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THE SWAHILI WORLD
Adria LaViolette and Stephanie Wynne-Jones
The Swahili world
Africa borders the Indian Ocean along its eastern coast, a region of beaches and cliffs fringed by coral reef and backed by a varied landscape, sometimes dry and inhospitable, often fertile and full of life. This coast and its offshore islands (Map 1, p. xxii) is home to the Swahili people, language and culture. Those elements overlap to a great extent, but each is the product of its own historical trajectory; this coast has been home for many centuries to the developments that created contemporary Swahili society. During the course of those centuries, the people of this coast developed a society of sophistication and complexity; their towns were known throughout the world from Europe to China, regions with which eastern African traders were in regular contact. Today Swahili history is relatively poorly known to a global audience, yet it is rightly recognised by scholars of the African past as the story of one of the continentâs great civilisations.
This volume is an introduction to that civilisation, created from a diverse assembly of scholarship about the Swahili, centred in archaeology and complemented by history, linguistics and socio-cultural anthropology. Such a wealth of disciplinary input is perhaps unusual for the Routledge Worlds series, which has covered societies known primarily through either archaeology or history. For the Swahili, however, it is difficult to create a full picture from any one discipline, and the current state of knowledge about the coastal past has been created through conversation between many sources of data (for example, Nurse and Spear 1984; Horton and Middleton 2000). Here, we sought to represent Swahili civilisation without compressing temporal and spatial differences, to avoid minimising the clear diversity of experience represented over the course of its history (Table 1.1). In walking this zigzag line, what emerges â and this was our task â is a âworldâ: unique, striking and complicated. The âpersonalityâ of the Swahili coast is conveyed in so many overlapping ways, ancient and modern: in peopleâs dress, Muslim faith, cuisine, language communities, origin stories, music, material culture and cosmopolitan urban and rural landscapes. Yet even as Swahili became an identifiable âworldâ, it has always been a world in motion; it has been conservative and traditional, and equally additive and open. These transformations have contributed to making this such an enduring civilisation and are what we have tried to convey collectively in the chapters that follow.
For readers, scholarly or otherwise, who are new to the coast, the volume will provide access to the ancient Swahili, some views of modern Swahili life, and some connections binding them together. For those readers whose research already ties them to the coast, we hope we have provided a truly non-normative, three-dimensional and up-to-date â if inevitably incomplete â view of contemporary Swahili scholarship.
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Table 1.1 Overview of the chronology of the Swahili coast
The myth of external origins and its legacy
Historical and archaeological work on the Swahili coast was inspired by a misapprehension, born of a more general orientalist vision that guided interaction with contemporary Swahili. Presented with the remains of a sophisticated Islamic civilisation of obvious antiquity, European colonial administrators and scholars assumed that the Swahili were Arab immigrants, brought to the coast by the opportunities of trade with the interior (Sutton, this volume). This provided an easy explanation for the clear Arab/Persian affinities of Swahili civilisation, the presence of Arabic words in the Swahili language and the ruins of mosques and palaces that dot the coast, which could be compared with those in the Islamic heartlands. It was also an explanation that found ready agreement among contemporary Swahili populations, who often traced their roots overseas; this was particularly true during the periods of Omani and later European colonialism, when Swahili identity was being actively negotiated for political advantage under a regime that favoured Arab over African ethnicity (Ray, this volume).
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Contemporary scholarship has rightly rejected this paradigm, presenting an alternative vision of the Swahili coast as home to an African population, strongly affected by centuries of contact with the Indian Ocean world, and with other parts of the Dar al Islam, but indigenous in great proportion of its population and autochthonous in development. The evidence that underlies this shift in thinking is presented in several of the chapters of this volume, which relate crucial developments in historical linguistics that categorised the Swahili language as Bantu, albeit with many Arab loanwords that came into the language in the last few centuries (Walsh, this volume); reinterpretations of the oral traditions of the coast (Coppola, this volume); and the archaeology of early towns (Horton and Chami, this volume). Each began independently to confirm African roots for Swahili populations. There are now no serious scholars who suggest external origins or significant Arab or Persian colonisation as the starting point for coastal settlement.
Effects on contemporary scholarship
This story of external vs. indigenous origins is more than just a footnote in modern interpretations. The way that research developed on the coast has had significant effects on contemporary scholarship. One effect of the way that Swahili sites were singled out by early researchers is â quite simply â that there was more archaeological research completed in coastal regions than in locations inland. Colonial scholars were drawn by the exotic nature of Swahili towns, the apparently incongruous appearance of grand palaces and mosques in regions otherwise characterised by earthen architecture; this was a puzzle to be solved (Kirkman 1964; Chittick 1974, 1984). It was also easier to work on these sites, with obvious standing remains and imported goods that gave an important frame of reference for understanding chronology and connection, in what was otherwise an almost complete absence of historical information. (Imported goods still play a crucial role in providing relative dates for coastal sites and, indeed, for sites inland; Priestman, this volume.)
From the 1980s onwards, scholarship was given further momentum by the desire to disprove the colonial thesis, with a wealth of studies focusing on âurban originsâ among indigenous populations (Sinclair and Juma 1992; Horton 1996). As part of this movement, scholars began to look to relationships between the coast and inland groups. Linguistic reconstruction showed a deep and ongoing coevolution of the Swahili language and those of the near hinterland, which belied the suggestion of enclaves of Arab immigrants on the coast (Nurse and Spear 1984). Historians began to grapple with the fluid nature of coastal identity and showed that it had long been defined in relation to other African groups of the hinterland near and far (Allen 1993; Willis 1993; Helm 2004). Archaeologists excavated sites of the African interior and produced a material record parallel to that found at coastal sites, positioning the archaeological culture known as Swahili within a much broader regional grouping (Abungu and Muturo 1993; Chami 1994; HĂ„land and Msuya 1994/5). A prominent Tanzanian archaeologist, Felix Chami, suggested that these similarities were particularly pertinent for the first millennium CE and that, from the eleventh century onwards, coastal sites became gradually more distinct from their hinterlands; for him this was linked to the widespread adoption of Islam on the coast and subsequent tendency to look âoutwardâ to the Indian Ocean world (Chami 1994; also Pouwels 1987; Horton 1991; Wright 1993 on the shift to majority Islam). This suggestion has to some extent been subsumed by the broader conclusion of these studies, which is that the coastal culture that became Swahili developed from, and in conversation with, a larger eastern African region.
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Recognizing diversity
This last point bears closer consideration, because enclosed within it is one of the key tensions that characterises Swahili scholarship today. Recognition of the Swahili as an African society was predicated on a set of assumptions that positioned coastal towns within a very broad region; similarities between inland and coastal sites meant that both were effectively considered part of the same society. The evidence was also developmental, based on common roots and, in particular, on the period between the sixth and tenth centuries. This vision has done much to shape understandings of Swahili society for the better, yet it has also sometimes made it more difficult to recognise diversity between mainland and coastal assemblages, or to discuss some of the unique characteristics of the coast.
As we discuss below, there is a broad shift between the sixth and tenth-century settlements and those of the eleventh century onwards. Although we might recognise sites of the sixth century and after as part of the Swahili historical trajectory, it is only from the eleventh century that many of the characteristic features of coastal culture developed. By the thirteenth to fourteenth century, many coastal townscapes looked very different from those found further inland, although they still contained a majority of earthen architecture like their neighbouring villages. The towns were also quite different from each other, as is clear in the pages of this volume. Kilwa Kisiwani and Songo Mnara, with their grand monuments and elaborate structures (Wynne-Jones, this volume), were quite distinct from contemporary Chwaka on Pemba (Fleisher and LaViolette 2013; LaViolette, this volume), where inhabitants continued to live in wattle-and-daub structures despite their mastery of coral architecture, demonstrated in the construction of a domed mosque (Horton, Islamic Architecture, this volume). These townscapes were diverse places, probably containing diverse populations; the evidence for this is starting to emerge from aDNA studies, although these are still in their infancy (Raaum et al., this volume). It can be difficult to capture this diversity, recognising the unique nature of Swahili society without attracting criticism for singling them out from their African neighbours. In fact, the DNA evidence joins that from many aspects of coastal material culture to demonstrate significant mobility between the coast and a very deep hinterland. The Swahili are a rich and complex African civilisation but, due to the history of research in this region and the long shadow of the external origins myth, it can be difficult to discuss the very aspects that make them so unique: their cosmopolitanism, diversity and outward-looking culture.
Moving beyond essentialisms
It can be equally difficult to point to change over time in terms of how the Swahili viewed themselves, something that is to some extent recoverable archaeologically. A recent paper, for example, argued that the Swahili had not always been a âmaritime societyâ, suggesting instead that the orientation of this society towards the sea had occurred incrementally and in different ways (Fleisher et al. 2015). A general shift in the eleventh century was postulated, at which time changes in architecture, diet, religion and material culture suggested more active engagement with the maritime world. This is also the moment at which oral traditions suggest towns were âfoundedâ by immigrant rulers. The aim of the paper was to explore such change over time, in a society traditionally regarded as maritime by default. Yet this argument has been critiqued from two opposite sides, each with their roots in the debate over Swahili origins. First, it has been suggested that the article focuses too heavily on maritimity, ignoring the mainland connections of the Swahili. This explicitly harks back to the origins debate, equating maritimity with foreignness: âresuscitating the very question that postcolonial pioneers like Gervase Mathew, Peter Garlake, Thomas Wilson, Richard Wilding, and James Allen struggled to exorciseâ (Kusimba 2016: x). Elsewhere, critique has focused on the idea that the article ignores a longer tradition of maritime adaptation on the coast, although this is not claimed directly ancestral to the Swahili (Crowther et al. 2016). Each of these critiques reveals an underlying assumption that coastal groups must be something or the other â if African, they cannot be maritime; if coastal, they must be part of a long-term developmental trajectory of uniquely maritime society. In fact, the more research occurs on the coast, the more we recognise that the Swahili were simultaneously African and engaged in foreign trade, they were both farmers and traders, they had a range of relationships with groups both near and far, across land and sea, and the recognition of these should be a fundamental part of studying the Swahili world.
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It is for this reason that the current volume deliberately sets out to include archaeology from the deep hinterland (Kusimba and Kusimba, Walz, this volume). Even though the sites and people discussed were not âSwahiliâ, they are part of the Swahili world as well as central to their own. In addition, the researchers involved have explicitly framed their research on interior groups from the perspective of coastal archaeology and connections. The fact that we also include chapters on Indian (Oka, this volume) and Chinese (Zhao and Qin, this volume) connections does not devalue the interior relationships of the Swahili coast, but simply adds to the richness of the Swahili civilisation and their range of interactions. Nevertheless, the constant need for negotiation between exploring external and African connections exists, created by contemporary politics and research agendas and not obviously by the ancient Swahili themselves, who seem to have thrived in both contexts.
Naming the Swa...
