Islam in East Africa - 2
By Professor Nazeer Ahmed
Concord, CA
The commanding location of Kilwa on the north-south sea lanes of East Africa gave it an advantage over rival trading posts. In time, Kilwa grew to be the most important trading center in East Africa.
The political clout of the city grew in proportion to its commerce. In the twelfth century, Sultan Sulaiman Hassan, the ninth in the lineage of Sultan Ali ibn Hasan, captured the port of Sofala at the mouth of the Zambezi River. Sofala was the export center for gold and ivory in the Zambezi River Basin. Control of this wealth gave the sultans of Kilwa enormous political clout along the Swahel and they extended their sway all along the coast, from Kenya to the Zambesi River and south. Included in their domains were Mombasa, Zanzibar, Kilwa, Comoro, Sofala and the cities along the coast of the large island of Madagascar. Kilwa carried on a brisk trade with cities as far away as Oman, Cochin (India) and Acheh (Indonesia). Using the Astrolabe, the Kilwans developed precise navigational maps of the Indian Ocean. Commerce made the African cities prosper and the sultanate of Kilwa rose to occupy an important place among the trading kingdoms that dotted the Indian Ocean like pearls around a half moon.
The free flow of people created a cosmopolitan culture wherein the immigrants and the Africans freely mixed with each other. The Arabs and Persians melted into the African milieu and a new culture arose amalgamating the best that Persia, Oman, Arabia, Yemen and East Africa had to offer. This was the origin of the Swahili culture. In time the Swahili language grew incorporating Bantu grammar and a rich Arabic and Persian vocabulary. It remains the lingua franca of the people of East
Africa and is the declared national language of Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania, the Comoros and the Congo. The impact of Swahili culture and language is to be felt as far away as the African American population in the United States. Examples are the celebration of Kwanza as a holiday, and the use of Kiswahili names by a sizable number of African Americans.
The far flung Kilwa sultanate was a free association of commercial interests between the major trading cities in the Swahel. The sultan was the nominal head of this association. Each city enjoyed a great deal of autonomy. The decentralized structure allowed each city to build its own trade relations with the Bantu peoples of the interior. The coastal cities exported Yemeni, Persian and Indian textiles to the interior and imported in turn ivory and gold. The region prospered.
Ibn Batuta visited the East African coast in 1331-32, traveling through the Sudan and Yemen, then on to Zeila (Eritrea), Mogadishu (Somalia), Mombasa (Kenya) and further south to Zanzibar and Kilwa. Ibn Batuta found the inhabitants of these cities to be very affluent. He records that they wore fine cotton clothes and intricate gold jewelry, prayed in domed mosques and dined on fine porcelain from China. Their cities were peaceful, with no outer fortresses, offering a warm and open welcome to the merchants from distant shores.
In the fifteenth century Kilwa went into decline because of court intrigue and internecine fighting. Ambitious viziers made the sultans their puppets and became de facto rulers. Sensing the corruption and turmoil in the capital, the associate cities in Sofala, Malindi, Mombassa and Mozambique sought to distance themselves from Kilwa and become independent.
It was into this fragmented political structure that the Portuguese thrust their dagger. Vasco da Gama circumnavigated the Cape of Good Hope in 1498. His goal was to find a sea route to the spice trade of India, bypassing the Muslims in the Middle East and North Africa who had hitherto controlled that trade. Vasco da Gama visited Mozambique and then Kilwa. Sailing further north he touched Mombasa and then Malindi. It was from Malindi that he embarked on the last leg of his voyage. The Muslims of East Africa knew the Indian Ocean well and understood the monsoons that enabled them to ply this vast ocean. Vasco da Gama enlisted the help of an African Muslim mariner Ahmed ibn Majid. Taking advantage of the southwest monsoons, he sailed across the Indian Ocean, and landed at Cochin on the Malabar Coast of India in May 1498.
The discovery of a sea route to India from Europe, bypassing the land routes through the Middle East, was a major event in world history. Europe was now in a position not only to benefit from direct trade with Asia but more importantly, threaten the Arab and Muslim Middle East with military encirclement. From a global perspective, three major events took place in rapid succession towards the end of the fifteenth century. They signaled the end of the medieval period and ushered in the era of European ascendency.
In 1492 Granada fell and the Muslims (and Jews) were expelled from Spain freeing up the southwestern flank of Europe from Muslim encirclement, a prospect that had haunted Europe for seven hundred years. It was also in 1492 that Columbus made the European discovery of America and opened up the vast resources of the New World to European exploitation. Then, in 1498, Vasco da Gama discovered the sea route to India.
While Vasco da Gama opened European doors to the riches of Asia, the event proved to be a disaster for Muslims. It was not just trade that the Portuguese were interested in. They were intent on destroying Muslim influence in the Indian Ocean and imposing their brand of Christianity on the peoples of Africa and Asia. Their tool was the inquisition that they and the Spaniards had used with devastating effectiveness against the Jews and the Muslims in Andalus (1492-1498).
Vasco da Gama used his first voyage as an intelligence gathering mission. He returned in 1502 at the head of a heavily armed flotilla of ships mounted with cannons and blasted his way across the coast of East Africa to India. The prosperous cities that dotted the rim of the Indian Ocean were trading posts. They had no defenses against an enemy attacking them from the sea. They fell one after the other before the Portuguese onslaught. The East African sultanates were in political disarray. Some of the cities, like Sofala, surrendered to the Portuguese. Kilwa resisted and was blasted and occupied. Arriving on the coast of India, the Portuguese flotilla engaged in wanton acts of piracy on the high seas. In one recorded instance, they captured a ship carrying Indian pilgrims to Mecca, butchered every man, woman and child on board and impaled a lone Egyptian mariner to the cross. The Hindu Raja of Cochin (the Zamorin) sent his ambassador, a respected Brahmin, to negotiate. The Portuguese cut off his nose and ears and sent him back to the Raja demanding total submission. When the Raja refused, the Portuguese bombarded Cochin and carried off scores of Indians as slaves.
In a short period of twenty years, the Indian Ocean turned from an ocean of peace to a theater of war. It had existed for a thousand years as a conduit of trade in which the peoples of the littoral states, Muslims, Hindus and Buddhists alike interacted with each other. Now it became an ocean of conflict and insecurity. Destroyed were the coastal cities that had been built up over a period of centuries for commerce and trade by Africans, Arabs and Persians alike. In their place sprang up fortress towns with parapet mounted Portuguese cannons facing the oceanic trade routes. The Portuguese captured Goa, India in 1510 and made it the base for the expansions of their fledging Indian Ocean Empire. The onslaught continued through much of the sixteenth century. In 1511, Malacca (Malaysia) fell. Chinese Macau, which fell in 1557, marked the limit of their reach. (Continued next week)
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