The Swahili Coast

From around the 8th century, a chain of trading settlements grew along the East African coast. Archaeologists at Shanga, on Pate Island, have found a town occupied from about 750 CE, with timber buildings that were later rebuilt in coral stone. By the 1200s, towns such as Lamu, Pate, Malindi, Mombasa and Gedi had stone houses, mosques, palaces and markets.

These were city-states, each ruled by its own sultan or council of leading families. They sat at the heart of the Indian Ocean trade. Using the monsoon winds, dhows carried gold, ivory, iron and mangrove timber out to Arabia, Persia and India, and brought back cloth, beads and Chinese porcelain. In 1414, envoys from Malindi presented a giraffe to the Emperor of China.

Swahili culture was a fusion. Its language, Kiswahili, is a Bantu language with many Arabic loanwords. Islam, arriving from around the 9th century, became central to Swahili identity. Poets such as Mwana Kupona, a woman of Siu and Pate in the 1850s, wrote in Kiswahili using Arabic script.

In 1498, Vasco da Gama reached Malindi, whose ruler gave him a pilot to guide him to India. The Portuguese wanted to control the ocean trade by force. They sacked Mombasa in 1505, looting and burning the city, and built Fort Jesus there in the 1590s. In 1698, after a siege of nearly three years, Omani Arabs captured Fort Jesus and drove the Portuguese out.

In the 19th century, Omani rulers based in Zanzibar controlled the coast. A huge trade in enslaved people grew, supplying plantations on the coast and on Zanzibar. Under pressure from Britain the trade was banned, but slavery itself was not legally abolished on the Kenyan coast until 1907.

In 1895, Britain took over the coastal strip from the Sultan of Zanzibar. It became part of Kenya at independence in 1963. Many coastal people have felt that the national story, focused on the highlands, left them out. Today, Lamu Old Town and Fort Jesus are both UNESCO World Heritage Sites.