Swahili City-States of the East African Coast

Hundreds of Swahili towns and villages lie scattered along almost two thousand miles of the East African coast from Somali to Mozambique. While many Swahili are rural farmers and fishermen, others are cosmopolitan traders and craftspeople who reside in urban stone houses. Yet all are bound by a common language, culture, and Muslim religion that both Swahili and others have long seen as the product of Persian and Arab immigrants who came to trade and settled to create distinctive maritime communities. From the mid-1980s, however, the consensus of both local and scholarly opinion has shifted to stress their local origins, the fact that Swahili is an African language, and the ways coastal religious beliefs and cultural patterns came to embrace both local practices and foreign influences, as Swahili came to be seen as an African people who, on moving to the coast and engaging in overseas trade, developed into distinctive, mercantile, cosmopolitan communities that served as economic and cultural intermediaries between their mainland neighbors and overseas visitors. The earliest Swahili towns emerged in the 8th century and, with increasing trade and wealth, developed into prosperous and complex city-states in the 15th century before they were displaced by the Portuguese in the 16th and 17th centuries, Omani in the 18th and 19th centuries, and Europeans in the 20th century. Yet Swahili towns have endured throughout as bearers of a distinctive coastal culture.