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The Shirazi in Swahili Traditions, Culture, and History1

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 May 2014

Thomas Spear
Thomas Spear*
Affiliation:
Williams College
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Extract

“Strange foreign jewels on a mournful silent shore”

Historians have frequently viewed the Swahili-speaking peoples of the East African coast as members of an Arab diaspora that spread around the Indian Ocean with trade over the last two thousand years. The interpretation flowed easily from the apparent “Arab” nature of Swahili culture--a written language using Arabic script, elaborate stone buildings and mosques constructed in urban settings, Islam, and genteel social behavior--especially when contrasted with the culture of mainland Africans, members of preliterate, uncentralized communities. Since the Swahili culture of the islands and coastal fringes bore little apparent resemblance to the cultures of the mainland, historians reasoned, its development could only have been the product of Persian and Arab merchants bringing to the “mournful silent shores” of East Africa the “jewels” of their own Muslim civilizations.

The perspective was essentially diffusionist in assuming that cultural innovation and historical development in Africa could only have come from elsewhere, and racist in assuming that race and culture were so inextricably linked that a separate “race” of immigrants had to carry these new ideas. As a result, historians failed to investigate the possible African roots of Swahili culture in their Bantu language, their religious beliefs and values, their economy, or their social structure. But this charge applies not only to European historians; Swahili oral historians have long recounted the development of their societies in essentially the same terms in involved genealogies tracing the development of different Swahili families, communities, and institutions back to Persian or Arabian ancestors. When European historians came to study the oral traditions of the Swahili (usually in written, chronicle form), they thus found ready confirmation of their own assumptions and interpretations.

Type
Research Article
Information
History in Africa , Volume 11 , 1984 , pp. 291 - 305
Copyright
Copyright © African Studies Association 1984

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Footnotes

1

The paper is part of a larger project with Derek Nurse on Swahili language and history and owes much to his analyses of the development of the Swahili language.

References

Notes

2. The term “Swahili” itself is open to considerable debate. I use it as a descriptive term, including the members of historical Swahili-speaking communities scattered along the islands and coastal fringe of East Africa from Somalia to Mozambique. Swahili normally identify themselves by the name of their town (e.g., Pate, Amu, Mvita), their lineage or residential quarter within the town, or by general cultural terms such as “Shirazi” or “Arab,” as we shall see. See Shariff, I.N., “Waswahili and Their Language: Some Misconceptions,” Kiswahili, 43(1973), 67–75Google Scholar, and Tolmacheva, M., “The Origins of the Name ‘Swahili’,” Tanzania Notes and Records, 77/78(1976), 27–37.Google Scholar

3. Derek Nurse and Thomas Spear, The Swahili: History and Language of an African Society (forthcoming); Nurse, , “Notes on the Classification of the Primary Dialects of Swahili,” SUGIA, 4(1982) 165–205Google Scholar; idem., “A Hypothesis About the Origin of Swahili” (mimeo, 1981); Tolmacheva, M., “The Arabic Influence on Swahili Literature: A Historian's View,” Journal of African Studies, 5(1978), 223–43.Google Scholar

4. deV. Allen, J., “The Swahili House: Cultural and Ritual Concepts Underlying Its Plan and Structure,” Art and Archaeology Research Papers, (1979), 1–32.Google Scholar

5. Trimingham, J.S., Islam in East Africa (Oxford, 1964)Google Scholar; Pouwels, R., “Islam and Islamic Leadership in the Coastal Communities of Eastern Africa, 1700–1914,” (Ph.D. dissertation, UCLA, 1979), 166–82Google Scholar; Caplan, A., Choice and Constraint in a Swahili Community (London, 1975), 84–115Google Scholar; Lienhardt, P., “A Controversy Over Islamic Custom in Kilwa Kivinge, Tanzania” in Lewis, I.M., ed., Islam in Tropical Africa (London, 1966), 374–86Google Scholar; bin Ismail, Hasani, The Medicine Man (Oxford, 1968).Google Scholar

6. Allen, “Swahili House;” Pouwels, , “Islam,” 352–628passimGoogle Scholar; el Zein, A., The Sacred Meadows (Evanston, 1974).Google Scholar

7. Willis, Roy, “On Historical Reconstruction from Oral-Traditional Sources: A Structuralist Approach,” 12th Melville J. Herskovits Memorial Lecture, Northwestern University, 1976Google Scholar; Miller, Joseph, “The Dynamics of Oral Tradition in Africa,” in Bernardi, Bernardo, ed., Fonti Orali (Milan, 1978)Google Scholar; idem., ed., The African Past Speaks (Folkstone, 1980); Spear, T., “Oral Traditions: Whose History?” HA, 8(1981), 163–79.Google Scholar

8. This analysis and much of what follows is drawn from a number of excellent studies of Lamu, including el Zein, Sacred Meadows; Pouwels, , “Islam,” 203–42Google Scholar; Allen, , “Swahili House;” Ylvisaker, Marguerite, Lamu in the Nineteenth Century (Boston, 1979)Google Scholar; and an ethnography of a village in Mafia, Caplan, Choice, with which they can be productively compared.

10. “An Arabic History of Kilwa Kisiwani, c. 1520” in Freeman-Grenville, G.S.P., ed., The East African Coast (Oxford, 1962), 35–37.Google Scholar

11. Chittick, H.N., “The ‘Shirazi’ Colonization of East Africa,” JAH, 6(1965), 275–94.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

12. The attribution of an entire people to a single individual is common in traditions.

13. Both kinds of land tenure are still found in Swahili society today. In Lamu individual freehold tenure obtains on the island itself, while farms on the mainland are held in usufruct. The same distinction is made by the Bajun and on Mafia. Ylvisaker, , Lamu, 1–65Google Scholar; Bujra, J., “An Anthropological Study of Political Action in a Bajuni Village in Kenya,” (Ph.D. dissertation, University of London), 54–68Google Scholar; Caplan, , Choice, 60–73.Google Scholar

14. “The Ancient History of Kilwa Kisiwani” in Freeman-Grenville, , Coast, 221–22.Google Scholar

15. Caplan, , Choice, 60–73Google Scholar; Saadi, Kadhi Amur Omar, “Mafia: History and Traditions,” Tanganyika Notes and Records, 12(1941), 23–27.Google Scholar G. Shephard, personal communication.

16. Chittick, H.N., “A New Look at the History of Pate,” JAH, 10(1969), 382.CrossRefGoogle Scholar For the Pate Chronicle: Stigand, C.H., The Land of Zinj (London, 1913), 29–102Google Scholar (reprinted in Freeman-Grenville, , Coast, 241–96)Google Scholar; Werner, A., “A Swahili History of Pate,” Journal of the African Society, 14(1914–1915), 148–61, 278–97, 392–413.Google Scholar

17. People from Pate are still called Batawi elsewhere along the coast.

18. On traditions as models see: MacGaffey, W., “African History, Anthropology, and the Rationality of Natives,” HA, 5(1978), 101–20Google Scholar; Miller, “Dynamics;” Spear, “Oral Traditions;” Sahlins, M., “The Stranger King, or Dumezil among the Fijians,” Journal of Pacific History, 16 (1981), 107–32.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

19. Lambert, H.E., Ki-Vumba (Studies in the Swahili Dialect, II) (Kampala, 1957), 13Google Scholar; bin Mwidad, Midani, “The Founding of Rabai,” Swahili, 31(1960), 144.Google Scholar

20. Bujra, , “Bajun,” 163Google Scholar; Nurse, , “Bajuni Historical Linguistics,” Kenya Past and Present, 12(1980), 34–43Google Scholar; Guillain, C., Documents sur l'historie, la géographie et le commerce de l'Afrique Orientale (Paris, 1856), 2:237–45Google Scholar; Lambert, , Ki-Vumba, 9–13Google Scholar; MacKay, W.F., “A Precolonial History of the Southern Kenya Coast,” (Ph.D., dissertation, Boston University, 1975), 26–29, 66–67, 227–34.Google Scholar

21. Burton, Richard F., Zanzibar: City, Island and Coast (2 vols.: London, 1872), 2:362–63.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

22. See, e.g., “Chronicle of Mombasa,” Swahili, 34/1(1964), 21–27Google Scholar and Spear, Mijikenda Historical Traditions, Nos. 16, 21, 27, 31, 65.

23. Feierman, Steven, The Shambaa Kingdom (Madison, 1974), 45–64.Google Scholar

24. al-Masʿudi in Freeman-Grenville, , Coast, 14–17.Google Scholar

25. al-Idrisi in ibid., 19–20.

26. Ibn Battuta in ibid., 27–32.

27. Nurse/Spear, The Swahili; Nurse, “Primary Dialects of Swahili;” idem, “Origin of the Swahili.”

28. Spear, , The Kaya Complex (Nairobi, 1978), 10–43Google Scholar; idem, Kenya's Past (London, 1981), 33–40, 54–57.

29. Chittick, , Kilwa (Nairobi, 1974)Google Scholar; idem, “Kilwa: A Preliminary Report,” Azania, 1(1966), 1–36; idem, Kisimani Mafia (Dares Salaam, 1961).

30. Horton, M., Shanga 1980 (Cambridge, 1980)Google Scholar; Phillipson, D.W., “Some Iron Age Sites in the Lower Tana Valley,” Azania, 14(1979), 155–62.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

31. Allen, , “Swahili House,” 4–5Google Scholar; Pouwels, , “Islam,” 352–628passim.Google Scholar