In the 1320s, a Syrian prince, Abu al Fida who, as an 18 year old soldier in 1291 had helped expel the crusaders from their last stronghold in the Holy Land, wrote a geographical work describing the physical features of the Muslim world. This, and a book outlining the history of humanity, were to become bestsellers among European orientalists of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Preferring to concentrate on physical geography, Al Fida did not shed a great deal of light on life at the coast but it is significant to note that, like Al Idrisi, he focussed on Malindi and Mombasa. By Al Fida's time, Malindi seemed to have superseded Mombasa in importance since the king of the Zanj now lived there.
Ibn Battuta
At around the time Abu al Fida was writing his geography, a 21 year old Moroccan was setting out on a pilgrimage to Mecca. His name was Abu Abdallah Muhammad Ibn Battuta. After crossing North Africa and completing his pilgrimage, Ibn Battuta seems to have developed the most monumental case of itchy feet the world has ever known. Instead of returning home, he embarked upon travels of global proportions, spending the next thirty years on an odyssey of some 75,000 miles. It is likely that until the invention of the railway, no human had travelled further. Ibn Battuta visited all the countries of North Africa and the Middle East, sailed down the East African coast, calling on Mogadishu, Mombasa and Kilwa, and then travelled on through southern Russia, the Black Sea and the Ukraine, Constantinople, the steppes of central Asia and the Hindu Kush, India, the Maldive Islands, Sri Lanka, Sumatra, Cambodia and China. Returning briefly to Morocco after twenty three years, he then visited Spain and, at a point when most people would have settled down to a quiet retirement, crossed the Sahara to visit the kingdom of Niger. Once he had sat down long enough, he dictated the story of his travels to one Ibn Juzay, a chronicler at the court of the Moroccan sultan in Fez. The resulting book, ‘The Travels of Ibn Battuta’, expanded both Muslim and Christian knowledge of the world in one colossal step. Ibn Battuta was, quite simply, a colossus in the expansion of human knowledge.
He visited the coast in 1331. At that time, Mogadishu was a large, sophisticated, wealthy town and an important Islamic city inhabited by many sharifs. Once they learned that Ibn Battuta was an Islamic legal scholar, the people of Mogadishu rolled out the red carpet for him. Ibn Battuta described Mogadishu's elders as splendidly dressed, adorned in silk tunics and turbans, and described cloth manufactured in the town as one of its major sources of income - in fact it was the only item of export mentioned by Ibn Battuta.
He described in detail one of Mogadishu's weekly events, a civic procession following Friday prayers involving many of the town's elders. The sultan, accompanied by emirs, wazirs, lawyers, sharifs, military commanders and the Islamic qadi, made his way to his palace under a silk canopy whose poles were adorned with golden birds, while people played drums, trumpets, oboes and flutes. Mogadishu was evidently a city that took its culture seriously.
Further south, Mombasa and Kilwa appeared to be Muslim oases amidst a pagan population. Indeed, Kilwa was, at the time of Ibn Battuta's arrival, involved in what he termed a holy war against the pagan Zanj. The people of Mombasa were described as “devout, chaste and virtuous”, living primarily on a diet of bananas and fish. Little farming went on there and grain was imported from further south, probably from Pemba Island.
Kilwa was the main town of the coast at the time of Ibn Battuta's visit. In the previous half century, she had undergone massive expansion, both in terms of wealth and construction, due to acquiring control of the gold trade, something Ibn Battuta failed to mention. Ibn Battuta was evidently impressed by the town, writing that “Kilwa is one of the most beautiful and well constructed towns in the world. The whole of it is elegantly built”, a huge accolade from one who had already visited many Arab and Persian cities. Kilwa was visited by sharifs from Iraq and Arabia, some of whom Ibn Battuta knew by name, so it must have been regarded as an important city by outsiders. The sultan of Kilwa at this time was al-Hasan bin Suleiman III, described as a pious and generous man, a man nicknamed the Father of Gifts: “this Sultan is very humble: he sits and eats with beggars and venerates holy men and descendants of the Prophet.” Ibn Battuta recounted a story in which the sultan had given up his clothes to a beggar he had passed in the street. Inspired by his father's generosity, the sultan's son then bought the clothes back from the beggar for the princely sum of ten slaves. Not to be outdone in charity, the sultan then gave the beggar another ten slaves and two loads of ivory.
Two years after Ibn Battuta's visit, this great sultan died and was succeeded by his brother, Daud. Charity ended there. According to Ibn Battuta, Daud would tell beggars that “the giver of gifts is dead, and has nothing more to give.” Daud was said to be such a miser that he only gave gifts to people who had stayed at his court for months, and even then they would only be grudgingly-given, token gifts. Eventually, people just stopped visiting.
Ibn Battuta was the first writer to use the term Swahili to describe people at the coast, but curiously, he only applied it to the people of Kilwa, not to those of Mombasa who were also Muslim, so it is unclear why he distinguishes between the inhabitants of the two towns. Perhaps it is used to indicate Kilwa's mixed population, for he mentioned that there were many Zanj among the population of the island.
The Golden Age
The fourteenth century saw more towns founded. Gede was established by the start of the fourteenth century, quickly growing in size. Still visible amongst its mysterious ruins today is a tomb with an inscription dating it to 1399, the only written chronological pointer we have to the town's age. At some point in the middle of the fourteenth century, Jumba la Mtwana was founded on a site above a beach just north of Mombasa. Lamu was also growing in importance: the mihrab of the Pwani Mosque, still frequented in the town, has been dated to 1370.
Kilwa's fortune lay in being located far enough south to exploit the gold trade coming out of Zimbabwe. However, this location also made it difficult for her to quickly exploit any alternative trading opportunities with India and the Middle East and from the 1330s Egypt, in particular, was keen to develop its trade in the Red Sea and along the East African coast. It was the most northerly of the Swahili towns, particularly those in the Lamu Archipelago, that became the main beneficiaries of this. Mark Horton's excavations suggest that by the fourteenth century, Shanga was at its height, potentially strong enough to be considered a rival to Kilwa. It had 200 stone houses, along with many more made of mud and wattle, together with three mosques and some 350 stone tombs. But if one Swahili chronicle is to be believed, the real superpower of the fourteenth century was Shanga’s neighbour, Pate.
According to its own town chronicle, Pate is said to have conquered the whole of Pate Island during the reign of its sultan, Muhammad bin Ahmad (1293-1343). This might not seem such a breathtaking feat, but given that she shared the island with mighty Shanga it was a notable jump forward. The chronicle then goes on to describe how Sultan Muhammad went on to conquer Mogadishu to the north. Muhammad’s son, Omar, ruled throughout the second half of the fourteenth century and was apparently even more successful than his father. First to fall to Pate was the ancient town of Manda. At the time, Pate was apparently seething over a prohibition that had been imposed by Manda some years earlier against the construction of ships in the morning and evening (Manda's king had become fed up from having his beauty sleep disturbed by the constant hammering of the dhow builders of Pate), but now Pate, emboldened by her conquest of Mogadishu, had had enough of being told what to do by their neighbours and decided to annihilate the town. This they did, with the help of a treacherous Mandan elder, fuming because his fellow elders had failed to tell him about a council meeting when he had gone on a fishing trip. He let the Patean troops into Manda by the main gate and the town quickly fell to Pate. It was sacked and abandoned soon after - archaeology does indeed suggest that the town was abandoned around this time - while its remaining inhabitants moved
to Pate, and later to Shela on Lamu Island. Omar then led his forces to nearby Takwa which, according to one legend, couldn't be found as a magician had rendered the town invisible. Another town on Manda Island, Kitao, fell more easily to Pate since its population seems to have descended into civil war - the whole lot of them - because of a dispute over the ownership of a chicken that had strayed into the mosque during Friday prayers. Unable to resolve this dispute, the population dispersed, most of them to Shela which seemed to have suddenly become a sanctuary for traumatised refugees. What happened to the chicken is unclear.
With Shanga, Mogadishu, Manda, Takwa (once they'd found it) and Kitao in Patean hands, Omar then went on a blitzkrieg-like offensive to the south. Malindi quickly made an alliance with Omar. Mombasa is said to have fallen to Pate because its entire population had abandoned the town to its fate and fled to the mainland. And then one-by-one, all the other towns of the coast capitulated to Pate, even Kilwa. Only Zanzibar was free from Patean control because, so the chronicle says, “at this time the town had no fame.”
Given that this story comes from the Pate Chronicle's own pages, there is every reason to believe that this incredible tale of conquest is somewhat exaggerated. However, Pate was certainly growing in commercial importance since Sultan Omar is also said to have dispatched merchants to India to establish trading links there, a proactive commercial policy that may well have been the real reason behind the rise of Pate.
By the start of the fifteenth century, 37 towns existed along the coast between Mogadishu and Kilwa. They all had stone buildings, their people were primarily Muslim and all were engaged in brisk and profitable trade. Exports from the Swahili towns were reaching China, India, Persia, Iraq, Arabia, Egypt and Italy. Gold was probably reaching the markets of northern Europe, even as far as England. In return, imports were flowing into the Swahili towns. Contacts with the outside world grew and grew, and in 1415, Malindi sent an ambassador to China, bearing a gift of a giraffe for its emperor. Two years later the Chinese emperor, Chengzu, repaid Malindi's gift by sending an embassy of its own to the town. Chinese annals suggest that this embassy was enormous, comprising as many as 300 ships commanded by the legendary Chinese admiral, Zheng He. Finds of Chinese porcelain and Chinese imperial coins from this period, most recently at nearby Mambrui in 2010, provide evidence for this voyage.
This period of peace, prosperity, trade and diplomacy, dominated by the powerful city states of Pate and Kilwa, can well be described as the Swahili Golden Age. But it was not without its problems. In 1441, an Arab biographer called Abu al-Mahasin described how Mombasa, Mogadishu and Lamu had been taken over by aggressive and organized bands of monkeys. According to his, probably overly imaginative source, monkeys had ruled Mombasa since 1402, stealing food and goods from homes and markets, attacking men in their own homes and having sex with women, while in Mogadishu, a civic meeting had descended into uproar when the local sultan had mysteriously turned into a monkey.
Other problems must have beset the coast during the second half of the fifteenth century because many stone towns seem to have been abandoned, among them Jumba la Mtwana, Mtwambe Mkuu and once-mighty Shanga. Pate's power was also on the wane. Kilwa was becoming stronger again, perhaps because of Pate’s decline in fortunes. However, at the very end of the fifteenth century, Kilwa's power began to be undermined by internal power struggles: several times in the 1490s, sultans were overthrown and by 1498, Kilwa was in the hands of a despot called Mir Ibrahim.
Weakened and divided, Kilwa was therefore in no position to offer leadership to the Swahili towns just at the time they would need it most.
PART 3: THE PORTUGUESE
European Exploration and Vasco da Gama
Before the middle of the fifteenth century, European knowledge of the African continent was almost non-existent. Most of Africa would remain a ‘Dark Continent’ right up until the late nineteenth century, but in the fifteenth century, knowledge of the coastal regions finally began to be revealed, almost entirely due to the pioneering work of a Portuguese prince, Henry The Navigator.
Henry's motives in sponsoring the exploration of Africa's coast came partly from a desire to conquer. He had, as a young man, been on crusade, generally a rewarding experience for Spanish and Portuguese Christians since they were using the crusading ideal to successfully push Muslims out of the Iberian Peninsula. However, the ultimate destination for crusaders was Jerusalem, and there the crusading movement had, in the previous century and a half, lost all momentum. Prince Henry, and many others, therefore began to argue for an alternative crusading strategy: if Europeans could sail around Africa, they would be able to attack Islam from the south and east. And while they were at it, they might also be able to seize control of the lucrative trade in silks and spices with India. Exploration was also encouraged by thoughts of an alliance with a legendary Christian king, Prester John, whose kingdom, thought to lie somewhere in eastern Africa, had managed to withstand centuries surrounded by Islam. Religious zeal and international commerce were therefore the pillars upon which the Portuguese age of exploration was built.
By the time of Henry The Navigator's death in 1460, the Portuguese had explored and established a profitable trade with West Africa, but progress had been slow and after Henry's death it became spasmodic. Then in 1487, a giant leap forward took place when Bartholomew Diaz, thrown southwards for fourteen days by a violent storm, finally reached the southern tip of Africa. He named it, understandably, the Cape of Storms, something quickly rejected by the Portuguese king, John II, who preferred the far more optimistic name, the Cape of Good Hope. Diaz's discovery had, after all, flung open the door to India.
In the same year, John II had dispatched to India a man who would become, as far as we can tell, the first European to explore the Swahili coast. Pedro de Covilhao was sent on a covert intelligence gathering mission, under orders to find out as much as he could about the sea route to India and the location and identity of Prester John. Under the guise of a honey merchant, de Covilhao reached Cairo and travelled to India, where he collected information about the spice trade. From there he set out in a dhow for the Swahili coast and made it as far south as Sofala, before travelling inland where he discovered the long-sought Prester John, who turned out to be the Emperor Alexander of Abyssinia, the latest in a long line of Christian kings whose power had clearly been exaggerated by the medieval myth-makers.
The Portuguese did not immediately extend the discoveries of Diaz and de Covilhao, but in 1493, when news arrived that the Spanish, led by Christopher Columbus, had apparently reached China by going west across the Atlantic, John II decided it was time for the Portuguese to make one final push to reach India and ensure they got there before the Spanish. When John II died in 1495, it was left to his successor, Manuel, to finish the job.
Vasco da Gama, a Portuguese nobleman in his late twenties, was the man chosen by King Manuel to undertake the voyage to India. Two years earlier, da Gama had been appointed a commander of the Order of St James of the Sword, a Christian military order borne from the crusading movement. Given that the voyage to India was perceived as a form of crusade, da Gama's membership of the military order, together with his experience captaining voyages to West Africa during the 1490s, made him an ideal choice.
Bartholomew Diaz organised the fleet and their equipment. Two new ships, the San Gabriel and the San Rafael, were built for the voyage, and these would be joined by a caravel, The Berrio, and a supply ship. The San Gabriel was to be da Gama's flagship, a 25 metre long galleon with 20 cannon while the San Rafael was captained by da Gama's elder brother, Paolo. The supply ship was packed with three years' supply of food, together with gifts to exchange with the people they would meet en route, amongst which were beads, bells, knives, weapons, silver ornaments and cloth. The crew comprised 148 men, among them doctors, priests, interpreters and twelve convicts sentenced to death, dispensable men who could be dro
pped off at promising-looking points on the coast to act as scouts and see if the locals were friendly or not.
Da Gama's fleet departed from Lisbon on 8th July 1497, escorted initially on another ship by Bartholomew Diaz. Diaz left them soon after they had got underway, but da Gama had the use of the navigator that had been with Diaz on his voyage to the Cape of Good Hope, Pero Dalanques, so they had little difficulty getting that far. Beyond, that, everything was unknown.
On 19th November the fleet rounded the Cape of Good Hope. On Christmas Day the ships passed a land they named Natal, in commemoration of the birthday of Jesus. A month later they reached Quelimane, a port lying in modern Mozambique, where the inhabitants of the town, to the delight of the Portuguese, were wearing loin cloths to cover their private parts and whose elders wore more voluminous cloth garments. Excited at finding some trace of civilisation, the Portuguese, who seemed to have got along well with the locals, remained at Quelimane for a month to make repairs to their ships.
Towards the end of February, the Portuguese sailed north, bullying any boats they found on the way. It was hardly the greatest gesture of public relations and word of the antics of these Europeans spread so quickly along the coast that by the time the Portuguese arrived in Mombasa on Saturday 7th April 1498, they were already seen as a hostile enemy. An account, written by a member of da Gama's crew, recounts their arrival in Mombasa:
A History of the East African Coast Page 4
