The Swahili Coast and Indian Ocean Trade

INDIA, THE INDIAN OCEAN BASIN, and EAST ASIA HIST 1301 | History The Swahili Coast and Indian Ocean Trade A portion of the Indian Ocean commerce moved to the East African nations after the fall of the Kingdom of Aksum. Improved shipbuilding, the ascent of the Umayyad and Abbasid caliphates, the fall of the Tang dynasty—which hampered overland trade—and even environmental changes like desertification, which rendered some parts of Africa uninhabitable, all contributed to the increased importance of maritime trade in this region. The Bantu people were migrating internally from northwest to east and southeast of Africa, while the Kingdom of Aksum was in collapse. The language, customs, and technique of ironmongering were all brought by the Bantu people. Many of them settled in East African coastal villages, especially around the beaches of what is now Tanzania and Kenya, where they either displaced or mingled with the Khoisan and other indigenous African peoples. They also made their way south, founding several communities for commerce and fishing. In exchange for cotton, glass, jewellery, and other goods the Bantu people were unable to produce on their own, they shipped ivory, skins, quartz, and stones. Port towns like Manda and Shang started developing into important port hubs. Arab traders soon settled among the Bantu peoples in order to take part in the newly emerging commerce. Yemeni traders first came to East Africa's coast in the seventh century, settling in significant places like the island of Zanzibar and Mogadishu, which is now part of modern-day Somalia. The Kharijites, rebels from Arabia with significantly different views from the majority on the caliph's position and the centralization of Muslim society, were among the first of these traders. Many of them settled in Oman, where they established intricate networks of trade with coastal villages and cities as well as merchant families in eastern Africa. Muslim traders eventually wed into these families, blending languages and cultures, especially those of Arabs, Persians, and East African Bantu speakers. This resulted in the creation of the Swahili civilization, which gets its name from the Arabic for "of the coast." Coastal African traders and port cities from Mogadishu in the north to Sofala in the south adapted to long-distance commerce and Islamic civilization as a result of increased trade with the Muslim world. This adaptation helped to form the Swahili coast, an area of East Africa's coast littered with several Mediaeval city-states (like Zanzibar) that functioned as hubs for trade, mostly in luxury goods. The Iranian capital city of Shiraz sent a fresh wave of Muslim immigrants after 1050, driving many of the earlier settlements farther south along the coast. They kept their Islamic cultural background while assimilating a large portion of the Bantu language and adding Arabic terms to create Kiswahili, which is now the primary language of contemporary Tanzania. In order to gain acceptance among the local populace, the new arrivals sought to prove their Persian ancestry. Some of them even said that they were descended from the prophet Muhammad. These Shirazi Muslims eventually gained control over coastal trade, particularly in Mombasa, Malinda, Lamu, and Sofala. Many made the decision to relocate to the coastal islands, especially Pemba, Mafia, and Zanzibar. Patricians were those who controlled commerce and identified as Middle Easterners. Forty or so new Muslim cities sprang up, many of them autonomous city-states headed by their own sultans. Without a sultan, a council of other patricians governed the town sometimes or frequently as counsellors. Either way, they established a privileged, dynastic class of merchants who spoke Arabic or Kiswahili and engaged in interior trade with Africans for commodities like gold, ivory, and furs. The northern portion of the Swahili coast received gold from Sofala, the southernmost populated area at the time, and traded it to the citystates before reaching the Indian Ocean trading network. Kilwa's merchants aimed to buy gold straight from the source, avoiding middlemen. As a result, they founded the commercial settlement of Sofala in the same region. Although Zanzibar proved to be almost as powerful, Kilwa emerged as the most significant Swahili town mostly because of its dominance in the gold trade. Indeed, throughout stretches in the fourteenth century, Kilwa ruled over several other cities. The interior of central southern Africa was linked to the greater trade of the Indian Ocean basin through the growth of the Swahili city-states. The Bantu people of major Zimbabwe ruled the Zimbabwean plateau, where merchants from city-states like Sofala, for instance, travelled up the Zambezi and Limpopo Rivers to attend the major fairs. There, they traded high-end luxury items like gold and ivory for shells, pottery, and coins from the coast of East Africa. In the vicinity of the Zimbabwean plateau, archaeologists have discovered artefacts ranging from fourteenthcentury Longquan Chinese pottery to ancient Indian coinage, indicating the extent of Swahiliborne maritime commerce into the interior of Africa. Compared to Arabic or Persian communities, Bantu societies in eastern and south-central Africa tended to be more matrilineal. Marrying the daughters of the local ruling class allowed many Middle Eastern immigrants to solidify their position of power. However, a tradition of women living in separate rooms and covering up ultimately emerged in the city-states. Mosques were present in even the tiniest city-state, and many of them still stand to this day. Coins made of copper and silver were minted by several of the most prominent city-states, including Kilwa. These coins were helpful among the coastal population even if they were rarely used abroad. The townsfolk, craftsmen, clerks, and other non-elite workers made formed the second class, if the merchant ruling class represented the elite and upper class. Because they were unable to identify their ancestry in a line of succession from Shirazi Muslims, they were often considered non-elite. The towns were home to a large number of non-Muslims who belonged to even lower socioeconomic classes and were employed as servants or other menial labourers. The lowest group of all were the slaves, individuals bought from the mainland who carried out much of the essential agricultural work. At this period, slavery was just as prevalent in East Africa as it was later, after European colonisation of the Americas, in the Atlantic region. After Portuguese sailors and other European settlers arrived in the sixteenth century, slaves continued to be a vital commodity in the Indian Ocean trade route. Through African middlemen, traders bought Bantu slaves from the interior, then transporting them to southern Iraq. These Muslim slaves, known as Zanj, worked to cultivate rice and sugarcane as well as clear marshes close to the mouths of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers in the ninth century. But in 868, the Zanj rose against their masters, sparking one of the biggest slave revolutions in history. This agitation essentially put a stop to the majority of the large-scale slave traffic between the Persian Gulf and the Swahili coast during this time, even if it was ultimately crushed in 883. The networks that traded in slaves throughout the Indian Ocean never stopped, but the Persian Gulf was never again the centre of this kind of enslavement. East Africa developed into a significant hub for commerce in the Indian Ocean by the eleventh century. The expansion of Islam and the uniting culture it generated among the merchant classes were made possible by the combination of monsoon winds that permitted ships to travel into Africa in the winter and towards India in the summer. Along the vast geographical arc encircling the Indian Ocean basin, trade-based communities grew. East African commodities, including ivory, animals, skins, rhinoceros horns, and gold, were traded for opulent items like silks, glassware, and equipment.