Cornelius - A History of the East African Coast

A HISTORY

OF THE

EAST AFRICAN

COAST

Charles

Cornelius

For Mum and Dad

Livingalong the narrow coastal strip where the African continent meets the IndianOcean, the Swahili people are a result of the coming together of two distinctcultures: African Bantu and Middle Eastern Arab. It is a unique culture. Forthe last thousand years, while most African people followed a nomadiclifestyle, the Swahili have developed a thriving urban civilisation that hasbeen engaged in maritime trade on an intercontinental scale, used one ofAfrica's first written languages, enjoyed a sophisticated, deeply religiousculture based around a string of stone towns and whose leaders lived in palacesinlaid with gold, silver and ivory. Here is one of Africa's oldest and greatestcivilisations.

Thedevelopment of the Swahili civilisation is inextricably linked with trade. TheSwahili, and the people who lived here before them, have been engaged inoverseas trade for the last three millennia, providing a range of luxury goodsunsurpassed anywhere in the world. The northern parts of the coast, in modernSomalia, had a limitless supply of spices, such as cinnamon, and aromatic gumslike frankincense and myrrh. Further south could be bought goods harvested fromwild animals such as ivory, rhinoceros horn, tortoiseshell and leopardskin.Ambergris, the waxy secretion of sperm whales washed up on East Africa'sbeaches, was valued highly by perfume makers. Slaves, too, have been exportedfor centuries to the countries of the Middle East and beyond. Gold was broughtout of the mines of Zimbabwe and the Transvaal for export from towns on thesouthern parts of the coast such as Sofala, Mozambique and Kilwa. Andeventually, often via the markets of Egypt, the Levant, Arabia, Persia andIndia, these goods found their way to wealthy courts as far apart as Englandand China. The East African coast was an integral part of a trading zone ofnear-global proportions.

Stretchingalong 3000 miles of coastline from Somalia in the north to Mozambique in thesouth and encompassing offshore islands as distant as the Comoros Islands, theSwahili coast has been blessed with a combination of geographical gifts thathave made the region ideal for settlement, navigation and commercialexploitation. 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 navigationbehind the reefs much easier and providing sheltered beaches for offloadingcargo. The coral itself made an excellent building tool. In places, riversflowing from the distant African highlands break out into the ocean, formingdeep inlets which provided excellent natural harbours and a base for largertowns, while offshore islands, some close to the mainland, others furtheroffshore, provided good harbours and a degree of protection from maraudingtribes from the interior.

TheEast African coast begins at the tip of the Horn of Africa, the peninsulajutting out at the end of the Red Sea, a point known as Cape Guardafui. Thecoastline around and to the south of the Horn is a dry area with few naturalharbours where sand dunes extend far inland, but in the hinterland beyond is aland that was, from ancient times, so rich in spices and aromatic gums that itwas known as the Cape of Spices or the Cape of Cinnamon. Waves of immigrantsfrom nearby Arabia and settlement by inland tribes has altered the populationto such an extent that it cannot today be called part of the Swahili world, butit is where our story begins.

Thespartan, northern Somali coast eventually breaks into the more lush Benadircoast, along which towns like Warsheikh, Mogadishu, Merca, Brava and Kismayuare located. Further south, a string of thin islands sits close offshore and,just beyond the frontier with modern Kenya, lies the Lamu Archipelago, threesmall, 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 fertilecoastal plain where agriculture thrives and through which the Tana and SabakiRivers flow out into a great bay, watched over by the town of Malindi, whoseharbour 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 outover a grandiose bay of brilliant blue and further south, the island ofMombasa, nestling between two arms of the mainland coastline. South of Mombasalies a long stretch of sandy beach, popular amongst tourists today and home toa 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 greatislands of the Swahili coast lie off the coast of Tanzania including Pemba, andthe queen of them all, Zanzibar. Mafia Island stands close to the delta formedby the outpouring of the Rufiji River and further south lays Kilwa. A string ofsmall settlements line the fertile coast that stretches into Mozambique, wherea number of important ports are located, including Quelimane, Maputo and, lyingjust south of the point at which the Great Rift Valley breaks out into theocean, Sofala, while 300 kilometres offshore lie the Comoros Islands. Beyond laythe giant island of Madagascar and the coast of South Africa, beginning withthe province of Natal.

Untilthe twentieth century, the East African coast looked out to the Indian Oceanand the world beyond for its raison dtre. Travelling by water used to be, theworld over, the preferred method of travel and the East African coast was noexception. Here, the people of the Indian Ocean invented a sewn boat withtriangular sails, the dhow. Able to navigate both deep oceans and shallowcoastal waters, it was ideally suited to conditions in the Indian Ocean. Thejourney across the ocean was made possible by a hugely helpful weathercondition, 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 havebeen blowing with metronomic regularity for aeons, carrying dhows laden withcargo. From October to April, the wind blows from the northeast. Known to theSwahili as the kazkazi, it carried dhows from India, Persia and Arabiato the East African coast, carrying goods to sell in exchange for East Africa'sluxuries. Then the wind turns, and for the rest of the year the northwestmonsoon blows. Known as the kuzi, it carried dhows away from EastAfrica, laden with gold, ivory, and all the other produce of the land. Beforethe age of steam, this force was the power that drove trade around the IndianOcean world and without it, the story that follows would not have beenpossible.

Onlywith the construction of railways and roads at the end of the nineteenthcentury from the coast to the new towns of the interior such as Nairobi, didthe coast start to look more to the African hinterland. Roads and railwaysovercame some of the difficulties of travelling overland, a journey previouslymade almost impossible by an uncompromising expanse of arid desert that cut thecoastal plains off from the fertile highlands.

Thehistory of the East African coast is a story of pioneers, pirates, adventurersand entrepreneurs, horrors, tragedies and comedies, scandal and politicalintrigue, international commerce, lost cities, invasion, rebellion, terrorismand reconstruction, an African success story that provides us, not only with ahistory of the past, but an understanding of the present and a hope for thefuture.

Deepinside the Temple of Queen Hatsheput at Thebes on the banks of the River Nileis a relief depicting an Egyptian expedition to the 'Land of Punt', an ancientland thought to lie in the Horn of Africa in modern-day Somalia. The expeditionof five ships was sent out to collect incense trees and myrrh in response tothe prophecy of an oracle. The relief itself is around 3500 years old, andmentions that the expedition was the first Egyptian voyage to the Land of Puntfor five hundred years, meaning Egyptians were going there to trade at least aslong ago as 2000BC. While the voyage in those days may rarely have been made byEgyptians, it is likely that traders from south-western Arabia made regulartrips across the Red Sea to barter for the luxury goods of Punt, goods thatincluded spices and aromatic gum resins such as frankincense and myrrh; fromthe markets of Arabia, these goods would then have exported to the wealthycourts of Arabia, Egypt and beyond.