Swahili Coast Research Articles

The Morality of Schooling: Women's Education as an Arena for Social Tension in Cabo Delgado

In this article, I reflect on education as a continuing arena of tension for people in Cabo Delgado. The tension between formal (state-sponsored) and religious education as a backdrop of the conflict in Cabo Delgado has been widely mentioned but largely misunderstood. Scholars have consistently mentioned poverty and people's lack of access to formal education as drivers of the disenfranchisement that has led to violent extremism in the province. There are also references to how the insurgent movement has shunned formal education in favour of Islamic teachings. The existing literature about the insurgent's rejection of state-sponsored education, especially for girls, fails to address a trajectory whereby formal (state-sponsored) education has been a field of tension for a long time. Similar tensions happened across the Swahili coast in both English and French colonies. From interviews focused on women's relationships and experiences with both the colonial and postcolonial state, it emerged that Muslim populations in Cabo Delgado, particularly on the coast, have a long history of suspicion towards state-sponsored education. This includes showcasing a locally established practice for women's education that predated and existed alongside formal education. This follows that cultural and religious dynamics do not preclude women's influence in society, particularly education. In fact, it relies on her active participation. At the same time, despite potential violent cooptation, in the context of the conflict, the insurgent movement is able to tap into the existing tensions, including that around state-sponsored education. Evidence from the field indicates that, despite the disadvantages of resisting formal education, religious education remains central to most people, not just those following the extremist movement. What may appear to be an extremist rupture from mainstream practice should be understood within a logic operating on shared and familiar values.

THE ‘TREES FROM THE SEA’ CORAL ARCHITECTRURES AND INDIAN OCEAN MARITIME RESOURCES

This article presents the author’s experiences, over the past twenty-five years, in coral stone architecture. The use of marine porite coral is a technology that unites different cultures around the Indian Ocean, from the Maldives to the Swahili coast in Africa. The paper focuses on the use of environmental constraints and local resources for the construction of maritime mosques and coral buildings. The pre-Islamic origin of coral architecture is located between India and Indonesia around the first century AD. The diffusion of this technology was supported by Abbasid travellers and merchants in the Western Indian Ocean, and in Africa around the 9th century, as well as its globalisation under the Buwayhids and the Fatimids in the 11th century. This article shows how international maritime trade and Muslim diasporas disseminate a unique technology and how local populations assimilate material cultures, new technologies, new building material and how they share a common Indian Ocean identity. Keywords: Coral Stone, Indian Ocean, Swahili, Maldives, Islamic, Abbasids, Buddhism

Laboring Under an Illusion: Erasing Female Public Labor in Post-Abolition Zanzibar Islands, 1890–1910

Female workers were central to the coastal East African labor force during the 19th and early 20th centuries, yet their bodies have disappeared from the historical narratives of public and skilled labor. Colonial officials wrote copiously about African labor along the Swahili coast; how to find laborers, how to coerce them into working, the categories of labor, what skills laborers held, how much they should be paid, how to efficiently move them to where they were needed, among many other aspects. However, these same officials, when writing about female laborers, often eliminated mention of females from both the skilled workforce and from their status as an equal portion of free laborers in the post-abolition era. Women and girls in the nineteenth century were present in the public labor force throughout littoral communities, yet reading the records of colonial officials and historians would suggest otherwise. This epistemic erasure has warped the way historians have thought and written about labor across coastal eastern Africa. Colonial officials gendered almost all forms of public, and particularly skilled labor, as male – for both enslaved and freed workers – an erasure often mimicked in the work of historians, thus reifying colonial views of an idealized labor force that was dominated by skilled male laborers with a few low-skill female manual workers.The British belief in the “benevolence” of Arab slave-owners was a longstanding one, a belief that officials in the Zanzibar Islands used to justify their slow response to the metropole demand for the abolition of slavery. The “benignity concept” as Marek Pawelczak termed it was so pervasive in colonial reports that historians into the 21st century still use it as an argument for why slavery in the Zanzibar islands was “mild” and required “not more than twelve hours’ labour” in any given week. Hidden within the “benignity concept” is an image of enslavement as wholly domestic, and therefore implicitly feminized. What is more insidious about the benignity concept is that British officials used it in the late 1890s both to justify allowing slavery to continue and figuratively to erase female enslaved laborers as workers, rather making them “domestics” and as such part of the household. Beginning in 1895, descriptions of an enslaved female became either one of a luxuriously kept concubine who was in essence a “secondary wife” or simply of a wife and mother. Men were enslaved, women were wives, and children were no longer part of the conversation at all. Similarly, I argue here that referring to laborers as ungendered historical actors obliterates significant pieces of history and distorts our understanding of the past. The distortions in colonial record-keeping has perpetuated an epistemic erasure in contemporary literature on labor in eastern Africa, which is an act of epistemic violence.

Clientage, debt, and the integrative orientation of non-elites on the East African Swahili coast

Ceramic trends on Unguja Island in Zanzibar, Tanzania provide insights into non-elite political strategies on the East African Swahili Coast. Synthesizing imported ceramic data from two seasons of systematic field survey across rural Unguja with historical, ethnographic, and archaeological evidence from coastal East Africa, this paper argues that an integrative orientation toward power characterized bottom-up action on the Swahili Coast over the second millennium CE. While theories of bottom-up action have emphasized commoner autonomy and resistance to clientage, debt, and social inequality, evidence from the Swahili Coast attests to efforts by non-elites to seek entrance into cycles of reciprocal obligation as a means for recognition and social mobility—a specifically non-egalitarian orientation toward power. In response, elites competed with one another to accumulate wealth-in-people, resulting in a competitive patron-client system that prevented political consolidation. Elucidating these dynamics contributes to an understanding of how non-elite political strategies have shaped sociopolitical systems globally.

Open-Access Archaeological Predictive Modeling Using Zonal Statistics: A Case Study from Zanzibar, Tanzania

This paper presents a case study using zonal statistical analysis for archaeological predictive modeling with open-access software and free geospatial datasets. The method is applied to the rural landscapes of Zanzibar, Tanzania on the Swahili Coast. This study used QGIS (version 3.28) to perform zonal statistical analyses of environmental datasets weighted by settlement classes digitized from a 1907 historical map, to create predictive models for settlement across the island. These models were compared against the locations of major precolonial archaeological sites on the island and site data from a random stratified archaeological survey in an environmentally diverse region of northern Zanzibar. The results show strong correspondences between larger permanent site locations and areas of high likelihood for site detection in the predictive model. Additionally, there were correspondences between areas of lower likelihood for site detection and smaller, ephemeral sites related to agricultural production in swidden field plots. These results attest to Swahili rural complexity and enable an understanding of the specific environmental affordances that structured settlement and land use over the last millennium, in ways that shaped colonial contact in rural areas and altered the sociopolitical development of Zanzibar and the East African coast. The methods described here may be applicable for researchers and heritage managers in Africa and the Global South, where funding for large-scale field projects, expensive satellite imagery, or software licensing is limited.

Real but unrealised: object transformations and political economy in East and southern Africa, AD 750–1250

Archaeologists of East and southern Africa have long been attracted to large urban centres, such as those on the Swahili coast, and to the circulation of imported goods. Here, the authors aim to refocus attention on the diversity of objects that were produced and transformed by the inland societies of East and southern Africa during the Middle Iron Age (AD 750–1250). Recognition of the remaking, bundling and repurposing of small, portable objects emphasises the innovative practices that helped to bestow power on their makers. A socially embedded approach to studying objects and practices re-presents African communities as innovators and active transformers of non-local objects, and facilitates new narratives about the political economy of Africa at that time.

“Unless we Value the Intangible Heritage, the Tangible will never be Safe!” Linking the Tangible and Intangible Aspects of Heritage Sites in Africa

ABSTRACT A few heritage researchers and protection practitioners in some African countries define heritage sites and cultural objects based on European and North American criteria. Such criteria emphasize visual material remains like monumental structures and their aesthetically pleasing features. This Western view overlooks some critical aspects. For example, to local people, the meanings and associated values make the monuments and sites relevant. Despite the inseparability of the tangible heritage and associated intangible aspects such as spiritual practices, some researchers and heritage practitioners, including antiquities department officials, need to pay more attention to the invisible meanings embedded in the sites and cultural objects. Notably, it is these immaterial aspects which the local people value the most. In this article, we survey three fishing villages: Batini, Mkadini and Winde, on the Swahili coast in East Africa, and document what heritage means from the local people's perspective. We argue that fishing communities value features like reef crests, sacred mangrove forests, the ruins of stone-built tombs and sacred baobab trees not because of their physical appearance but the spiritual practices (e.g., healing, rituals, and offerings) the local people undertake within and around these sites. We further contend that to achieve heritage preservation sustainability, government officials and heritage scholars should pay greater attention to the spiritual aspects associated with these places.

Dancing in Duality: Exploring the Comparative Relationship of Swahili Culture with Islamic and Liberal Paradigms

This paper examines the crucial role of Islam on the Swahili coast, using it as a case study to explore the intriguing transformations Islam underwent during its spread in the region. It aims to shed light on the cosmopolitan nature of the Swahili space before colonialism, focusing on the reciprocal processes of Islamization and the Swahilization of Islam. By doing so, it aims to enhance our understanding of the significant role of Islam in fostering globalization. Moreover, it explores the expansion of Islam beyond the Arabian Peninsula, particularly through trade conducted by Muslim merchants. This exchange resulted in a dynamic interaction as local leaders embraced the faith, facilitated trade, and supported the growth of Islamic intellectual, artistic, and cultural endeavours. Building upon this case study, the paper conducts a comparative analysis of the legal systems of Islam and liberalism and explores the potential for envisioning a world transcending colonial national racial logics. Embracing Islam as a major signifier, this essay draws on a diverse array of critical scholarship, contending that Islam, unlike liberalism, inherently embraces diverse cultural knowledge, making it a faith that is inherently receptive to different cultures and their unique contributions.

Present Pasts of Colonial Modernity: Embroideries by Lucie Kamuswekera

Present Pasts of Colonial Modernity: Embroideries by Lucie Kamuswekera

On the Frontiers of the Indian Ocean World: A History of Lake Tanganyika, c. 1830–1890 by Philip Gooding

Since the publication of Kirti N. Chaudhuri’s Trade and Civilisation in the Indian Ocean (New York, 1985), historical studies of the Indian Ocean World (iow) have grown exponentially. Coming to grips with this vast oceanic space has challenged subsequent generations of historians to think creatively about how best to address its great diversity in both time and space. An important feature of this recent scholarship is its interdisciplinarity. In the volume under review, Gooding takes an innovative approach to what, in some hands, might have been limited to a regional East African study of this historiographically neglected zone by locating Lake Tanganyika as a frontier of the iow. By defining the Indian Ocean littoral as the core of this watery world, he boldly proposes that this great African lake lay at its frontier. Specifically, in this analysis, he depicts a dynamic interaction that links the Swahili coast and the lakeshore littoral through the integrating element of the ivory trade. As he writes, “This book is about how these physical lines of connection developed and the roles that littoral and inland populations around Lake Tanganyika had in shaping them” (3).The book opens with an introduction discussing “Lakes, Oceans and Littorals in History” in which Gooding makes his case. The body of the text is divided into two parts. The first, entitled “Demarcations of Space,” includes three chapters—“The Growth of Emporia,” “Changing Land Use in a Changing Climate,” and “Traversing the Lake.” Part II is divided into four chapters—“Competition and Conflict on the Western Frontier,” “Global Commodities in East African Societies,” Structures of Bondage,” and “An Islamic Sea.” In each of these chapters, Gooding strives to demonstrate the numerous ways in which the changes wrought by the expansion of the ivory trade worked to connect the Swahili coast to the lakeshore and to transform the lakeshore’s society and culture, especially after about 1860.Some of Gooding’s assertions are more speculative than demonstrable—an evidentiary challenge that is familiar to historians of precolonial Africa—but his thesis nonetheless demands serious attention. That said, although he sets his study in a wide East African context and relates it to parallel examples from the broader iow, he misses the opportunity to consider the comparative possibility of an earlier interior African frontier of the iow—the auriferous region of the Zimbabwe plateau in its relationship to the Sofala coast (today, southern Mozambique). He might also have contrasted the evolution of the town of Ujiji into the main entrepôt for coastal links on the eastern side of Lake Tanganyika with the development of Nkhotakota on the western side of Lake Malawi, given their contemporaneous chronologies.The author draws from a wide range of sources, including archaeology, anthropology, oral history, and environmental studies, but he admits that the bulk of his evidence comes from reading the classic nineteenth-century European explorer and missionary accounts, whether published or located in various archives. Nevertheless, he recognizes the biases of his European sources and is meticulous in his reading of them. He is also careful in his use of oral sources, where he points to the problems of feedback and the positions of his informants (172–176).Gooding brings these elements together in each chapter of the book, but his most interesting discussions concern slavery and Islam. His most vigorous use of interdisciplinary sources and methods, however, is in his chapter about the effect of climate change (rainfall and lake levels) on what he defines as an agricultural “revolution” during the nineteenth century. As he argues, “Climate and climatic change are crucial for contextualizing this agricultural revolution” (65). Thus, he reveals the important intellectual influence of his academic home at the Indian Ocean World Centre at McGill University, where a major thematic focus is on “Appraising Risk, Past and Present” in the iow. Readers of this journal will find that chapter especially valuable.

Fishing Songs from Kilwa Kisiwani, Tanzania: A Case Study of Intangible Maritime Cultural Heritage on the Swahili Coast

Historically, fishers (both men and women) have engaged in different activities ranging from preparing fishing equipment (traps, nets, fishing vessels), weather forecasting, and sailing to fishing grounds and they continue to do so today. While sailing, fishers paddle collaboratively when the wind is low and when the boat is leaking, some crew will bail the vessel. Once they arrive at the fishing grounds, fishers cast anchor, mend the fishnets, and fix the boat foresheets. If successful, the fishers collect their catch, weigh the anchor, return to shore, and prepare to sell their fish. These fishing activities have always been accompanied by maritime customs, traditions, rituals, stories, and gestures. For instance, singing is one key tradition that has continued to accompany the fishing process from the start to the end. This paper documents and present the songs that have always been part of the fishing process in Kilwa Kisiwani, along the southern coast of Tanzania. The fishing songs are presented in the context of intangible cultural heritage of the east African Swahili coast.

Entwined African and Asian genetic roots of medieval peoples of the Swahili coast

The urban peoples of the Swahili coast traded across eastern Africa and the Indian Ocean and were among the first practitioners of Islam among sub-Saharan people1,2. The extent to which these early interactions between Africans and non-Africans were accompanied by genetic exchange remains unknown. Here we report ancient DNA data for 80 individuals from 6 medieval and early modern (ad 1250–1800) coastal towns and an inland town after ad 1650. More than half of the DNA of many of the individuals from coastal towns originates from primarily female ancestors from Africa, with a large proportion—and occasionally more than half—of the DNA coming from Asian ancestors. The Asian ancestry includes components associated with Persia and India, with 80–90% of the Asian DNA originating from Persian men. Peoples of African and Asian origins began to mix by about ad 1000, coinciding with the large-scale adoption of Islam. Before about ad 1500, the Southwest Asian ancestry was mainly Persian-related, consistent with the narrative of the Kilwa Chronicle, the oldest history told by people of the Swahili coast3. After this time, the sources of DNA became increasingly Arabian, consistent with evidence of growing interactions with southern Arabia4. Subsequent interactions with Asian and African people further changed the ancestry of present-day people of the Swahili coast in relation to the medieval individuals whose DNA we sequenced.

Of Patience and Pity: Rewriting and Reciting the Widely Travelled Islamic Poem “The Hawk and the Dove” in East Africa

Abstract The Swahili poem of “The Hawk and the Dove” (Kozi na Ndiwa) has long been popular along the Swahili coast. In brief, the poem tells the story of the prophet Musa, who is put to the test by the angels Mikaili and Jibrili, disguised as a dove and a hawk. The dove, fleeing the famished hawk, finds refuge in the folds of Musa’s clothes. The bird of prey, approaching Musa, claims its right to the dove, since it is hungry. Musa faces a dilemma: he understands the hawk’s argument but is also full of pity for the dove. When he finally offers to cut off a part of his own right thigh to feed the hawk, the birds reveal themselves as the two angels and praise the prophet. “The Hawk and the Dove” has been a travelling Islamic poem par excellence: like many other popular Swahili Islamic poems dating back to the eighteenth, but mostly the nineteenth century – the heyday of Swahili Islamic poetry, having flourished amid the Sufi movements and their emphasis on poetry in vernacular languages as a means to ignite religious zeal in wider audiences – the poem is also based on sources that have widely travelled the Indian Ocean. Swahili poets creatively adapted them into Swahili verse, just as other Muslim poets in North Africa, West Africa, and, earlier, the Iberian Peninsula did for the discourses relevant to their own contexts. This contribution takes the double optic of providing a first text edition of the most ancient surviving Swahili manuscript of the poem. Secondly, I view the poem amid a longer history of circulation beyond the Swahili coast, as well as compare it with other popular, vernacular versions in the Arabic dialect of Algeria, Hausa in Nigeria, and the earlier adaptations by moriscos from the Iberian Peninsula in Aljamiado. This kaleidoscope of various rewritings of the story allows me to see the Swahili-specific readings more clearly in contrast.

Carnival in Africa

Carnival in Africa

Human-ecodynamics and the intertidal zones of the Zanzibar Archipelago

The intertidal zone, covering the nearshore fringe of coasts and islands and extending from the high-water mark to areas that remain fully submerged, encompasses a range of habitats containing resources that are as important to modern populations as they were to humans in prehistory. Effectively bridging land and sea, intertidal environments are extremely dynamic, requiring complexity and variability in how people engaged with them in the past, much as they do in the present. Here we review and reconsider environmental, archaeological, and modern socio-ecological evidence from the Zanzibar Archipelago on eastern Africa’s Swahili coast, focusing on marine molluscs to gain insight into the trajectories of human engagement with nearshore habitats and resources. We highlight the potential drivers of change and/or stability in human-intertidal interactions through time and space, set against a backdrop of the significant socio-economic and socio-ecological changes apparent in the archipelago, and along the Swahili coast, during the late Holocene.

Globalization and Islamic Indigenization in Southeast Asian Muslim Communities

For centuries, what is now commonly referred to in the Cold War-inflected English parlance as “Southeast Asia” has been connected to various regions of the world -- from the transmission of Islam from diverse places in the Middle East, South Asia, and China, to engagements with European colonialism and, more recently, post-independence foreign relations in various regional, multilateral, and global contexts. From the eighth century Muslim traders were traversing the ports of what is now called Southeast Asia, and by the turn of the fourteenth century there is evidence for indigenous Muslim communities.[1] Such economic, cultural, and religious exchange over the centuries has not, despite the warnings of some globalization theorists, led to a homogenization of Southeast Asia, much less a homogenization of Islamic ideas and practices. Rather than coming as a single homogenous and authoritative source, the spread of Islam – and Muslim leaders -- across mainland and island Southeast Asia came from many directions and influences from Mecca and Medina to the Swahili Coast, Yemen, India, the Persian Gulf, Patani networks, and as far as China. Whereas some transmission of Islamic ideas from the Middle East (often led by Southeast Asians, or Jawi, pilgrims, scholars, and travelers who return home) have led to contentious debates and power struggles in particular moments and places, such as the struggle between “old” and “young” movements among Minangkabau in West Sumatra, more recently Southeast Asia – especially Muslim Southeast Asia – has experienced other forms of cultural influence and exchange with East Asian countries like Japan and Korea as well as Western countries from the United States to former European colonial powers.[2] As a nation-state, Indonesia has also begun to come to terms with Chinese Muslims as part of the long histories of Islam and Muslims in the archipelago. Along the way, Southeast Asia’s ethnic communities have retained a sense of cultural, national, and religious identities that are influenced, yet never entirely determined, by outside forces.
 
 [1] Feener 2019, “Islam in Southeast Asia to c. 1800,” Oxford Research Encyclopedia. https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190277727.013.40
 [2] For Malaysia, see Michael G. Peletz, Sharia Transformations: Cultural Politics and the Rebranding of an Islamic Judiciary (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2020). For the influence of K-Pop, see Ariel Heryanto, Identity and Pleasure: The Politics of Indonesian Screen Culture (Singapore: NUS Press, 2014).

Names of Contemporary Wooden Boats of Coastal East Africa: Origins and Meanings

ABSTRACT The coast of eastern Africa, commonly referred to as the Swahili coast, has a rich artisanal heritage of boats — both in their building and use. This iconic history is marked by the presence of various boat types that have historically been used for fishing and transporting people and cargo between coastal settlements (of eastern Africa), the islands of Zanzibar, Pemba, Mafia, Comoros, Madagascar, and other distant parts of the Indian Ocean world. Currently, the sailing boats such as the double-outrigger logboat (ngalawa), various plank-built craft, and several other types, line the shores of Tanzania, Kenya, Mozambique, Somalia and the islands of Zanzibar, Mafia and the Comoros. Some of these boats, almost all locally built, have names, decorations, and engravings. However, the boats’ names, decorations and engravings alongside the conveyed message(s) have remained undocumented. Thus, taking a maritime-heritage perspective, and by focusing on the nineteenth century historic port town of Bagamoyo in Tanzania, this paper documents the boats’ names and the messages they carry.

The Swahili World

The Swahili World

Steven Fabian. Making Identity on the Swahili Coast: Urban Life, Community, and Belonging in Bagamoyo.

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Transitory Courtyards as a Feature of Sustainable Urbanism on the East African Coast

The tropical urbanism of coastal East Africa has a thousand-year-long history, making it a recognized example of sustainable urbanism. Although economically dependent on trade, the precolonial Islamic towns of the so-called Swahili coast did not feature markets or other public buildings dedicated to mercantile activities before the European colonial involvement. In this regard, Swahili urban tradition differed from other tropical Islamic cities, such as in Morocco, Mali, Egypt or the Middle East, where markets fulfilled the role of social and economic hubs and, in terms of movement, major transitory/meeting spaces in the trading towns. Yet, the Swahili urban tradition thrived for centuries as a well-connected cosmopolitan type of tropical urbanism. As research has suggested, the public role of spaces associated with trade might have been fulfilled by houses. Using approaches of space syntax and network analysis, this article studies the morphology of the houses considering whether it could have been the courtyards that simulated the role of markets thanks to their transitory spatial configuration. The results are discussed reflecting on other models of houses with courtyards, especially the modern Swahili house appearing later in the colonial era when markets began to be established, and Islamic houses known from elsewhere.