"The Swahili are among the most distinctive peoples in Africa, and their coastal location is the primary reason why. It provided a setting where multiple cultural influences came together to produce a society characterized by:

1. mercantilism based on Indian Ocean trade;
2. town dwelling;
3. a unique architecture using coral and stone;
4. Islam;
5. literacy in an African language with an Arabic script;
6. a sense of belonging to a wider civilization; and
7. social stratification, with ruling elites who stress their Persian and Arab lineages. Influences from southwestern Asia have clearly been significant to Swahili identity, but it is equally obvious that the Asian elements are essentially a veneer glued onto a solid Bantu African framework."

James L. Newman in his recent book called THE PEOPLE OF AFRICA (Yale University Press, 1995 P. 177)

The Bantu peoples are many and varied and exist in different clusters of fairly closely related tribes. According to Newman, the Swahilis constituted part of the Sabaki cluster of Northeast Coast Bantu that had formed in the Lower Tana River-Lamu Archipelago.

From the original Sabaki who lived in small coastal or offshore-island villages where they could both fish and farm, some Sabaki took up a trading activity with merchants from the Arabian Peninsula and the Persian Gulf. This trade has by all accounts been going on for at least some 2000 years.

Indian Ocean Traders

In answering the question of who the Waswahili are, we should perhaps briefly look through seven features which mark them out as outlined by Newman above. We have mentioned the Indian Ocean trade element and that the Waswahili were basically middlemen between Africa and the Indian Ocean traders. But they were more than that, as we shall discover when we come to discuss my own native Bajuni.

Town Dwellers

The Waswahili are a people of eastern seaboard of Africa stretching from Mogadisho in the north to Mozambique in the south. It is universally agreed that Kiswahili is a Bantu language in its basic grammar and structure.

From this we can conclusively say that the Waswahili themselves must be of Bantu origins. Kiswahili is certainly not a pidgin language like Creole or patois. It is in the same family of languages as Kikuyu, Meru, Kikamba, Kitaita, Luganda, Luhya, etc

The word 'Swahili' comes from the Arabic word 'sawahil' which means 'people of the coast'. And for at least the last two thousand years, the Waswahili have been the indigenous people of the eastern seaboard of Africa stretching from the borders of Djibouti to the borders of South Africa.

With inland peoples, one often finds a degree of ethnic homogeneity that is rare to find among the Waswahili. It is probably this that has made the Waswahili so difficult to classify racially. But why is this so? The reason is simple to see if we understand the geography of Swahililand.

The Indian Ocean is a somewhat peculiar ocean. While it is open to the Antarctic to the south, it is completely land-locked to the north. This combination of geographical facts together with the fact that the Indian Ocean straddles the equator has led to the regular patterns of winds called the 'monsoons'. In fact the very word 'monsoon' is a corruption of the Arabic word 'muusim' which in turn led to the Swahili word 'musimu'.

The monsoons have been affecting the lives and history of the inhabitants of the Indian Ocean shorelines for centuries. Their very consistency meant that a lot of peoples of the area stretching all the way from the shores of China to southern Africa pegged their lives to these regular winds.

With the arrival of the technology of building ocean-going sailing boats, the Indian Ocean became one of the most active areas of material, spiritual and intellectual exchange of anywhere in the world. This circumstance alone would explain many factors in the history of the Waswahili. We will state these briefly before we return to the Bajunis and the central role they played in the history of the Waswahili.

One consequence of this unique set of Indian Ocean weather patterns is the fact that dhows sailed from the northeast to the southwest regularly during 'kaskazi' and from the south west to the north east during 'kusi'. The very words 'kaskazi' and 'kusi' tell you the directions of the winds at the relevant times. 'Kaskazi' in Swahili means 'north' and 'kusi' means 'south'.

In other words, during the months of late August to March, the winds are coming from the north -- north east in fact -- and from the months of April to July, the monsoons are blowing from the south west to the north east. The regularity of thse wind patterns meant that traders sought their fortunes by coming to the East African seaboard to seek the riches of Africa. In return, the traders of the east brought with them the many riches from as far afield as China.

At the centre of interchange between the non-African and African Indian Ocean traders were the Waswahili. John Middleton describes the Swahilis as members of the mercantile civilization. He describes the Waswahili as the middlemen between Africa and the Middle-East/Asia.

Anyone who wanted to buy anything from the East African seaboard had to employ the Waswahilis as their agents. Anyone who wanted to sell anything to the East African hinterland could not do so without the intermediary of the Waswahili.

A broad Cultural Portrait of the Waswahili

A good way of illustrating the Waswahili is to give a brief portrait of the life style of these people in some ways across and time. Across space, because the description given is basically common apart from the demands made upon them by local ecological conditions.

Across time, because of the adaptations that they have made with their constant interaction with the kaleidoscope of Indian Ocean cultures prior to the end of the 15th century and with Europe for the last 500 years. The Waswahili have not only been contending with the elements in establishing their settlements up and down the East African Coast. They have also had to contend with a series of invasions from the outside world.

The Swahilis have always provided the first line of defence for invaders of the East African interior. But we shall not enter into the latter here despite the fact I would be delighted on some other occasion to talk about the fascinating subject of Swahili naval contribution to the defence of East Africa in general and Kenya in particular.

On now to the cultural portrait of the Waswahili as a people that have tamed the East African Coast for more than two millenia and possibly beyond. In painting this portrait, I shall have to rely to a large extent on a section of the Swahili peoples that have probably been least polluted by modernity - the Bajunis.

The Bajunis illustrate a number of features shared with other Swahili peoples but I will have to urge you to see these pursuits as being those of the Waswahili in general and not just of the Bajuni in particular even though the latter sometimes illustrate this best.

Swahili Buildings

This brief survey of the Waswahili would not be complete without a mention of the unique building technology that they had developed. In Africa, some of the oldest buildings exist in Swahililand. Buildings over a thousand years in age exist which compares very favourably with buildings from other civilizations.

We have remarked before about the manner in which African technological innovation is often played down. Nowhere is this more true than with Swahili building technology. We will confine our remarks to the kind of building technology that attracted the attention of the famous student of African history - Basil Davidson.

Davidson has travelled wide in his studies of African history and culture. Nowhere was he more impressed with building technology than he was in Swahililand. What impressed him most was not merely the longevity of the buildings he found parts of the old town of Mombasa and Lamu but with their perfect adaptation to the ecological climes in which they were.

Mombasa and Lamu along with most Swahililand townships are hot, humid, tropical cities. Anyone who has lived in these climes would know that the combination of heat and humidity could be very depressing.

What impressed Davidson the most was how these Swahili buildings could be incredibly equable in both temperature and humidity despite relatively oppressive outside conditions. Both factors remained virtually constant throughout the year. And this without any air conditioner, any dehumidifier and no use of electricity! How was this achieved?

It was achieved by the use of very thick outer walls and high ceilings within the houses. The juxtaposition of the houses meant narrow streets. Narrow streets meant that during the morning the houses to the east would be sheltering the houses to their west. During the evening, this was reversed.

This meant that the houses were basically built on a north-south orientation with main entrances on the east. This ecological orientation of the houses was also fortuitous in that houses faced Mecca, a religious necessity of Muslims in their five daily prayers.

This essay is necessarily truncated but we do hope that it sheds a little light on the subject: WHO ARE THE SWAHILIS?

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