2,030 Abibisika (Black Gold) Points

Rank: Unranked Obibini

“The word “Swahili” is derived from the Arabic word sahil which means coast. When the Arabs first saw the African people living along the coast they gave these coastal people who spoke Bantu languages the name “Sahili.” KiSwahili is a Bantu language to which many Arabic words have been added. This came about over a long history of trade relationships between the people. It is the adopted language of the modern nation of Tanzania. To understand the Swahili culture, it is important to start at the beginning. For millennia, Africans lived along the coast of the Indian Ocean without too much interference from foreigners.

Visitors from Asia and Europe found the east coast of Africa quite accessible as they had found the west coast. In the east, there were visitors from Arabia and Portugal and other countries from Asia and Europe. Soon after 622 CE, and the beginning of Islam, the east coast of Africa became popular with Arabs, Persians, Indians, Indonesians and Chinese. They came to the coast of Africa looking for exotic spices, ivory, rhinoceros horn, tortoise shells, and coconuts. Soon Arab traders had made their way from Somalia in the north to Pemba Island in the south.

But Africa was not just a market for traders: some of the people were escaping punishment in the religious conflicts that engulfed their own lands. Nothing in the religion of the Bantu was a threat to anyone else. Africans did not mistreat, harm or kill people simply because they did not like their religion. There was nothing called religious intolerance in the mind of Africa. Therefore, many people rushed to live on the coast of Africa. The east coast was one of the world’s first melting pots. Here one could find people from all the countries of Asia and many of the European countries from the 17th to the 20th century.

The Somali coast also called Banadir, had to accommodate a large Arab and Persian population by the ninth and tenth centuries CE. The Persians came from Shiraz a city of Iran. These visitors intermarried with Somali women and developed what was called the Shirazi culture, a combination of African, Persian and Arab peoples. Shirazi culture was to have a major impact on coastal activities. It was between the tenth and 14th centuries that the term “Swahili” came into existence to define people who were African in language and phenotype, but Islamic in culture and religion.

Soon the African cities of Mogadishu, Brava and Merka became magnets for trade and centres for Islamic thought and culture. As in West Africa particularly during the Mali Empire, the imprint of Islam on the east coast of Africa changed the culture of the people. African traders took their goods to India, Arabia and China, and traders from those places travelled to the Swahili coast, some times going into the interior as far as 400 miles to trade with Great Zimbabwe.

Along the coast, huge towns such as Mombasa, Malindi, Lamu, Kilwa and Sofola were beehives of trading and proselytising. The Banadir coastline all the way down to Sofola was nothing but one large human experiment in how much activity around trade and culture could take place without the host people losing their patience. However, the Arab traders grew sensitive to the Africans concerns about losing property and influence to the rich traders and soon there was a movement of Arab traders to live on the offshore African islands and the African population of Islands like Pemba, Mafia and Zanzibar became known for their concentration of trading vessels and goods, and people to be sold into slavery, taken from the mainland. The Arab slave trade on the Indian Ocean was a onerous as the European slave trade on the Atlantic Ocean. Neither practice was pretty, both were monstrous in their brutality and exploitation of Africans.

When the history of Kilwa was written in KiSwahili in 1520, the language of the Bantu people now occupying the coast had become a sort of lingua franca for East Africa. Almost all Bantu speakers had KiSwahili as a second language, or could speak KiSwahili with a little practice. Thus, the African people soon Africanised all the cultural elements that had been supplied by the Arabs and Persians. Indeed the first sultan of Kilwa, Ali Selimani, a Shirazi, married the daughter of the African king he overthrew. His son, half African became the second sultan of Kilwa.

Overtime, the intermarriages of the Arab and Persian traders men who did not bring their women on the trading voyages Africanised the Swahili society. Although the people remained African, the teaching of the Qur’an and Hadith kept the people firmly in the grip of Islamic culture. The ruling families were thoroughly Islamicised, while the masses of African people continued to practice African traditional religion.