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Encyclopaedia of the History of Science, Technology, and Medicine in Non-Western Cultures
Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg New York 2008
10.1007/978-1-4020-4425-0_8504
Helaine Selin
Cities and Towns in East Africa
Felix Chami
Without Abstract
The towns of East Africa were built during two periods: pre‐colonial and colonial. The former grew up along the coast, facilitating trade and communication between the rim of the Indian Ocean Seaboard and the interior of Africa. The towns, better known in history as Swahili City States, survived from about the beginning of the second millennium AD to about the 1890s. The latter were mostly new administrative centres established with the launch of German and British rule in East Africa from about the 1890s. Only a few settlements of the colonial period had a history pre‐dating the colonial era. Such towns include Mombasa, which is a Swahili town, and Mengo in Kampala, which was the seat for the Buganda Kingdom. This article examines the pre‐colonial Swahili towns.
The Growth of the Swahili Towns
Swahili settlements spread all along the coast and islands of East Africa (Fig. 1). There were few settlements before the Swahili towns of the thirteenth century, mostly built with mud and wattle. Concentration of these towns seems to have first occurred in the Mafia‐Kilwa region on the coast of Southern Tanzania and on the Lamu Archipelago on the northern coast of Kenya. Individual settlements seem also to have flourished elsewhere on the coastal littoral and virtually on every island large enough to settle from Lamu archipelago to Madagascar. These early settlements are identified by archaeologists by remains there of early Islamic goods including Sassanian Islamic ware, Islamic copies of Chinese pottery and early Sgraffiato [decoration which is scratched through the clay surface coating to reveal the colour of the underlying clay].
Fig. 1 The Swahili towns on the Tanzanian coast. For the rest of East African coast see Horton and Middleton 2000: 6–7.
Probably the largest earliest settlement of this period is that of Kilwa in Southern Tanzania (Figs. 2– 4). The settlement seems to have become a larger centre by about AD 1000 when the earliest stone structures could have been built (Chittick 1974). Probably only a few stone structures would have been built then. The spectacular nature of Kilwa centre was the first to attract archaeologists in the1950s. Mortimer Wheeler led a team of researchers in 1955 to conduct a test excavation. This research paved the way to more intensive archaeological researches by Neville Chittick, not only in Kilwa but also in other Swahili towns (Chittick 1974, 1984).
Fig. 2 The water facing side of Husuni Kubwa (Great Palace) in Kilwa Island.
Fig. 3 Port of Kilwa with recent Portuguese to man fort.
Fig. 4 Residential house around the Kilwa friday mosque.
Kilwa was large, the stone town itself estimated to have been about 50 hectares in the early period. This settlement must have controlled other larger settlements of the area more economically, as settlements of a similar nature existed on the islands of Mafia, off the Rufiji Delta, and on the nearby island of Songo Mnara. Other settlements of the period related to the development of Kilwa are found in Zanzibar and Pemba, the central coast of Tanzania, Comore and Northern Madagascar and on the northern coast of Mozambique and Zimbabwe. Archaeological work on sites located in those regions have yielded goods of exchange between these settlements, including coins, pottery and stone vessels, suggesting that Kilwa was a centre with economic influence if not direct control of the peer settlements north and south.
The early towns of Lamu Archipelago were excavated later by Chittick (1984) and Horton (1996). Settlements like Gedi, Malindi, and Mombasa grew to compete with those to the north and even Kilwa at the time when Portuguese had entered the region. What is obvious in the archaeology of the coast of Eastern Africa is that the Swahili towns were related, and this is true whether or not Kilwa controlled affairs in the whole region between AD 1000 and about AD 1400.
In the later phase, from about AD 1300, or slightly earlier, larger Swahili towns were built by coral stones and lime mortar and roofed by mangrove poles, lime mortar and palm leaves. Archaeology also finds a profusion of many smaller settlements, which were built by mud and wattle; the larger settlements may also have had the majority of its population living in such simple houses (Horton 1996; Pradines 2002; Chami 2002). When Ibn Baṭṭūṭa visited the coast of East Africa in the AD 1330s, contrary to what archaeology suggests today, he did not see many stone houses even in larger towns such as Kilwa and Mombasa (Gibb 1939). Whether this was a personal bias against stone houses if he only saw simpler town places is not yet properly explained (see discussion by Sutton 1998).
It is also not quite certain whether each large Swahili town had its own trade and cultural link with foreign traders or if trade was only controlled by one or two larger towns which collected trade goods and distributed them to other towns. Ibn Baṭṭūṭa seems to have visited only two towns on the Swahili coast, Kilwa and Mombasa, suggesting that those were the larger ones. However, in the same time period a Chinese trip to East Africa led by Zheng He entered a town called ‘Malin’. Some scholars think this place was Malindi on the Kenya coast (Chittick 1975: 21; Wheatley 1975: 90–1); Fuwei (Fuwei 1996: 190) suggests that ‘Malin’ was Kilwa. A support for Fuwei comes from the fact that the wealthy clan at Kilwa at that time was known as Malindi and the most impressive tombs at the water front belong to this clan.
Probably each large town had its own trade abroad or a set of traders visiting particular ports in the Middle East and India. Archaeologists are now finding sites and many Swahili cultural materials in the Middle East, suggesting that the Swahili people sailed to those distant lands (Sutton 1998). It is likely that the profusion of foreign trade goods in all Swahili settlements could also suggest that individual towns engaged in long distant trade at least within the western Indian Ocean seaboard. This is testified by the fact that several towns are now known to have made their own coins and that when Vasco da Gama reached Northern Mozambique he had to get a person from Malindi, on the Kenya coast, to guide him to India. Probably the southern towns were not co‐operating with the Portuguese.
The Origin of The Swahili Towns
Scholars had, up to the end of the twentieth century, debated the origin of the Swahili people and their stone town culture. Such debates revolved on the question of who the Swahili people were (Allen 1974, 1983; Nurse and Spear 1985; Pouwels 1987; Horton 1987; and Chami 1994, 1998). The original popular conception was that the Swahili people and their culture originated from the Middle East. These were alleged to have arrived in waves of immigration. Individuals in these waves founded settlements, which later grew into larger Swahili stone towns. Chittick (1974, 1975) used chronicles, particularly that of Kilwa, and archaeology to argue that the earliest immigrants could have arrived on the East African coast not earlier that the ninth century. This view suggested, therefore, that the Swahili people were originally Persians or Arabs who would later have mixed with Africans. Due to their alleged origin in the Muslim world the Swahili people were necessarily Muslims and people of towns.
Archaeologists such as Horton (1987), influenced by Allen (1983), suggested that the Swahili were people of Cushitic origin, from the northeast of Africa, who were originally pastoralists. The pastoralists, who are alleged to have ruled the Bantu speakers in a mythical land called Shunguaya, mixed with Bantu speakers, adopted Islam and spread to the rest of the coast and islands of East Africa. In this theory the Swahili people are seen as Africans who also mixed with the people of the Middle East in the process of adopting Islam and trade. This position was made more prominent in the 1990s (Horton 1990; Abungu 1994–1995; Sutton 1994–1995) in an attempt to quash the discovery that the Swahili people were Africans of Bantu origin, people of the general region of Eastern and Southern Africa who were agriculturalists and fishermen.
That the Swahili people did speak a Bantu language was a point recognised by linguists from the 1980s (Nurse and Spear 1985). Archaeologists had also established settlements of Early Iron Working people near the coast; scholars recognised that they were early Bantu speakers (Soper 1971; Phillipson 1977). Historians also recognised that the people reported by the Romans in the first centuries AD to have inhabited East Africa, then known as Azania, were agriculturalists and probably Bantu speaking (Casson 1989). In the early 1990s this author suggested that the cultural tradition found in the earliest Swahili settlements was culturally related to that of the Early Iron Working tradition (Chami 1994). In some cases settlements of the Early Iron Working people and those of the so‐called early Swahili, termed by this author as Triangular Incised Ware tradition, were found in the same location. In some cases the later was found superimposed over the former in the offshore islands and on the coastal littoral of the central coast of Tanzania (Chami 1998, 1999a).
The evidence of cultural continuity from the time of Christ, through the mid‐first millennium AD, to the time of the foundation of the Swahili towns in the early centuries of the second millennium AD, has now been recognised by many scholars (Kusimba 1999; Sinclair and Hakansson 2000; Spear 2000). Those who disagreed with the the first set of evidence for this continuity have now revised their ideas (Horton 1996; Horton and Middleton 2000; Sutton 1998). Archaeological findings now prove that the Swahili coast had been settled by an agricultural and trading population from the time of Pharaonic Egypt, 3000 BCE, through the Greaco‐Roman period (Chami 2006). Whereas the former was of Neolithic tradition, the latter was an Early Iron Working culture. Throughout these periods the Indian Ocean, just like it was during the time of Islam, had brisk trade with communities of Asia, the Middle East and the Red Sea/Mediterranean worlds. Ceramics and beads as evidence of trade of all these pre‐Islamic trading periods have now been recovered from the islands of Zanzibar, Mafia, Kilwa and Rufiji River (for conspectus see Chami 1999b, 2004, 2006).
The most recent thinking that the early Swahili people, or Zanj of the Arab documents, were Indonesians/Austronesians (Dick‐Read 2005) is an attempt to disregard the archaeological, linguistic and historical data already established. For this recent thinking to be regarded as scientific at least a discussion of the previous thinking on the subject matter and its flaws should have be debated.
Some Cultural Aspects of the Swahili Towns
General Culture
The culture of the Swahili towns, as already suggested, is African with an infusion of Islamic traits. It is these infused Islamic traits such as religion, law, language, writing and costume which have made many students of the Swahili culture identify the people as Arabs. The people who had adopted this culture themselves wanted to be identified as Arabs or Persians. However, Ibn Baṭṭūṭa identified the people as ‘Sawahil’ and the earliest European visitors to the Swahili world, the Portuguese, identified the people as ‘Moors’ or ‘Suaili’ as opposed to Arabs.
De Barros, as Ibn Baṭṭūṭa did, also identified the Sultans of Kilwa as black people (Chittick 1975: 39). Barbosa, writing in about 1518, wrote, “Of the Moors there are some fair and some black, they are finely clad in many rich garments of gold and silk and cotton.” To show that the Swahilis were different from Arabs, the Queen of Kilwa in the mid‐eighteenth century wrote a letter calling home her people who had run away from the Arab/Omani domination of Kilwa to Mozambique. This was written in Kiswahili and not in Arabic; a Swahili letter suggesting that it was only the Europeans/Christians who were in conflict with the Arabs, but not the African/Swahili people (Omar and Frankl 1994).
Religion
Most Swahili people are of the Sunni sect of Islam, which suggests an early link with Southern Arabia. Large mosques (Fig. 5) had been built with stones from AD 1300 or slightly earlier in every town of the Swahili coast. Some towns have several mosques, some being smaller for the purpose of a clan or a family. Kiblas/the north of these mosques were elaborately made; probably the one at Songo Mnara in Kilwa (Fig. 3) is the most elaborate of those seen by this author. One very unique religious aspect of the Swahili towns is that of making spectacular burials for the dead. The tombs, which most of them concentrate around the mosques, were built using stones and lime. Walls of some are more than two meters high with various decorative panels including impressed Chinese porcelain. Some tombs have high standing pillars some reaching up to six meters above the tomb.
Fig. 5 Kilwa friday mosque.
These aspects of tombs are non‐Islamic as they are found nowhere else in the Muslim world. Muslim burials are supposed to be made humbly and no materials or aspect of wealth are supposed to be involved. That these spectacular tombs are also found attached to houses or are located in compounds where people were living suggests that this is an African culture blended with Islam. I have noted elsewhere (Chami 2002) that the African tradition of wanting to live with the spirit of the dead in the same house/compound or within the settled landscape is the one portrayed in this context. Like the ancient Egyptian tradition, the spirit should not be abandoned in the wilderness away from human warmth and food. A failure to observe this rule was/is expected to bring bad omen to the family.
Writing and Arithmetic
Whatever type of pre‐Islamic writing that could have existed on the coast of East Africa cannot be known for now. Early Islamic characters found on the Swahili settlements are Kuffic, the earliest known being of the eleventh century tomb of Kizimkazi in Zanzibar (Flury 1921). Later on Arabic scripts were used to write in the Swahili language. These can be seen in many tombs post dating AD 1300.
In daily counting the Swahili people mixed African and Arabic words. Counting may have followed Arabic languages in schools or official places, but in normal cases African counting was used. Today most counting words in Kiswahili are still African with the exception of a few numbers such as twenty, thirty, forty and fifty, which are in Arabic. Probably much more Arabic influence came after the rule of the Omanis from AD 1884.
Architecture
Garlake (Garlake 1966) studied the architecture of the Swahili towns; his interpretation of Swahili architecture has prevailed (Chittick 1984; Sutton 1998). As was noted with the tombs, the architecture of the Swahili buildings is of Western Indian Ocean Seaboard origin. It is the tradition that began and evolved within the region. The architecture is very much conditioned by available resources for building lime coral rubble which is made into walls with lime mortar and then plastered with the same mortar. Rarely were bricks and dressed stones (apart from porites) used. The only dressed stone used for door and window frames, mihrabs and lamp chambers was porite [coral]. This is a coral cut from underwater while fresh and it is dressed and decorated or inscribed while fresh.
For multi‐storey houses floor slabs were made by arranging mangrove or other hard woods across. Lime mortar, sometimes mixed with coral rubble, was spread on top. Some houses, especially mosques, had moulded roofs with decorative arches, domes and vaults. Most houses must have been roofed by wood and palm/grass. Swahili houses had large verandas and corridors for relaxation and cooking. Carved panels decorated the doorframes.
Livelihood
Swahili people engaged in various economic activities. They are traditionally agricultural. They lived in mostly settled communities with vegetable gardens around their compounds and in areas a few hours’ walk from towns. Allen (Allen 1983) characterized the Swahili as people who commute from town to the countryside for agricultural purposes. This has been the situation from ancient times. Crops cultivated include rice, millet, beans/peas, banana, coconut, sugar cane, spices and fruits such as mango and oranges. In recent history American crops such as maize, cassava, sweet potato and tobacco have been added to the list.
The Swahili people would have been mixed farmers who would also have domesticated chicken, cattle and ovicaprids (sheep and goats). These are well authenticated from archaeological records dating back to the early Swahili period. They also had dogs and cats and for the northern coast donkeys and camels. Due to environmental variability the northern part of the Swahili coast would have been more pastoral than the south because of the interaction that existed with the nomadic regions of Somalia and Northern Kenya.
Fishing must have dominated the activity of those living near the shore and on the island settlements as it secured the most reliable means of obtaining protein. They fished in the deep and shallower, waters and there is much evidence for times when they consumed a lot of shellfish probably suggesting difficult times (Msemwa 1994). There was also fresh water fishing. There are several large rivers entering the Swahili coast from the deep interior and also few lakes near the littoral which provided fish. Salting and drying fish facilitated transport to the deep interior.
Sailing, not only for fishing, but also for trade was probably the most prestigious activity of the Swahili man. Swahili towns consisted of people who had travelled far for the purpose of trade or prayers. There was a lot of intermarriage between communities. The Swahili people can therefore be seen as a maritime people. Goods to be exchanged with those arriving from abroad had to be collected from the south or interior of the region and this also involved distribution of those imported goods. So the Swahili towns were trade axes providing for the larger part of Eastern and Southern Africa.
Consequently the Swahili people were also involved in building sailing vessels. The Romans found the people of the Swahili coast already making sewn boats and also importing boats from abroad (Casson 1989). This technology grew tremendously and by the time of the stone towns the Swahili people must have been building large dhows used to cross the Indian Ocean to Arabia and India. In most of the Swahili towns today one can find at least one operating dhow/boat building yard, suggesting a continued tradition. Related to this technology was that of metal working, which has passed down since ancient times. This technology was necessary for cultivation and boat making, as wood had to be felled and worked.
Swahili Towns in Ruins
It was noted earlier that the realm of the Swahili culture is in the period between AD 1200 and 1500. After this heyday the Swahili culture entered into a deteriorating moment following the penetration of Europeans into East Africa. They wanted to conquer by destroying the large Swahili towns such as Kilwa and divert trade to the Atlantic Ocean towards Europe. The monopoly of trade was taken from the Swahili traders and put into the hands of European companies and later on, after 1800, into the hands of Oman Arabs and Indians. The Omanis came to East Africa to challenge the Portuguese. It was the Swahili rulers who invited the Omanis to use their Muslim responsibility to assist Muslim brethrens, but the Omanis did not leave after they accomplished the task. Only petty trade was left in the hands of the Swahili. In some towns trade was left to the Swahili people, but they had to cater for the masters of the new order.
In the new order, the Swahili towns, which had not given way to invaders before, were suppressed to the extent that they fell into ruins. This was necessary because other prosperous settlements, mostly controlled by the new Portuguese and Omani powers, emerged and it is here the new elite, whether foreign or local, would move (Chami et al. 2004). As Kilwa and other settlements of its type decayed, with only short periods of renewal, previously unknown towns emerged from about 1700. Such towns included Zanzibar, Bagamoyo and Kilwa Kivinje. Mombasa also grew substantially. These are towns founded by the enterprising British and German colonials. From the 1890s the new colonial towns such as Dar‐es‐Salaam, Nairobi and Kampala challenged these other towns. See (Chami et al. 2004) for an explanation of the fall and the rise of the Swahili towns.
See also: Ceramics, Beads, Navigation, Agriculture
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