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CHAPTER 13 The CDastal Hit1terlat1b at1b lt1teriDr Df€ast Africa Davw C. Sperling with additional material by Jose H. Kagabo A1tHO\,j5H Islam Has been present on the East African coast for more than twelve centuries (chapter 12), in assessing the extent ofIslamic influence we need to distinguish between the Swahili towns, centers of Islam on or near the coast, and the neighboring rural areas ofthe coastal hinterland, which remained untouched by Islam until relatively recent times. Arabic, Chinese, and Portuguese references to the indigenous peoples ofthe coast are scanty, but they say enough for us to conclude that prior to the nineteenth century the influence of Islam in the immediate hinterland and the interior was negligible, hardly extending beyond the outskirts of the coastal towns.! In this chapter, we look at the way Islam spread, beginning in the nineteenth century, among the peoples of the coastal hinterland, behind a stretch of the East African coast extending for some five hundred miles (eight hundred kilometers), from the Tana River-Lamu archipelago region in the north to the Rufiji River delta region in the south. This stretch, known as the Swahili coast, can be divided into two sections. The sections are dissimilar but roughly equal in length, running I. from the Lamu archipelago south as far as Tanga (in whose hinterland the Usambara Mountains rise); and 2. from Tanga south to the Rufiji River. The dissimilarities stem from a combination of geographical, historical, and economic factors. North ofTanga, the coastal hinterland is relatively narrow, extending only fifteen to twenty miles inland, and in some places less, before one enters dry, inhospitable scrubland, known to the Swahili as the Nyika (nyika being the Swahili word for "desolate barren country"). South ofTanga, the hinterland is habitable further inland and the interior beyond is more easily accessible. This southern section of the 274 East African coast, from Tmga south to the Rufiji River, has long been called the Mrima coast, or the Mrima, a term used in this chapter to distinguish it from the Swahili coast north ofTanga. To these topographical features can be added the differences in proximity to the island of Zanzibar, and the ensuing different economic and political relations with the Omani Busaidi sultanate whose commercial empire in East Africa came to be centered on that island. The Mrima coast (such towns as Pangani, Saadani, and Bagamoyo) experienced varying degrees of Busaidi political control, or interference, and the full force of the interior caravan trade emanating from the commercial expansion that took place in the nineteenth century. In contrast, although the main towns of the coast north ofTanga felt the political impact of Busaidi conquest and rule, many smaller Muslim settlements were quite independent from Zanzibar throughout the nineteenth century, and the northern coast was less directly affected by the caravan trade into the interior. Berg points out that, for example, Mombasa's economy was a "slave-absorbing and grain-producing" component of the Zanzibar system, and most of the town's direct trade was confined to the Arabian Sea.2 The differentiation that concerns us here is that related to the ways in which distinct local or regional settings affected contacts between Muslims and non-Muslims, since to a large extent the key to understanding the beginnings ofIslamization, ifnot its subsequent course, lies in the nature of relations between Muslim and non-Muslim . Thus, for example, to attribute the spread ofIslam to trade and traders is correct only in a certain sense. Trade facilitated contacts between Muslim and non-Muslim parties, but any ensuing process of Islamization worked itself out within the tissue of relations between those parties, subject to many and varied circumstances. In this chapter we also examine the penetration ofIslam into the interior ofEast Mrica, as far west as the Great Lakes region, in the area corresponding roughly to present-day Kenya, mainland Tanzania (north ofthe Rufiji River), Uganda, Rwanda and Burundi, and the eastern Congo. The differences noted above between the southern and northern parts of the coast come to be reflected to some extent in the interior, where, for example, by the 1820S, Muslim traders had already reached the region ofTabora (180 miles south ofLake Victoria), whereas the first Muslim traders to reach the Wanga region (northeast of Lake Victoria) arrived only some forty or fifty years later. Two questions come to mind: Why, in spite of the Islamic character of the coastal towns, did they for so many centuries exert so little religious influence...

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