Swahili World Research Articles

The Swahili World

The Swahili World

Arabic‐language manuscript and print as a source for Indian Ocean Islamic history: The case of East Africa

AbstractIn the Indian Ocean Islamic world, Arabic‐language texts have been the foundation of what has been called an Arabic cosmopolis and a Sunni Islamic ecumene. In East Africa, this historical material can be found in extant collections in manuscript and printed form, and has formed the basis of research over the past decades that investigate local, regional and trans‐oceanic Islamic histories. The nature of this corpus means that it is spread across several modern nation states and a diverse range of custodians. Here is offered an overview of the material available for research in the Western part of the Indian Ocean, also known as the Swahili world. The Arabic textual material that can be found in this part of the Indian Ocean has a strong potential to enrich the study of Islam in the region, but also to inform the wider field of Islamic history. This article offers pointers to avenues for future research.

Mozambique Island, Cabaceira Pequena and the Wider Swahili World: An Archaeological Perspective

ABSTRACT When the Portuguese reached Mozambique Island at the end of the fifteenth century, they encountered a populated coast of diverse communities integrated within a wider Swahili world. Swahili society was in its fundamental nature cosmopolitan, and incorporated arts, cultures, peoples, and beliefs from Africa, India, the Middle East, and the Far East. Although Swahili archaeology is well established in Tanzania and Kenya, there is still little understood about northern Mozambique and its role in the Swahili world. This paper presents preliminary results from recent excavations on the northern coast of Mozambique, as well as interpretations from known archaeological sites, to better assess the nature of Swahili society on the northern Mozambican coast at the time of Portuguese first contact. This paper also raises questions about the nature of Swahili culture in northern Mozambique and its construction of a maritime cultural landscape centred around oceanic connection in the Indian Ocean Trade Network.

The Swahili World, edited by Stephanie Wynn-Jones and Adria LaViolette

The Swahili World, edited by Stephanie Wynn-Jones and Adria LaViolette

Archaeological Survey and Excavations at Mikindani, Southern Tanzania: finding their place in the Swahili world British Archaeological Reports S2859 MATTHEWPAWLOWICZ196pp., illustrated throughout, 146 figures, 40 tables, BAR Publishing, 2017, £39 (sbk), ISBN 978‐1407314860

Archaeological Survey and Excavations at Mikindani, Southern Tanzania: finding their place in the Swahili world <i>British Archaeological Reports S2859</i> MATTHEWPAWLOWICZ196pp., illustrated throughout, 146 figures, 40 tables, BAR Publishing, 2017, £39 (sbk), ISBN 978‐1407314860

Chinese-style ceramics in East Africa from the 9th to 16th century: A case of changing value and symbols in the multi-partner global trade

In this case study dedicated to Chinese style ceramic sherds excavated from archeological sites in East Africa, we have made use of multiple approaches. First, from a local viewpoint, the density of Chinese style ceramic sherds at a site may be used as a measurement tool to evaluate the degree of its involvement in long distance trade. In concentrating on the analyses of regional and global contexts, we propose a tentative division of Chinese style ceramics found in East Africa according to four phases: phase I (ca. 800-950/80 CE), phase II (950/80-1220/50 CE), phase III (1220/50-1430/50 CE), phase IV (1430/50-1500/510 CE). Chinese-style ceramics travelled from the production sites in China and South-East Asia to East Africa, by passing successively from different regional networks, that formed the multi-partner global networks. Thus, the periodization of Chinese imports in East Africa appears to show that each phase appears to fall within a particular configuration of these successive trade networks.From the 12th century onwards, ceramics became the first Chinese exported goods in maritime trade. From the global context of Sino-Swahili trade, the inequitable nature of the cheap Chinese ceramics traded against highly valued African commodities should also be mentioned. Nevertheless, our study shows the powerful social symbolic of Chinese ceramics in the Swahili world. From the local lens, it is the phenomenon of a changing value of Chinese ceramics in the long-distance trade. Indeed the “exotic” character of Chinese style ceramics seems to have been intentionally valorized in cultural practices such as feasts. Consequently, these objects actively contributed to the expanding power of the merchant elite, who took full possession of it both materially and symbolically.

Situating Madagascar: Indian Ocean dynamics and archaeological histories

In the first issue of Azania Pierre Vérin outlined the state of research in Madagascar in 1966. He described three key areas: the nature and origin of human settlement, the influence of Islam and the Swahili world and the archaeology of the historically attested highland kingdoms. In this article we outline the state of archaeological knowledge today, demonstrating the continuing importance of these themes, but also showing how they have been expanded and reshaped through subsequent research. We finish by assessing the potential and challenges that the future holds for archaeology in Madagascar.

Modelling the Swahili past: the archaeology of Mikindani in southern coastal Tanzania

The Swahili of the East African coast formed one of the most studied and best known societies of Sub-Saharan African antiquity. The most popular model of Swahili society recognises their roots among Iron Age African communities but views them as largely facing outwards — away from the rest of Africa – and defines them primarily through their activities in the Indian Ocean sphere, especially their participation in inter-regional commerce and the integration of Middle Eastern Islamic culture into their lives. Building from the insights of projects studying connections between the coast and hinterland, this paper uses new evidence from the region around the town of Mikindani in southern Tanzania to show that some coastal communities in the Swahili world instead concentrated on interior connections and did not follow cosmopolitan Islamic sociocultural norms. Indeed, patterns in the Mikindani region departed from Swahili norms across a variety of measures during the early second millennium AD and suggest that certain portions of the Swahili coast would be better viewed facing into the African interior to a greater degree than toward the Indian Ocean.

Finding Meaning in Ancient Swahili Spatial Practices

The development of the Swahili world involved new ways of organizing and conceiving of space. Archaeology and historical linguistics are both crucial in charting the trajectory of changing spatial practice during the late first and early second millennium ad, yet their respective datasets have been correlated only in specific and restricted ways. In this paper, we take the first steps toward working between archaeological and historical linguistic data to understand the changing contexts and meanings of Swahili spatial practice. We develop this argument in three parts. First, we review archaeological approaches to space in the Swahili world and develop a holistic view of towns, including both confined and delimited space. Second, we offer an archaeologists’ perspective on the development of historical linguistics in relation to the Swahili world, exploring the changing relationship between linguistics and archaeology and arguing for a greater appreciation of context in how archaeological materials are deployed with linguistic data. Finally, drawing on new data from Songo Mnara, a fourteenth–sixteenth-century Swahili town on the southern Tanzania coast, we make a preliminary attempt to reconcile some aspects of the archaeological and linguistic datasets. Using published lexical innovations, we suggest ways that meaning might be found alternatively in archaeological and linguistic data. Our hope is to make some tentative steps toward a mutually satisfying way of working between disciplines.

Finding Their Place in the Swahili World: an archaeological exploration of southern Tanzania

Finding Their Place in the Swahili World: an archaeological exploration of southern Tanzania. University of Virginia, 2011. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/0067270X.2012.677331 Large-scale systems of int...

Islam in Northern Mozambique: A Historical Overview

AbstractThis article is a historical overview of two issues: first, that of the dynamics of Islamic religious transformations from pre‐Portuguese era up until the 2000s among Muslims of the contemporary Cabo Delgado, Nampula, and to a certain extent, Niassa provinces. The article argues that historical and geographical proximity of these regions to East African coast, the Comoros and northern Madagascar meant that all these regions shared a common Islamic religious tradition. Accordingly, shifts with regard to religious discourses and practices went in parallel. This situation began changing in the last decade of the colonial era and has continued well into the 2000s, when the so‐called Wahhabis, Sunni Muslims educated in the Islamic universities of the Arab world brought religious outlook that differed significantly from the historical local and regional conceptions of Islam. The second question addressed in this article is about relationships between northern Mozambican Muslims and the state. The article argues that after initial confrontations with Muslims in the sixteenth century and up until the last decade of the colonial era, the Portuguese rule pursued no concerted effort in interfering in the internal Muslim religious affairs. Besides, although they occupied and destroyed some of the Swahili settlements, in particular in southern and central Mozambique, other Swahili continued to thrive in northern Mozambique and maintained certain independence from the Portuguese up until the twentieth century. Islam there remained under the control of the ruling Shirazi clans with close political, economic, kinship and religious ties to the Swahili world. By establishing kinship and politico‐economic ties with the ruling elites of the mainland in the nineteenth century, these families were also instrumental in expanding Islam into the hinterland. Only at the beginning of the twentieth century, the Portuguese rule took full control of the region as a result of military conquests of the ‘effective occupation’, and imposed new legal and administrative colonial system, called Indigenato, impacting Muslims of northern Mozambique to a great extent. After the independence in 1975, and especially since 1977, the post‐independence Frelimo government adopted militant atheism and socialist Marxism, which was short‐lived and was abolished in 1983 owing to popular resistance and especially, because of government’s perception that its religious policies were fuelling the opposition groups to take arms and join the civil war. The 1980s and 1990s were marked by an acute rivalry and conflicts between the two emerging national umbrella Islamic organizations, the Islamic Council and the Islamic Congress, each representing largely pro‐Sufi and anti‐Sufi positions. In the 2000s, these organizations became overshadowed by new and more dynamic organizations, such as Ahl Al‐Sunna.

Matriliny, Islam and Gender in Northern Mozambique

AbstractUsing gender as the major line of difference, the paper examines the diversity within Islam in northern Mozambique, in which, despite strong historical ties to the Swahili world and waves of Islamic expansion, as well as attempts to establish and police an Islamic 'orthodoxy', matriliny continues to be one of the main cultural features. Concentrating on two coastal regions, Mozambique Island and Angoche, and on three urban zones of the modern provincial capital, Nampula City, the paper addresses the reasons for the endurance of matriliny, through historical processes that brought about different currents of Islam, and discusses the ways in which the colonial and post-colonial state, while attempting to control the often conflicting Islamic and African 'traditional' authorities, have contributed to the perpetuation of this conflict as well as to the endurance of matriliny.

Felix Chami and Gilbert Pwiti, eds. Southern Africa and the Swahili World. Dar es Salaam: Dar es Salaam University Press Ltd., 2002. Distributed by African Books Collective Ltd., The Jam Factory, 27 Park End St., Oxford OX1 1HU. vi + 138 pp. Photographs. Bibliography. Index. $29.95. Paper.

Felix Chami and Gilbert Pwiti, eds. Southern Africa and the Swahili World. Dar es Salaam: Dar es Salaam University Press Ltd., 2002. Distributed by African Books Collective Ltd., The Jam Factory, 27 Park End St., Oxford OX1 1HU. vi + 138 pp. Photographs. Bibliography. Index. $29.95. Paper. - Volume 48 Issue 1

Southern Africa and the Swahili World. Studies in the African Past 2

Southern Africa and the Swahili World. Studies in the African Past 2

The Swahili and the Mediterranean worlds: pottery of the late Roman period from Zanzibar

Mortimer Wheeler famously tied together the worlds of ancient Rome and ancient India by finding Roman ceramics stratified into levels at Arikamedu, in south India. Late Roman pottery from far down the East African coast now permits the same kind of matching link from the Mediterranean to a distant shore, this one in the Swahili world.

Swahili Culture Reconsidered:

Summary J. de V. Allen was until recently curator of the Lamu Museum. In this article he presents a new view of Lamu society. There was a major economic and cultural renaissance in the northern Swahili world between c. 1700 and 1885 coinciding with Pate's political supremacy and declining when Oman asserted itself in the region and Indian and Western commerce began to intrude. Evidence for this renaissance can be found not only in the abundant architectural remains but in the opulence of the material culture generally. It must have been financed from three sources: from products found in or near the coast towns; from natural products brought from the interior; and from large-scale agriculture and trade in livestock when political conditions on the mainland permitted. An examination of the material remains and of the eighteenth and nineteenth century economy reveals that Swahili society was at this time far more homogeneous and Swahili culture far less dependent upon Arabia and India than has generally been assumed. So much so that it is hard to believe the same was not true of earlier periods also, since this latest great flowering of the culture is unlikely to have occurred in conditions totally antithetical to those of any previous Golden Age.

Swahili Settlements in Northern Zambia and Malawi

Just as the history of European exploration has been placed in perspective and assimilated into the new historiography of Africa, so the history of the expansion of coastal trade with interior peoples must be reassessed and grounded in the African context. To investigate the social and economic implications of the Swahili- speaking communities which became established in northern Zambia and Malawi, it is necessary first to examine them in terms of individuals and developing political relationships. The following essay is a preliminary to further research, and attempts to draw out aspects of political history and commercial geography as stepping stones to a fuller consideration of social history in the later nineteenth century. The use of the umbrella term to cover the entire commercial community represents an obvious compromise. It has a certain ethnic basis when applied to the coastmen, often called Zanzibari, for whom Swahili was a mother tongue. The coastmen proper, however, could not be readily distinguished in Central Africa from the amorphous category of Wangwana, or Alungwana, as they were known and called themselves in Zambia.1 The Wangwana were of heterogeneous origin, often becoming attached to the community as slaves, but also including all those who traveled with caravans and adapted to the coastal culture.2 More distinct, but closely associated and frequently intermixed with the Swahili were the Nyamwezi or Yeke, who composed a significant element of autonomous traders as well as commercial and military auxiliaries of the communities under discussion. Arabs and Baluchis also belonged to the Swahili-speaking community and figured prominently among the big men. Their roles in affecting local history can not be satisfactorily understood in terms of status in Zanzibar or even of economic relations based upon credit or other affiliation. Merchant princes who would have been recognized throughout the Swahili world were transients in our region in the nineteenth century and it was never certain that they would return