Form Five – TOPIC 4 – Jamii za Kitanzania kabla ya Ukoloni
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In the early first Millennium CE, trade with Arabia and Persia made the East African coast economically strong. As a result Islam was introduced and due to the Arab-centric doctrine of Islam, some Arabic influences entered the language – resulting in the emergence of the Kiswahili language. The Kiswahili language continued to grow as a result of thriving trade with Arabs, Persians and Indians. Today’s Kiswahili language is colored with influence from Arabic, Indian and European languages, but a majority of it remains Bantu.
All along the coast, as well as on the islands of the Zanzibar, archipelago, and Kilwa, many trading cities thrived. Between the 13th and 15th centuries, in a period known as the Shirazi Era, these cities flourished, with trade in ivory, gold and other goods extending as far away as India and China. The Swahili influence was felt east to the islands of Comoros and Madagascar, as well as west into central Africa, the great lakes kingdoms, and Malawi. In the early 1300s Ibn Battuta, an international Berber traveler from North Africa, visited Kilwa and proclaimed it one of the best cities in the world. Kilwa was one of the early trading towns in the world to use money.
In their constant search for people to enslave, Arab traders began to penetrate farther into the interior, particularly in the southeast toward Lake Nyasa. Farther north two merchants from India followed tribal trade routes to reach the country of the Nyamwezi about 1825. Along this route the availability of ivory appears to have been as great an attraction as people to enslave, and Saʿīd ibn Sulṭān himself, after the transfer of his capital from Muscat to Zanzibar, gave every encouragement to the Arabs to pursue these trading possibilities.
From the Nyamwezi country the Arabs pressed on to Lake Tanganyika in the early 1840s. Tabora (or Kazé, as it was then called) and Ujiji, on Lake Tanganyika, became important trading centres, and a number of Arabs made their homes there. They did not annex these territories but occasionally ejected hostile chieftains. Mirambo, an African chief who built for himself a temporary empire to the west of Tabora in the 1860s and ’70s, effectively blocked the Arab trade routes when they refused to pay him tribute. His empire was purely a personal one, however, and collapsed on his death in 1884.