“I longed to travel the world and visit distant cities and islands in quest for profits and adventures. So I bought a great quantity of goods, made preparations for a new voyage, and sailed down the river Tigris to Basra. There I joined a band of merchants and set sail the same day. Helped by a favourable wind, we voyaged for many days from port to port and island to island and wherever we cast anchor, we sold and bartered our goods, and haggled with officials and merchants. At last our ship reached the shores of an island, rich in fruit and flowers, and echoing with the singing of birds and the murmur of crystal streams.”

The History of the Swahili Coast
While most of Europe was still floundering in the Dark Ages, the light of the Oriental world had already fallen on Zanzibar. It nestled in the middle of a well established mercantile civilization, constructed from a series of independent coastal and island city states, which stretched down East Africa, from the Somali coast to the mouth of Zambezi river. The Swahili civilization was born on the coast of Africa, and nourished by the waters of the Indian Ocean, crisscrossed for centuries by merchant vessels bearing traders and adventurers and pirates from India, Arabia, Persia, China, Japan and Russia. They arrived on the East African coast with the monsoon and left again, their holds groaning with trade goods. They brought metal tools, weapons and jewelry and took away ivory, tortoiseshell, slaves and palm oil. The 9th Century Tales of Sinbad the Sailor from the eastern fairytale Arabian Nights reflect the seafaring tradition of the people of the Persian Gulf. It was they who named the coast Zanj el Barr, meaning “land of black people”.

The African people of the coast intermarried with the visitors, fusing their traditions with Arab customs until the Swahili became a distinct race, with its own language, feudal rulers, art forms and decorative traditions. They were named from the African word sahl, meaning coast. Driven from their homes by a succession of wars and conflicts that beset the countries of the Persian Gulf, Shirazi and Arab visitors settled permanently in Swahili towns, bringing the religion of Islam with them.

The Swahili had no one overall ruler, they were organized into separate communities each ruled by their own Sultan, but with a constant flow of populations between the trading centres that rose and fell with the progression of the centuries. Zanzibar was ruled by a dynasty of kings and queens with the hereditary title of Mwinyi Mkuu. The Mwinyi Mkuu were Islamic rulers, but they were credited with older powers – they held in their possession a set of magic drums, which beat of their own accord when the kingdom was in peril. The last Mwinyi Mkuu died in 1873, and his mansion at Dunga in the centre of Zanzibar Island is thought to be haunted.

Trading and life
Zanzibar rose to prominence as a flourishing commercial centre in the thirteenth century. Swahili communities on Zanzibar and Pemba built stone mosques decorated with carved inscriptions, minted silver coins and used delicate Syrian style perfume bottles in green and blue glass. The graves of their more important citizens featured stone towers at either end, with Chinese porcelain bowls sunk into the cement walls. Mosques and private dwellings had dressed stone lintels, rectangular patterned wall niches, plasterwork friezes and stone latticed windows. The Swahili decorative tradition arose from the fact that the dictates of Islam forbade the rendering of images of people or animals. Patterns on walls, ceilings, furniture and utensils were always abstract, or composed of verses from the Koran in Arabic lettering. The floors of the richer houses were covered with Persian rugs. Wealthy women went about richly decorated with gold and silver jewellery, and prosperous merchants wore robes and turbans embroidered with gold thread.

Swahili houses were built of fossilized coral held together with limestone cement and thatched with makuti leaves. Stone benches ran around the outside porch, providing a space known as a daka where the master of the household received visitors. A carved double leafed door led into the interior of the house where the privacy of the Swahili women was jealously guarded. Their quarters were in the innermost recesses of the house, beyond an inner courtyard and visited only by the closest of family members. In the wealthier areas of Swahili towns covered walkways crossed high above the streets to allow well born women to glide between the houses without being seen by strangers.

Swahili domestic furniture was both decorative and ingeniously designed. Food trays had saucers to hold dishes at either side, corn grinders incorporated large flat stones, and high backed, formal wedding chairs were inlaid with ivory or bone. Babies’ cradles woven from cotton cloth hung from the ceiling or from struts of springy wood. Beds were wooden frames, often carved, covered with coir rope made from coconut husks. They were sat on during the day, slept on at night and carried the dead to their graves. Brass coffeepots were engraved through hammering or chiseling.

In Zanzibar today, Swahili artifacts decorate hotel lobbies and private houses, and men still weave through the crowded streets of Stone Town wearing long, flowing white kanzu (robes) and embroidered kofia (hats). Swahili cuisine -curries made with coconut milk and spices, maandazi pancakes, fried octopus - is eaten daily by most of the population and the traditional music of the Swahili coast, taarab, is played alongside gangsta rap and European house. Despite deep-seated traditions of hospitality and of religious tolerance, colonization over the centuries by successive Portuguese, Omani and European invaders has done nothing to dent the unique cultural identity of the Swahili people.

Originally published in Swahili Coast Magazine. Author - Gemma Pitcher