Abetternarrative needed to use the new Africanist scholarship to show how Africans understood and shapeddiese encounters. To make African perspectives vital and valid, I combed die records forhistoricalvoices thatmightbe included. For one dung, diere proved to be a lot of African voices. One effect of the encounter with Europe was diat many Africans learned European languages well enough to voice opinions that were recorded by Europeans, and some Africans wrote down their own views.
Though it was not in my initial plan, the longest chapter in the book came to be about the many Africans in 18th- and early 19di-centuryEurope. Butdie mostsignificant impact ofdiese African voices was to broaden and deepen the exploration ofmany topics.
African voices took the narrative to places diataudiorial caution, discretion , and concern for die sensibilities ofreaders and reviewers might have feared to go on dieirown.
Amongthese were religion, slavery, and racism, often blended in intriguingways. For example, a letter from King Afonso I ofthe kingdom Project MUSE promotes the creation and dissemination of essential humanities and social science resources through collaboration with libraries, publishers, and scholars worldwide. Forged from a partnership between a university press and a library, Project MUSE is a trusted part of the academic and scholarly community it serves.
Built on the Johns Hopkins University Campus. In the meantime, a number of scholars had confirmed the African origins of Great Zimbabwe. Archaeologists showed that Great Zimbabwe had features, like stone masonry and rituals involving cattle, found in nearby African kingdoms. Historians used oral tradition and linguistics to track African state formation in the region and show that Great Zimbabwe was a Bantu civilization. Archaeologists and historians concluded that from approximately to CE, Great Zimbabwe was the thriving commercial and political center of a rich southern African state.
Covering three square miles, the ruins of Great Zimbabwe consists of many clusters of stone buildings. The most famous structures are the Hill Complex Figure 9. The stone buildings were constructed with local granite, and the stones were stacked without mortar. Scholars hypothesize that the ruling elite resided and performed ceremonies on the Hill Complex, symbolically demonstrating their authority with the height and separation of the complex. From about CE, more than 15, people lived in the valley below them in small, circular homes with thatched roofs and walls made of clay and gravel.
The Hill Complex overlooked a number of other structures, including the famous Great Enclosure. With its stone walls up to thirty-five feet tall, the Great Enclosure was the largest structure in precolonial sub -Saharan Africa. The Great Enclosure was a ceremonial site, perhaps used by religious leaders or as a site for the initation of youth. Scholars disagree about its exact function, but suggest that the Great Enclosure further demonstrated the status and wealth of the capital city and the ruling classes.
Great Zimbabwe declined in the fifteenth century and was abandoned by CE. Some scholars suggest that the site deteriorated because it was supporting up to 30, people and thus became too crowded, deforested, and stripped bare of resources through overuse. Surrounding gold mines may have also been depleted. In any case, trade shifted to support the rise of two new kingdoms, Batua to the west and Mutapa to the east. From the fifteenth through seventeenth centuries, the kingdoms also faced the Portuguese and the influx of other African populations.
The Mutapa Kingdom lasted the longest, enduring until Overall, this rewritten history of southern African statehood acknowledges the significance of the Bantu expansions that brought agriculture and iron to many regions. It also celebrates the African origins of great civilizations and demonstrates how Africans shared technologies and cultural practices across the Zimbabwean plateau. When he arrived, he was generous and people liked him, which enabled him to marry the daughter of Mrimba, the local headman.
The newlyweds were set up to live more or less happily ever after. Starting at least by the thir-teenth century CE, in response to resident Arab merchants who scorned non-Muslims and some African practices, African elites in East Africa claimed descent from Shirazis Persians and to have been early converts to Islam.
In some cases, the connections may have been exaggerated or inaccurate from a historical standpoint. However, regardless of their accuracy, these stories demonstrate some of the defining features of Swahili identity.
As it controlled gold coming from Great Zimbabwe, Kilwa Kisiwani became one of the most prosperous of the Swahili city-states. From to CE, Swahili city-states were wealthy urban areas connected both to the African interior and the larger Indian Ocean World. Dozens of Swahili city-states running down the East African coast from Mogadishu to Sofala, and including islands off the coast, were commercial centers, tied together by a shared identity, not an overarching political structure.
In addition to Islam and claims to Persian ancestry, Swahili identity also became associated with Indian Ocean trade, an urban style, and a shared language Swahili. Historians of Africa trace the origins of the Swahili city-states to the Bantu expansions, ex-plaining that by the first century CE, Bantu farmers had built communities along the East African coast. They traded with southern Arabia, southeast Asia, and occasionally Greece and Rome. Although trade contracted after the fall of the Roman Empire, it rebounded several hundred years later.
At that time, residents of the Swahili city-states played a pivotal role as middlemen, selling gold, timber, ivory, resins, coconut oil, and slaves from the interior regions of Africa to traders arriving from throughout the Indian Ocean World. In return, Swahili elites bought imported glass, porcelain, silk, spices, and cloth. The seasonal monsoon winds that allowed trade between the Swahili coast and southern Arabia, the Persian Gulf, and southeast Asia also facilitated cultural exchange.
Blowing towards the East African coast three to four months of the year and reversing several months later, the monsoon winds stranded traders for months at a time, encouraging intermarriage and cultural exchange. Furthermore, the wealth of the Swahili coast attracted Persian and Arab immigrants. With African, Arabian, and southeast Asian influences, Swahili culture became a blended culture as, for example, the Swahili language incorporated loan words from Arabic and Hindi. One of the quintisessential features of the Swahili city-states from to CE was their urban style.
A few families made up the elite, ruling classes, while most people in the cities were less wealthy, working as craftsmen, artisans, clerks, and sailors. People in villages along the coast could also identify as Swahili. Claimants of used their stone houses to establish themselves as prominent, creditworthy citizens. They wore imported silk and cotton and ate off imported porcelain to further display their status. Like other Swahili, the ruling classes distinguished themselves from non-Muslims of the interior.
They may have been partially moved to draw this distinction by their desire to sell as slaves people captured in the neighboring, non-Muslim communities. Slavery within the Indian Ocean World , the zone of contact and interaction connecting people living adjacent to the Indian Ocean, began well before the spread of Islam in the seventh century CE. During the high point of the Swahili city-states, Muslim traders controlled the slave trade within the Indian Ocean World.
Slaves tended to be captives of war sold to the Arabian Peninsula and regions near the Persian Gulf. Slaves were put to work as sailors, agricultural laborers, pearl divers, domestic workers, concubines, and musicians.
Our information about the everyday lives of slaves in this region is very limited. In one famous revolt, slaves from East Africa the Zanj , who were forced to work on sugar plantations and salt flats near Basra in present-day Iraq , seriously challenged the power of the Abbasid Caliphate.
For fourteen years, the Zanj and their supporters, altogeth-er an estimated 15, people, raided towns, seized weapons and food, and freed slaves. They captured Basra and came within seventy miles of Baghdad, the Abbasid capital. The rebels created their own state with fortresses, a navy, tax collection, and their own coinage. At enormous cost, the Abbasids finally put down the revolt in CE using a large army and by offering amnesty to the rebels.
Scholars have used the Zanj Rebellion to examine the scope of the Indian Ocean trade in East African slaves, the conditions of slavery in the Indian Ocean World, and the agency the ability to exert their own will of slaves.
Some of these scholars suggest that the Zanj Rebellion led Muslims in Arabia to largely abandon the practice of using East African slaves as plantation laborers. The rebellion helps them explain why the Indian Ocean slave trade developed differently than the trans-Atlantic slave trade.
While there were some similarities between the trans-Atlantic trade that brought slaves to the Americas and the slave trade within the Indian Ocean World, there were important differences. Both slave trades took Africans, contributing to an African diaspora , or a dispersal of African peoples and their descendants, all over the world.
The trans-Atlantic slave trade, which lasted approximately years and reached its peak in the eighteenth century CE, forced approximately 12 million people, mostly from West Africa, into the Americas. The slave trade within the Indian Ocean lasted much longer, about years, and was generally smaller in scale. Scholars suggest that African slaves in the Indian Ocean World had more social mobility, especially since many of them were skilled soldiers.
Also, according to Islamic precepts, slaves had some basic rights and could be incorporated into the households that they served. Theoretically, a freeborn Muslim could not be enslaved. Unlike slavery in the Americas, slavery within the Indian Ocean World was not racially codified, so freed slaves did not automatically face racial discrimination. And due to their reproductive capacities, women were more sought after as slaves within the Indian Ocean World, while the trans-Atlantic slave trade had the highest demand for young men.
Despite these general trends, there was great individual variation within the slave experience. Moving up the East African coast in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, the Portuguese sacked some Swahili cities and tried to tax trade. In , when they happened upon the Swahili coast, the Portuguese were trying to establish a direct sea route to the riches of India and China. The Trading Post Empire consisted of a series of forts along the Indian Ocean coast where Portuguese administrators collected taxes and issued trade permits.
In the early s, the Portuguese returned to the Swahili city-states to enforce their will. As the Swahili city -states did not have a unified political structure or large armies, the Portuguese successfully looted and destroyed some Swahili cities.
However, the Portuguese cultural influence and their ability to enforce tax collection was very limited north of Mozambique. The Portuguese did not move inland beyond the coastal cities and, by and large, trade within the Indian Ocean continued without a great deal of Portuguese interference.
However, the Portuguese presence encouraged Swahili leaders to ally with the Omanis from southern Arabia. In , the Omanis, working with some Swahili rulers, seized Mombasa from the Portuguese, and began an era of Omani dominance of the Swahili coast.
Africa was not isolated. Although there were local differences, the ruling classes in each of the states collected tribute from outlying areas and participated in long-distance trade. The wealth of these states supported labor specialization, urbanization, and other innovations. African states contributed to great cultural change. As just one case in point, Ethiopia, the Western Sudanic states, and the Swahili city-states all experienced religious transformations.
Not only did Ethiopia serve as a sanctuary for both Christians and Muslims, but Ethiopians also established their own Church, the Ethopian Orthodox Church.
Starting in the thirteenth century CE, Western Sudanic rulers converted to Islam, maintaining some of their pre-Islamic beliefs while building their connections with the rest of the Islamic World. Medieval African cities like Timbuktu benefitted from these connections.
They attracted traders as reports of African gold circulated far and wide. Taxing the gold trade, Western Sudanic rulers developed these cities as both trading depots and places of scholarly learning.
The Swahili in coastal East Africa also embraced Islam as one of the defining features of their identity. Their urban style reflected the centrality of Islam, which they believed distinguished them as cultured and refined. All four states also developed numerous other innovations, such as those in art, architecture, metal-working, agriculture, and political organization. There are limitation to their accounts, meaning that a number of written documents about Africa are mislead-ing, at best.
Many African societies remembered their own histories orally, using professionalized classes of historians, storytellers, and musicians, in addition to proverbs and the teachings of elders. They have also used linguistics and archaeology to create a more accurate written history of the continent and reclaim African civilizations. Ali, Omar. Asante, Molefi Kete. New York: Routledge, Brizuela-Garcia, Esperanza and Trevor Getz. Boston: Prentice Hall, Center for Food Security and Public Health.
Collins, Robert O. A History of Sub-Saharan Africa. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, Conrad, David. Emmanuel Kwaku Akyeampong.
Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press, Ehret, Christopher. The Civilizations of Africa: A History to Garlake, Peter. Early Art and Architecture of Africa. Oxford: Oxford University Press, Gilbert, Erik and Jonathan Reynolds.
Hall, Martin. Keim, Curtis. Boulder, CO:. Niane, D. Sundiata: An Epic of Old Mali. Harlow, England: Pearson Longman, Nurse, Derek and Thomas Spear. Ranger, Terence. Eric Hobsbawm and Terrence Ranger.
Cambridge University Press, Wiley, David. Privacy Policy. Skip to main content. Middle Ages. Search for:. Chapter 9: African History to 9. Which environmental challenges and diseases have historically limited population growth in Africa? Discuss the methodological challenges of studying Ancient and Medieval African History. Identify commonly used terms that are potentially problematic for scholars of Africa.
Explain why these terms are potentially problematic. What was distinctive about the agriculture of the Ethiopian Highlands? How were the states in this region shaped by trade and inter-cultural relationships? Describe the spread of Christianity into Aksum.
What characteristics were shared by the Western Sudanic States? How did the location of the Western Sudanic states have an impact on their history? How did nineteenth century European scholars depict the Bantu Migration? What factors influenced their view? How have post-colonial scholars challenged nineteenth century depictions of the Bantu Migration?
Additionally, the Portuguese shared many beliefs about magic, the supernatural, and the treatment of illness with the African societies they encountered. Protective amulets in both cultures were considered medicinally valuable, and sickness in general was attributed to witchcraft. Ross, Emma George. Visiting The Met? Plaque: Two Portuguese with Manillas.
Citation Ross, Emma George.
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