volumes of smoke were now being wafted lazily away in the light breeze which had sprung up and I feared the town had caught fire but it was only the harem. Every five or ten minutes there would be a cessation in the fire to allow the Arabs a chance to haul down their colours but it was not until 9.45 when the flag came fluttering down that the fire ceased.”
The bombardment of Zanzibar, lasting 45 minutes, was the shortest war in history, but it was also a massacre. The palace and the square in front of it had been packed with people, many armed but many simply bystanders expecting little more than some kind of fireworks display, but within 45 minutes, 500 of them had been killed, The Glasgow lay at the bottom of the harbour and two palaces, the Beit al-Sahel and the Beit al-Hakm behind it lay in ruins together with a lighthouse in front of the House of Wonders. Miraculously, the House of Wonders suffered only minor damage - even its chandeliers were intact - but the devastation elsewhere was on an horrendous scale. According to Dorsey Mohun,
“the scene in the palace square was utter ruin. The small palace, old palace and harem were in flames ... the new palace had hundreds of shot holes in its walls and at the south-west angle in the third storey a shell had made a hole big enough to drive a coach through ... inside the [old] palace was a scene beyond description ....”
Khalid fled to the German consulate where he was given asylum, boarded a German warship and fled to Dar es Salaam. By 1.30 in the afternoon, the British choice for sultan, Hamoud bin Muhammad, had been declared sultan, but at a terrible cost.
This appalling act of aggression in Zanzibar was proof to all that the British, like the Germans, were now very much in charge of the coast. And by then, control was no longer being enforced by the trading companies. The British and German governments now ruled the coast and its hinterland directly as imperial colonies.
The cost of running the mainland spheres of influence and maintaining a military presence along the coast proved to be, by the mid 1890s, too much of a burden for the British and German trading companies and by the time of the Zanzibar bombardment, both companies had folded. IBEA had been underfunded from the start and made little headway in developing commercial opportunities inland, although it did succeed in building a rough road from Mombasa into the Kenyan Highlands known as the Mackinnon Road to help stimulate trade. Travel along it was still slow, so in 1891 IBEA undertook its most ambitious venture of all, the construction of a railway from Mombasa to Lake Victoria. Within months rails had been shipped in and construction began. A few miles inland, all work was halted. IBEA was bankrupt.
The Company was only saved by donations from missionary societies keen to see its work in Uganda continue, but three years later even Mackinnon was forced to admit that IBEA was in a hopeless situation. By then the dream of a railway line had been abandoned, its tracks pulled up and relaid in Mombasa to form a trolley service for the expatriates there. It was now clear that if Britain was to develop East Africa and build a railway through it, the task would have to be carried out by the British government, financed by the British taxpayer. In June 1894, IBEA sold its assets to the British government and the Sultan of Zanzibar was forced to repurchase the mainland sphere of influence for £150,000. On 1st July 1895 the mainland sphere of influence was declared a British protectorate, administered by the consul in Zanzibar. Once again the sultan had no say in the proceedings.
The German East Africa Company had enjoyed more success, but it had been operating within a government protectorate for longer than IBEA and so had less of a military burden. Able to concentrate on developing commerce, it had by 1888 established thirty plantations along the coast growing sugar, tobacco, coffee, vanilla and, in 1892, sisal, a plant whose fibres made excellent rope and sacks, was introduced from Florida by the German botanist Richard Hindorf. It quickly became a huge money spinner and by 1908 there were ten million sisal plants in Tanzania, mainly around Tanga.
In 1891, the German East Africa Company transferred its headquarters from Bagamoyo to Dar es Salaam, a town which, in the aftermath of the Abushiri War, was regarded as a much safer place to be. It gave the town created by Seyyid Majid a rebirth and under the control of Major Hermann von Wissmann, Dar quickly expanded, rising from a population of 350 people in 1889 to one of 24,000 by 1905. The town was now set to become one of the foremost on the coast.
In May 1896, the British government began the construction of a railway line from Mombasa to Lake Victoria, one of the most ambitious civil engineering projects of the Victorian era. It traversed the arid Taru Desert, the lion country of Tsavo, the climb into the Kenyan Highlands and the precipitous slopes of the Rift Valley, courting diseases like malaria and sleeping sickness. The railway, built by over 32,000 Indian labourers, took over five years and £5½ million to build. At the same time, the Germans were constructing a railway from Tanga to Moshi and in 1905 started building another line from Dar es Salaam to Kigoma on the shore of Lake Tanganyika, a town they would reach in 1914.
The railways had a profound impact on the coast. To build them meant expanding the harbour at Dar es Salaam and, since there was no room to expand the old harbour in Mombasa, a new, deep-water port was constructed at Kilindini on the southern side of Mombasa Island. With rapid, direct access deep into the African interior made possible by the railways, the ports of Dar es Salaam and Mombasa, and to a lesser extent the one at Tanga, began to dominate trade along the coast. From 1897 to 1947 the population of Mombasa rose from 25,000 to 100,000 people. The growing importance of Mombasa and Dar es Salaam led to a decline in trade through such ports as Lamu, Malindi, Bagamoyo and Kilwa, but the port most seriously affected was Zanzibar since the railways meant its position offshore now isolated it from trade with the interior.
The construction and maintenance of the railways were expensive affairs. In order to make them pay for themselves, traffic on the railways would have to increase and so the British and German governments encouraged Europeans to settle in the interior and farm the land in order to produce agricultural exports that could be conveyed to the coast on the railways. Ultimately this meant that the European authorities came to regard development of the interior as more important than development of the coast. In 1904, Britain began to administer the mainland protectorate separately from Zanzibar and in 1907 the protectorate's capital was transferred from Mombasa to Nairobi, a town which a few years earlier had been little more than a railway shunting yard. Nairobi now became the focus of attention for British colonial officials, whose main concern was to assist in the development of agriculture in the Kenyan Highlands.
A quarter of a century earlier, the main concern of British officials had been the suppression of the slave trade. Having abolished the trade in 1873, the British had not taken direct action to wipe out the actual use of slaves for many years, realising that such an action might undermine the local economy. However, from 1897, slaves on Zanzibar who wanted freedom could be granted it through the courts, their owners receiving compensation. The same decree was issued along the rest of the coast in 1907, but the cost of this was such that in 1911, a Slavery Decree was passed which announced a deadline for compensation payments. Consequently, there was a sudden rush through the courts which led to the virtual disappearance of slavery along the coast.
Imperial rivalry had grown steadily in East Africa, and in 1914 it plunged the European powers into a war of global proportions that included East Africa. British and German colonists quickly abandoned their farms to enlist as soldiers. And in Dar es Salaam, the Germans had an ace up their sleeve that might see them take control of the whole coast. The Konigsberg, one of a new generation of modern ships built in the first decade of the twentieth century, had arrived in Dar es Salaam in June 1914 under the command of Captain Max Looff to replace the colony's ageing steamship. When war broke out two months later, British shipping across the western Indian Ocean, plying the routes between Zanzibar, Mombasa, Aden and Bombay, suddenly came under direct threat.
Sure enough, the day after war was declared, British fears were realised when The Konigsberg, sailing off the coast of Oman, captured and sank a British freighter, The City of Winchester. The situation would have been much worse for the British had it not been for The Konigsberg's chronic shortages of coal which was only temporarily relieved by taking on board The City of Winchester's coal stocks. When these ran out at the end of August, The Konigsberg was forced to retire to the sanctuary of the mangrove creeks of the Rufiji Delta opposite Mafia Island and await fresh supplies from her collier ship, The Somali. Once replenished, she was ready to pounce again.
Looff had actually been planning a return to Germany once he had taken coal aboard, but as he was about to sail south towards the Cape of Good Hope he learned that a British cruiser, The Pegasus, was anchored at Zanzibar. Not one to let an opportunity slip by, Looff instead sailed north and sank The Pegasus with the loss of 38 lives. Then Looff set a course back to Germany, but within hours his ship had developed serious engine trouble, forcing her to limp back to the Rufiji Delta. The damaged parts were stripped from the ship and sent overland to Dar for repair, while Looff hid from the enraged British who, once realising that The Konigsberg was still somewhere in East African waters, launched a huge operation to find and destroy the cruiser.
Five miles upstream, The Konigsberg was so secluded that the three British cruisers charged with finding her were unable to do so. Within a few weeks, Looff’s repaired engine parts had returned from Dar but, just as he was about to set sail, the British finally located the ship. However, with no knowledge of the tides and shallows of the Rufiji, the British could not mount a seaborne attack with their cruisers, so instead a blockade was mounted at the mouth of the river to prevent The Konigsberg from escaping.
With The Konigsberg trapped, the British launched an attack on Tanga on November 2nd 1914. The British commander, General Aitken, expected to take Tanga in a day, but in the end the attack was a complete debacle. The outnumbered Germans ambushed the advancing British near the railway line, scattering the British amongst the thick plantations near the town. Those not killed by the Germans either got lost amongst the trees or stung by bees, and after three days Aitken ordered his bruised army back to Mombasa after taking 795 casualties. Tanga remained in German hands until 1917.
More farce surrounded the continued blockade of The Konigsberg. The British had attempted to attack the ship from the air, but all they had to accomplish this task were two small seaplanes whose tiny bombs failed to even dent the cruiser. But in July 1915, the British captured Mafia Island, giving them an air and naval base from which to mount a concerted effort to destroy the ship. On 6th July, two former Brazilian Navy shallow-water monitors entered the Rufiji after having been towed from the Mediterranean, while reconnaissance planes took off from Mafia Island to pinpoint The Konigsberg. They eventually found that the German ship had moved a further seven miles upstream and immediately reported the ship's position to the two heavily armed monitors which began shelling the cruiser, their targeting becoming more and more precise with the help of the planes. As the tide moved out, the monitors pulled back, returning five days later to finish the job. With his ship fatally damaged, Looff scuttled The Konigsberg in the mud of the Rufiji. She was still visible there nearly fifty years later, until being salvaged for scrap.
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.
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 arrivals 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.
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.
Kindle Edition | Copyright 2013 Charles Cornelius
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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.
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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: the 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.
Simon Mollison (1971), Kenya's Coast. East African Publishing House
William Ochieng (1985), A History of Kenya. MacMillan Kenya
Stephen Derwent Partington (1999), Animation of the Soul: a translation of the Kiswahili, Islamic epic, Al-Inkishafi.
Emily Reute (1886), Memoirs Of An Arabian Princess From Zanzibar. The Gallery Publications, republished 1998.
Edward Rodwell (1948), Ivory, Apes and Peacocks. Mombasa Times.
Hamo Sassoon (1975), The Siwas of Lamu. The Lamu Society
Justus Strandes (1961), The Portuguese in East Africa. Kenyan Literature Bureau
John Sutton (1990), A Thousand Years of East Africa. The British Institute in Eastern Africa.
Gideon S Were and Derek A Wilson (1984), East Africa Through A Thousand Years. Evans Brothers.
Thomas Wilson (1978), Takwa: An Ancient Swahili Settlement of the Lamu Archipelago. Kenya Museum Society