Moving Inland from the Coast

It is immediately clear that the towns of the Swahili coast could not have existed without a web of connections linking them to a deeper African hinterland. This is a complex network to recover: a lack of historical documents and an extremely patchy archaeological record have meant that interaction has been understood only in very general terms. This is often cited as a major lacuna in our understandings of the coast (Horton 1987a; Sinclair 1995), with calls for sustained archaeological attention to interior societies. There can be no doubt that this is necessary. Yet here a cautiously optimistic approach is taken, as I suggest that part of the problem we have in understanding interior networks is in the ways that we expect them to be manifest, according to a model developed for the coast: connections have been sought through the movement of imported trade goods, which may not everywhere be a useful proxy for interaction. In fact, there is now a significant body of evidence for the ways that these connections worked, even though they do not always take the form of foreign artefacts in new locations. In this chapter I extend the notion of networks of practice to think through the ways that activities and consumption would have determined the nature of coast/interior entanglements; I suggest that the absence of trade goods in sites of the interior may not be (just) a function of lack of knowledge, but also the result of choices and the active role of taste among hinterland groups. Historical sources hint at long-distance movements across eastern Africa from at least the first century AD; Ptolemy’s Geography refers to the ‘Lake of the Nile’ (Freeman-Grenville 1962b: 4), suggesting knowledge of areas and connectivity as far inland as Lake Victoria. Direct material evidence of these two millennia of interaction tends to be sought in the remains of imports found at interior sites. These are comparatively few, but do at least offer a map of connectivity that sets a framework for thinking about interaction. The earliest imports at interior sites are not, in fact, objects.

Community and Identity in Material Culture

The identification of a cultural grouping termed ‘Swahili’ has long rested on the ability to discern a commonality of material and social environment across an enormous region, aspects of which have been discussed in previous chapters. Clearly, the coast and offshore islands of eastern Africa have been interconnected to a significant degree throughout the precolonial period, in a similar way to that noted in colonial histories. One of the key data sources for that ongoing interaction is the record of historical linguistics, which has traced a spread of Swahili languages from a north-eastern homeland southwards along the coast and to the Comoro archipelago. This has not only offered a crucial challenge to models of external origins, but also serves as a guide to the ongoing interactions that have made dialects of Swahili mutually intelligible more than 1,000 years since their original divergence. This mobility and entanglement are also invoked as causation for the ‘community of material culture that remained relatively constant over 3,000 kilometres of archipelagic civilization’ (Prestholdt 1998: 8). Certainly for the historical period, sources suggest that cultural cohesiveness was maintained through regular coasting travel along the littoral (Sheriff 2010). This seems likely also to have been the case in the deeper past, which resulted in similarities along the coastline over the longer term. Horton and Middleton (2000: 5) discuss this in enduring terms: ‘[the Swahili] have comprised a single social and cultural entity, Swahili society, with its own unique civilization of which they are deeply proud and possessive.’ These patterns of commonality have to some extent been the subject of this entire volume, but this chapter specifically explores the route by which communities of material culture were produced and maintained. Clearly this is more than simply a case of proximity or contact. Through attention to the shifting geography of coastal connections over time, it also becomes clear that the situation encountered by the Portuguese and later Europeans on the coast, while indicative, was not necessarily representative of the coast through time.

The Indian Ocean before the Arrival of Europeans

The precolonial Swahili coast was thus a region united through particular material practices. In this volume, consumption and display have been emphasized as aspects that are very clearly evident in the archaeological record. More ephemeral practices, such as ritual, dance, or public acts of memorialization, are only now being incorporated into our understandings, bringing the picture of the precolonial coast into line with what is known of more recent periods (see Chapter 8). Yet tangible acts of display and the use of material objects in certain contexts served to delineate a particular cultural area, as well as to link them to a broader Indian Ocean sphere; the objects bound up into prominent acts were often derived from that world. As has been discussed, this served a purpose on the Swahili coast, where cosmopolitanism and the ability to claim connections with distant regions have long been important in the negotiation of identities. This might be seen as an unequal relationship: a region in which external symbols had special power, whether due to their intrinsic qualities or to the cultural hegemony of the societies from which they came (per Gosden 2004). This has often been the assumption on the eastern African coast, where commodities such as gold or ivory were traded for exotic objects such as glazed ceramics or beads. Yet this inequality is a difficult notion to test. First, as discussed in earlier chapters, the ocean was only one of the spheres of interaction in which the Swahili were active, albeit one that they chose to highlight. Second, it is probable that the imported goods we see on the coast, often in tiny quantities, were just a very small part of a much larger commodity trade. Ships would not have travelled empty to this region, and so the bulk of their cargo must have been made up of items we now do not see: cloth, foodstuffs, or raw materials long since consumed or formed into manufactured objects.

Vumba Kuu: Negotiating Similarity and Difference

Identity and society in Swahili towns have tended to be considered on the scale of a settlement or region; as discussed in the previous chapter, it is possible to understand urban Swahili identity relative to surrounding populations. At Kilwa Kisiwani, one way that this can be recognized is in the relationship between the town and its wider hinterland, as this creates a sense of the urbanism of Kilwa through the practices that went on there. Display and the material setting have been emphasized as a means by which objects and architecture were bound up into social dynamics, and served as active components of the formation of urban identities. This sense of creating social worlds through the material setting is particularly apposite along the East African coast in the fourteenth–fifteenth centuries. As discussed, this was a time when many new towns were founded, or elaborated with coral buildings. Even sites containing a majority of wattle-and-daub architecture were often augmented with a coral mosque during this period. This incorporation of new architectural technologies was a part of adopting the emergent material forms of Swahili towns, as well as providing a space for the practice of Islam and a new way of dwelling within stone houses. As suggested by the example of Kilwa Kisiwani, though, the towns of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries were also shaped by more mundane practices of consumption relating to food and to everyday objects. This created a distinction between town and countryside through new ways of living that defined the urban milieu. The process of distinction and identification will also have been an active one within the town and among the urban population; more recent archaeologies have thought through the ways that Swahili urban society was internally differentiated. Here, too, a biographical approach to practice recovers a sense of the ways that coastal inhabitants have lived those identities, which were intimately bound up with changing forms of materiality. For these considerations, the town and polity of Vumba Kuu is an important case study.

A Material Culture: Introduction

Africa’s eastern littoral borders the Indian Ocean, providing the setting for the settlements, people, and language known collectively as Swahili, which have been a key part of that ocean’s trading networks for at least two millennia. Graeco-Roman sailors visited the now-forgotten metropolis of Rhapta, and their voyages were recorded in the narratives that later became the first-century Periplus of the Erythraean Sea (Casson 1989). Traces of that early contact survive in the form of beads and coins, yet are limited in number and diffuse in nature (Chami and Msemwa 1997a; Horton 1990). From the seventh century onwards, a series of more permanent settlements began to monopolize this trade; by the eleventh century some of these had grown into towns that were able to control and provide a focus for the mercantile opportunities of the Indian Ocean. The trading economy of Swahili towns was based on the wealth of the African continent—gold and ivory were particularly valuable exports—and underlain by a mixed economy and diverse population of fishers and farmers, traders and craft-workers (Horton and Middleton 2000; Kusimba 2008). By the ‘golden age’ of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, the Swahili were an African society of considerable cosmopolitanism and fame, with towns like Kilwa Kisiwani known throughout the medieval world (Sutton 1993, 1997). Swahili archaeology is focused, conceptually and methodologically, on the series of stone towns that grew up along Africa’s eastern coast from the end of the first millennium AD. These towns developed as key nodes in both local and international networks of interaction, and became the conduits through which the African continent traded and communicated with the wider Indian Ocean world. The material settings of the towns, and particularly the distinctive tradition of coral architecture they contain, embody their cosmopolitanism, with this locally derived building tradition creating unique urban spaces that nevertheless reference the Islamic architecture of the Arabian Peninsula and Persian Gulf (Garlake 1966). Archaeology on this coast is still relatively new, dating back only to the 1950s and 1960s, and to the pioneering work of researchers convinced they had discovered evidence for Arab trading stations on the coast of eastern Africa (Kirkman 1964).

Swahili Material Worlds

The abiding importance of objects and spaces in the Swahili world makes this a fertile ground for archaeological exploration, as well as for material ethnography. This volume therefore picks up on a rich history of writing on objects and settings on the coast, and in the Indian Ocean world more generally. As such, the eastern African coast has potential for broader considerations of the role of objects in social life, an important field of both archaeological and anthropological interest. The more recent past on the Swahili coast has long been recognized for this potential. Contemporary understandings of materiality on the Swahili coast—notably in Lamu and Zanzibar—have provided key case studies for archaeological treatments of objects and spaces (particularly Donley 1982, 1987; Donley-Reid 1990a, b) as well as for the growing field of material culture studies in global history (Prestholdt 1998, 2008). The contemporary world of objects and structured spaces also, of course, provides a framework for viewing the precolonial coast, and tropes that have emerged in Swahili historiography often owe their roots to ethnography. The importance of the Swahili house, for example, has been stressed in contemporary Lamu and Zanzibar, with authors demonstrating links between stone-house ownership, ancestry, modes of occupancy, and the self-identification of groups in the Swahili world (Allen 1979, 1981; Bissell 2000; el-Zein 1974; Ghaidan 1971, 1974, 1975; Myers 1996; Sheriff 1992, 2001–2). The importance of cosmopolitanism and overseas connections is also emphasized in the interiors of these houses—a practice that appears of long standing (Meier 2009; Prestholdt 2008). Forms of consumption and display, and particularly the practice of conspicuous generosity, also have a particular power on the Swahili coast, wielded more recently by newcomer groups as a means of creating identities in coastal society (Fair 1998, 2001; Glassman 1995). Even the identity claims of coastal urbanites, which in the twentieth century emphasized Arab ancestry in order to gain a competitive advantage under European colonial powers, echoed the claims for ‘Shirazi’ origins found in the origin stories of earlier Swahili settlements and families (Allen 1982; Pouwels 1984; Spear 2003).

Kilwa Kisiwani: Establishing a Town

Kilwa Kisiwani is an iconic Swahili stone town, its status and international renown exceeding any other. As discussed, it is also the town that has seen some of the largest-scale archaeological work, recovering a material record that bespeaks a thriving urban setting. Archaeological interest came on the heels of historical scholarship relating to the area; Kilwa is one of the few Swahili towns mentioned by both indigenous and foreign histories. The various versions of the Kilwa Chronicle give an account of the dynastic succession of Kilwa and of the deeds of its various sultans; together they are the earliest indigenous history of the coast. The oldest version was transcribed from oral form by João de Barros in his 1552 Da Asia (Freeman-Grenville 1962a: 89–93), while two other versions were both copied down in the nineteenth century (Strong 1895; Velten 1903). The Chronicles are similar in many aspects, although they differ on details and on the names of certain sultans. Debate over their veracity was quieted by the recovery of thousands of locally minted coins, and the dynastic lists were used as the basis for their interpretation (Album 1999; Brown 1991, 1992, 1993; Chittick 1965, 1967, 1973; Mitchell 1970; Walker 1936, 1939; Walker and Freeman-Grenville 1956). Indeed, the chronology of the Kilwa sultanate has been determined in the interplay between historical and numismatic evidence, the latter seen to act as an independent check on the less-reliable oral histories (cf. Fleisher and Wynne-Jones 2010b). This local historical record is bolstered by occasional mention in travellers’ accounts of the region. These are testament to Kilwa’s growing renown, but rarely offer much detail. In 1222, the Arab geographer Yakut referred to this ‘town in the country of the Zanj’ in his Geography and in 1331 an extended account was provided by Ibn Battuta during his travels on the coast (Freeman-Grenville 1962a: 27–32). These accounts echo a theme evident in the Kilwa Chronicles themselves: a distinction made between this town on its island, and the African continent that sits at its back.

Objects in the Swahili World

The stone towns of the Swahili coast define and embody both contemporary Swahili society and the ways that the archaeology of that region is known. The series of large-scale projects that have explored their architecture and changing material culture provide the means through which the past is conceived, even though these stone towns were themselves a particular material expression of a broader eastern African society, linked through networks of trade and interaction from earliest times. Urban centres provided the setting for the practices and lifestyles that came to be construed as Swahili, and twenty-first-century stone towns such as Lamu, Mombasa, and Zanzibar are still the quintessential expression of coastal culture. Stone-town excavations therefore structure our understandings of ancient Swahili materiality, and explorations of the wider society use these urban trajectories and developmental sequences as their reference point for exploration of the broader context. The objects of the Swahili world, reviewed in this chapter, are therefore presented through the archaeology of some of the more prominent stone-town excavations that together have defined our understandings. Rather than offering a comprehensive review of the archaeology of the coast (for which see Horton and Middleton 2000; Kusimba 1999b), this chapter discusses the material settings of the town. After a brief consideration of these key excavations, discussion focuses on themes in the study of Swahili materiality, and the ways that this has been conceptualized. Objects are implicated in understandings of identity from two angles, first as a reflection of some kind of ethnic identity, and second as part of the practices of daily life and the ways that people have constructed the urban social world. These discussions introduce more sites into consideration, and attempt to position them with relation to material understandings. The Swahili world presents itself as a ‘material culture’, in which objects are and were crucial to the performance of social roles and the construction of the urban environment. The evidence suggests that the Swahili themselves have long manipulated the material world to create a certain form of urban life, which defines and also creates certain types of person and activity.