Swahili

ETHNONYMS: none

Orientation

The people known as Swahili (sing. Mswahili, pl. Wa Swahili) live along the narrow East African coastline and the adjacent islands (Zanzibar, Pemba, and Mafia) between southern Somalia and northern Mozambique; they also live in the Aomoro Islands and northwestern Madagascar, and there are Swahili settlements in the far African interior near Lake Tanganyika. On the coast, they live in distinct settlements within approximately 2 kilometers of the seas, placed on creeks and on the leeward sides of the many small islets that are protected from the Indian Ocean. Their language, KiSwahili, with its many dialects, belongs to the Sam Family of North-eastern Bantu and has many loanwords from Arabic. It has long been used in a debased form as a lingua franca throughout eastern Africa. It was traditionally written in Arabic script but today Roman script is mostly used. The name "Swahili" comes from the Arabic swahili ("coast" or "margin"). The term was first used to refer to the eighteenth-century coast dwellers by the colonial rulers of the time, the Omani of the sultanate of Zanzibar; they prefer to use the names of their local settlements, such as Mvita (Mombasa), Unguja Zanzibar, or Amu (Lamu). "Swahili" is essentially the name others have given them. They number between 200,000 and 400,000, censuses being unreliable because self-designations have varied from one period to another.

History and Cultural Relations

Pre-Swahili settlements are reported from the first century onward, mainly in Arabic and Chinese medieval records, and later in those of the Portuguese and other Europeans. Many Swahili claim Arabic and other Asian origins, but these claims, rather than having a historical basis, reflect ambitions to deny African origins (i.e., those of their slaves). They suffered under Portuguese rule from 1498 until 1729, when they were forcibly incorporated into the sultanate of Zanzibar. In the nineteenth century they came under the rule of Britain and Germany, and in the 1960s they were incorporated into the independent states of Kenya and Tanzania, not always with their approval. As Muslims, the Swahili have felt themselves distinct from the non-Muslim majorities of these countries, which have rarely supported the social and political wishes of the Swahili, who are remembered as slave traders and owners.

Economy

The basis of Swahili economy has been the long-distance commerce between the interior of Africa and the countries of the northern Indian Ocean, in which they played the role of middlemen merchants. Their settlements, strung along the coastline, have been urban—some closely built-up places and others more like large villages—but all are known by the same Swahili term, mji. The commerce, now virtually extinguished, lasted for almost two thousand years. Raw and unprocessed items from Africa (e.g., ivory, slaves, gold, grain, mangrove poles) were exchanged for processed commodities from Asia (e.g., textiles, beads, weapons, porcelain). The oceangoing sailing vessels from Asia and the foot caravans from the interior met at the coast, where the Swahili merchants provided safe harbors and the many complex skills and facilities needed for mercantile exchange.

"Stone-towns"—permanent houses built with "stone" (coral block), set in narrow streets, and often surrounded by walls—provided these services. Interspersed with these are the "Country-towns," large villagelike places of impermanent housing that have provided the Stone-towns with foodstuffs and labor but have not themselves taken direct part in the long-distance commerce. The whole has formed a single oikumene, never a single polity, but a congeries of towns with a single underlying structure. Country-towns grow foodstuffs in gardens and fields; Stone-towns once had large plantations worked by slave labor for the growing of export grains, their own food coming mainly from the Country-towns.

The staple foods are rice and sorghums; the most important of the many other crops and trees are the coconut, banana, tamarind, mango, and clove (the last grown mainly in large plantations formerly owned by Omani Arabs). Fishing is important everywhere, and few livestock are kept.

Labor has been provided from three sources: the family and kin group, slaves, and hired laborers. In the Country-towns, men and women are, in most respects, considered equal and their respective labor as being complementary: men have the heavier work—as contract laborers on clove plantations and in the largest towns such as Mombasa, Zanzibar City, and Dar es Salaam. In the Stone-towns, domestic and agricultural work was carried out by slaves until the beginning of the twentieth century. Since then, it has been done in most towns by hired and "squatter" labor from the Country-towns and by non-Swahili immigrants. Shortage of seasonal labor has always been a serious problem in all the Swahili settlements; this remains true today.

Kinship, Marriage, and Family

There is a wide variation in forms of descent and kin group among the Swahili settlements. Country-towns are divided into moieties, and these into wards or quarters. The wards, composed of clusters of cognatically related kin, are the corporate and landholding units. Marriage is preferred between cross and parallel cousins; it is seen largely as a way to retain rights over land within the small kin group. Authority is held by senior men and women, and all local groups are regarded as equal in rank.

Within the Stone-towns, the main social groups are in most cases patrilineal subclans and lineages. The clans are distributed among the coastal towns and even in southern Arabia, from which immigrant origin is often claimed. These towns are likewise divided into moieties and constituent wards, the former once providing indigenous forms of government; their structural opposition is expressed in fighting at certain rituals, football matches, and poetry competitions. The corporate groups are the lineages, segments of subclans, that, in the past, acted as business houses and owned the large permanent houses that are so marked a feature of these towns. The subclans are ranked, position depending largely on antiquity of claimed immigration and settlement, as well as on commercial wealth and standing. Members of these mercantile lineages are known as "patricians."

Marriages are centrally important and weddings the most elaborate rituals. In the Stone-towns, the preferred marriage forms vary. For firstborn daughters, they should be between close paternal parallel cousins. Bride-wealth and dowry are both transferred, as are residential rights (not full ownership, which is vested in the lineage) for the daughter in her lineage house, marriage thus being uxorilocal. Marriages of later-born daughters are more usually with cross cousins, often in neighboring Stone-towns so as to make and retain useful commercial ties. Stone-town weddings are traditionally elaborate and costly, the bride needing to show her virginity and so her purity, which reflects upon the honor and reputation of her husband. Country-town weddings are basically similar but less elaborate and less ritualized.

Divorce is permitted under Islamic law: it is easy for husbands but extremely difficult for wives. The marriages of firstborn patrician daughters are monogamous (although concubinage was frequent), and divorce has been rare; all other marriages have often been polygynous, and divorce has been and is extremely common, as high as 90 percent in some areas.

Today Swahili women undergo initiation (without physical operation) at puberty, in order to be permitted to marry. Boys nowadays are not initiated but are circumcised in infancy; in the past there was more elaborate male initiation. Both boys' and girls' socialization after infancy takes the form of Islamic education in the Quranic schools attached to mosques, and consists largely of moral and theological learning based on knowledge of the Quran, although instruction in poetry and music has been an important part of their training to become pious Muslims. Today most children also attend nonreligious schools in order to acquire "Western" education, but religious education retains its central place, and overtly Christian schools are totally avoided.

Sociopolitical Organization

Swahili towns have traditionally been autonomous, many at one time being ruled by kings and queens. (Lamu Town, ruled by an oligarchy, was an exception.) Country-town local government remains largely in the hands of small, indigenous government organs, known as "the Four Men" and similar titles, representing constituent wards.

The Swahili patricians kept and traded in slaves; the Country-towns did neither. Slaves, numbering between 25 percent and 50 percent of the total population, were obtained from the interior from indigenous rulers and used as trade commodities, for house- and fieldwork, and as concubines. Slavery was abolished under the British in 1897 in Zanzibar and Tanganyika and in 1907 in Kenya. Its abolition brought the traditional mercantile economy largely to an end.

Open conflict has been—and remains—unusual among the Swahili, and institutions such as the feud are not known; however, fitina, intrigue and backbiting, is a well-recognized aspect of Swahili domestic and social life. Nevertheless, the towns have frequently waged war against one another, as part of wider processes of colonial subordination. The Omani sultanate of Zanzibar extended its sway along the coast during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries by attacking towns in turn, using other towns as allies; local opposition to Zanzibar hegemony was soon put down by the sultans' forces of mercenary troops from outside eastern Africa. The Swahili also revolted against German rule in Tanganyika in the early years of the twentieth century and were put down with great brutality by German-led troops. The Zanzibar Revolution of 1964 removed the Omani colonial administration, and there have since been many small clashes, often couched in religious terms, with the forces of independent Kenya.

Religion and Expressive Culture

The Swahili are Sunni Muslims; even though their former Omani rulers of the sultanate of Zanzibar were Ibadhi, the Swahili were shown religious tolerance. The first mosques on the coast date from about the mid-tenth century, the identity of Swahili as Muslims dating also from that period. The central building of every town is its mosque, typically placed in a space between the two moieties; the male population assembles there on Fridays (women are not permitted to attend). In most towns, a Muslim school is built next to the mosque. There may be many mosques in a large town, built and administered privately and entailed for charitable purposes. Swahili religion is comprised of two aspects: orthodox Islam, or dini, and the set of local beliefs and practices known as mila, which are perhaps almost always originally pre-Islamic. It is often held that the dini is Arabian and associated with men, whereas the mila is African and associated with women. Both men and women, however, see themselves as orthodox Muslims, and in fact almost all observe the practices of the mila. An important part of the mila is spirit possession, which is largely practiced and controlled by women, even though they stress their Islamic purity. Women who are possessed typically join associations, even though these are in most case controlled by men, and most such associations have members of both free and of slave ancestry.

The Swahili recognize as crucial to the maintenance of their identity the concepts of ustaarabu ("civilization") and utamaduni ("urbanity"), both linked to Islam and contrasted to what they see as the ushenzi ("barbarism") of the other, non-Muslim peoples of eastern Africa. Important rites that maintain these concepts include the originally pre-Islamic "New Year," Mwaka or Nauroz, at which the towns are symbolically purified, and the regular Islamic ceremonies of Id-al-Fitr and other occasions, along with the regular public reading known as maulidi, that deal with the life and deeds of the Prophet.

Closely linked to religious beliefs and practice are forms of medical healing. Herbal medicines and possession by "doctors" are employed, as well as prayer and ritual purification. In the latter, the main practitioners are members of the clans known as Sharifu, composed of people who claim to be direct descendants of the Prophet and who live scattered in the coastal towns. All Swahili believe in the existence of many categories of both evil and good spirits, and also in that of witches and sorcerers, whose activities can be controlled by recourse to "doctors" who use both pre-Islamic and Islamic means.

The Swahili practice certain forms of visual art—the carving of elaborate wooden doors and furniture, the making of gold and silver jewelry—but the art most highly regarded is poetry. Swahili poetry is complex and of many kinds; like Islamic scholarship and knowledge, it is open to both women and men (and formerly, also to slaves). Poetry is used for both devotional and historical writings, the latter taking the form of the "chronicles" that relate the founding of the various towns and other key historical events. Today poetry is composed for both domestic and town occasions, such as weddings and competitions at New Year, and also for political purposes on radio and television.

Bibliography

Cooper, Frederick (1977). Plantation Slavery on the East Coast of Africa. New Haven: Yale University Press.

Middleton, John (1992). The World of the Swahili: An African Mercantile Civilization. New Haven: Yale University Press.

Pouwels, Randall L. (1987). Horn and Crescent: Cultural Change and Traditional Islam on the East African Coast, 800-1900. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Sheriff, A. M. H. (1987). Slaves, Spices, and Ivory in Zanzibar. Athens: Ohio University Press.

JOHN MIDDLETON