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After about A.D. 1000, Africa’s ivory and gold became more sought-after than its people. Prisoners taken in wars with the Christians of Abyssinia met most of the needs of the slave trade. Nevertheless, the continent was still cast in a subservient role. The interior remained sealed off, dealing with the outside world through the Muslim intermediaries. Africans came to the coast, to live in the towns or to cross the ocean, usually against their will. They did not go back, to take inland the ideas which could have stimulated change.
The clearest contrast was with India, where coastal cities gave allegiance to powerful inland states whose culture and religion they shared. Watered by the monsoon rains, India grew enough crops on its fertile lands to feed a vast population as well as spices for export and cotton to be made into cloth. Its manufactures were sold throughout the Indian Ocean and beyond, just as the tales from its literature were translated and adapted all across the known world.
THREE
The Mystery of the Waqwaqs
In the same way that the Sea of China ends with the land of Japan, the Sea of Zanj ends with the land of Sofala and the Waqwaq, which produces gold and many other wonderful things. It has a warm climate and is fertile.
—Al-Mas’udi (893–957), The Meadows of Gold
AS OLD AS the monsoon trade between Arabia and East Africa, the contacts across the eastern expanse of the Indian Ocean date back to the time when Buddhism held sway over much of Asia. Two thousand years ago ships were taking merchandise from the powerful Satavahana kingdom of southern India to Sumatra, Java and Bali. It was a two-way trade, with bronze ware from Indonesia being exported to India. These contacts had been known to the Romans on one side of the world and to the Chinese on the other. A much-travelled historian and diplomat, Kang Tai, writing 1,700 years ago, told of ships from a Sumatran kingdom he called Geying sailing 8,000 li (about 2,500 miles) to a busy Indian port where ‘people came from all quarters’.
Indian monks spread Buddhism to the Indonesian islands; it was traders who brought Hinduism. In later centuries, Hinduism was to advance well beyond the Indian Ocean, extending northwards through the China Sea to what is now Kampuchea. The surviving monuments to this expansion are great temples and palaces overgrown by jungle, the best-known being Angkor Wat.
Relations between India and its trading settlements across the ocean to the south-east were not always friendly. Hindu armies were active in Indonesia during the tenth century, and later a warlike Sumatran state, Sri Vijaya, sent its fleets northwards to attack Ceylon. Such events belong to the complex, interwoven history of the Indian Ocean spreading over several thousand years, and it is only in this context, of the sea as a cultural and geographic entity, that the Waqwaq migrations westwards from Indonesia become credible. Even so, the French historian Hubert Deschamps has called them ‘one of the greatest mysteries of mankind’, and only fragments of the story have so far been assembled from archaeology, linguistics and anthropology.
Why the Indonesian seafarers known as Waqwaqs acquired such a curious name is, like much else about them, obscure; it may simply have been a mocking imitation by their enemies of the sound of their speech. More probably the source is waka, the name given in parts of Indonesia to the type of outrigger canoe the Waqwaqs used. The one indisputable fact is that they voyaged 3,500 miles from their homeland to discover and settle in Madagascar, off the coast of Africa.
Their migration to what would prove to be one of the world’s biggest islands, a semi-continent, never until then inhabited by humans, is an astonishing chapter in the annals of ocean travel. The date when the first wave of Waqwaq migrants reached Madagascar is a matter of controversy; one clue is in the language they brought with them (and which still makes up more than nine-tenths of the Malagasy vocabulary, a bond across the ocean). It includes many Sanskrit loan words, and Sanskrit influence was at its strongest in Indonesia in about A.D. 400.1
The Waqwaqs were setting foot in a land where the animal life had developed in almost total isolation for 150 million years. There were no elephants, giraffes or lions, as on the African mainland 300 miles further west; but species which existed in Africa before Madagascar ‘broke away’ had lived on undisturbed, including the agile, wide-eyed lemurs, from the same stock as apes and humans. There are hundreds of varieties of insects found nowhere else in the world. In the deep seas near Madagascar lives the coelacanth, another survivor from the remote evolutionary past, a clumsy fish with huge scales and fins resembling legs.
Perhaps most remarkable of all the animals there when the Waqwaqs arrived was the Aepyornis maximus, a flightless bird which stood ten feet high and laid eggs more than a foot long. It probably gave rise to the persistent myth of a monstrous eagle, variously called a rukh, peng or gryphon, living in the Indian Ocean and believed capable of picking up an elephant, bearing it to the heavens, dropping it to earth, then devouring it. The Chinese were especially devoted to this fantasy, and described the bird as being able to fly 19,000 li before needing a meal. It must surely be more than a coincidence that the Aepyornis maximus became extinct around the time that the first Waqwaqs reached Madagascar. These awkward, inoffensive creatures would have been easy prey for humans equipped with bows and arrows; tales spread by the Waqwaqs of a bird which laid a huge egg may well have grown into something far more extravagant in the course of a few retellings.
The Waqwaqs’ original landfall was almost certainly the African mainland, rather than Madagascar. They were eventually driven out by the local inhabitants, but left on the coast as reminders of their stay some Indonesian words and maritime techniques, such as outriggers to stabilize canoes. The intrepid newcomers set off again, travelling south for another 1,000 miles before sighting Madagascar. This time, there was nobody to challenge them: it was a long journey’s end. In many places they found the coastline hostile, with sand bars or coral barriers, and parts of the island were dry and infertile; but there were also rich volcanic soils.
Most of the Indonesian boats were probably small and simple – little more than canoes, each carrying five or six men and women – with square sails and the outriggers to help them keep upright during storms. These small vessels may, however, have acted as escorts to larger ships, called kunlun bo by the Chinese. (The ancestors of the Maoris were to migrate to New Zealand in such vessels.) A Chinese account from the third century A.D. claims that these boats, which were also used to take Buddhist pilgrims from Sumatra to India, were large enough to carry hundreds of people and heavy cargoes. They had four sails, so skilfully rigged that the ships could set their course ‘without avoiding strong winds and dashing waves, by the aid of which they can make great speed’.2
The Indonesian fleets undoubtedly travelled fast: from Sumatra, their most likely starting-point, it would have taken little more than a month to Madagascar in the May – October period, when the equatorial trade winds blow towards Africa. The strong east–west Malabar current would also have helped the travellers, carrying them first towards the 1,100 Maldive islands or, on the most direct route, to an uninhabited scattering of fifty coral atolls now called the Chagos archipelago, exactly halfway between Sumatra and Madagascar. Together these two island chains extend more than 1,500 miles from north to south.
The Indonesian voyagers would have found drinking water, to replenish their supplies, by digging shallow trenches on the islands. On beaches lined with coconut palms, takamaka trees, and other Asiatic plants – progeny of seeds borne for vast distances on the ocean current – they could mend the hulls and sails of their boats. When they set off again, out of the lagoons and through the reefs surrounding these lonely islands, navigating was simple: the rising sun was always on their backs, the setting sun in their eyes.
There were other places to pause and hunt for food on this bold journey, for the Indian Ocean is dotted with coral atolls, specks of greenery in an amaranthine sea. Most have never been inhabited by humans, but are alive with animals. Turtles drag themselves on land to breed and giant tortoises march ponderously through the undergrowth. The brightly-coloured birds, unused to being hunted, could also be caught for the pot.
For their great trans-ocean venture the Waqwaqs had unique advantages. They were islanders, seafarers from childhood, and their needs afloat were few. Many Pacific islands were to be populated by similar long-distance voyages into the unknown. The boats carried baskets of rice, dried fruits wrapped in banana leaves, animal skins to hold drinking water, spears and lines for fishing, and live chickens for slaughtering en route. Rice was essential for survival on such voyages, because it did not go rotten; and if food ran out, aromatic leaves were chewed to fend off hunger-pangs.3 How many of the migrants died on their way can not even be guessed at.
At the time when the first Indonesians set off across the Indian Ocean they lacked a written language, so there is no record of why or precisely when their great journeys were undertaken. They appear to have spoken a tongue now long forgotten in Indonesia, known as Old Javanese; it is likened to the language of the Batak people of northern Sumatra.4 Some of Madagascar’s religious rituals still retain vestiges of Hinduism, so it is likely that there were later migrations, over several centuries, by communities escaping from wars between rival Indonesian states.
The Indonesians who settled later in Madagascar – some after A.D. 1000 – probably did so because they discovered that people with origins like their own had survived and settled peacefully in a new island home. Such information may have come from China, that great storehouse of knowledge. References to the western flank of the Indian Ocean occur at various places in the records of the Tang dynasty (A.D. 619–906); in 863 the scholar Duan Chengshi was able to describe the Somali people. They were, he said, feuding pastoralists, living on a diet of blood and milk and ‘drawing fresh blood from the veins of their cattle with a needle’. This was an exact description of the habits of the Galla (or Oromo), who inhabited the Somali hinterland at that time. Duan went on to say that the women were ‘clear-skinned and well-behaved’; the people of Africa did not hesitate to ‘make their own countrymen prisoners and sell them to foreigners at prices many times more than they would fetch at home’. The Spanish-born historian Ibn Sa’id, who worked in the thirteenth century for the Mongol warlord Hulagu Khan, knew of Madagascar; he had been told that some Khmer people, driven by the Chinese out of what became Cambodia, managed to find their way to the island.
However, what the faraway Chinese knew could only have been a fraction of the information available in countries to which the Indonesians had sailed for centuries. In India there must have been an awareness of the existence of Madagascar, which the Arabs called al-Qumr. Indian merchants dealt directly with the African mainland, and the glass beads they used for barter can be found in the sites of Zimbabwean villages, among debris dating to A.D. 500. By this date there was a flow of ivory to India, whose own elephants were too valuable to slaughter for their tusks, since they could be tamed and used for work and warfare. African ivory was also more desirable, since the tusks were larger and softer for carving. The herds were so vast that they could be hunted virtually on the seashore.
The Waqwaqs on Madagascar were well placed to compete with Arab traders for the ivory of the mainland, and for its gold. The gold-bearing veins were reached by sinking deep trenches and shafts. The rock was made hot by lighting fires beneath it, then cracked from the top by flinging on cold water. Children carried the baskets of ore to the surface, because they could squeeze more easily through the narrow spaces in the workings. The rock was then ground and washed to extract the metal.
However, the Africans cared little for gold themselves, and the fine dust was poured into porcupine quills for safe-keeping before it was carried down to the coast. As contact with the outside world grew, the African rulers took control, distributing Indian cloth and beads to their subjects as rewards for bringing them gold-dust and elephant tusks, which were passed to the waiting traders.
The Waqwaqs were disliked by other merchants in East Africa. The Arabs resented their piratical ways, while respecting their seamanship. These rivals from the ‘Zabaj islands’ were reputed to have among them ‘men who look like Turks’; they may have been mercenaries from countries close to China, or the Khmer (Qumr) driven from Cambodia.
In A.D. 945 an armada of Waqwaq ships appeared off the East African coast and besieged the town of Qanbalu, on the island of Pemba. Before the newcomers’ warlike aims became clear, the townspeople had asked them what they wanted. The reply was frank: they were after ‘ivory, tortoiseshell, panther-skins and ambergris’ – trade goods needed in their own homeland, and in China. More than that, they wanted to capture Zanj people, ‘for they were strong and easily endured slavery’. By their own admission, the besiegers had been raiding towns and villages up and down the African coast. They were less successful when they tried to subdue Qanbalu, because it was heavily fortified; in the end they were repulsed and sailed away.
Essentially, the Indonesians and the Arabs shared a similar attitude towards the African mainland – one which was predatory. The Waqwaqs brought slaves back to Madagascar to look after domesticated animals and labour in their terraced ricefields (which were built in a style identical to that found as far east as the Philippines).
In time, however, the Waqwaq impact proved beneficial in many ways: the crops they had transported from Asia included rice, bananas, yams, sugar cane, breadfruit, mangoes, lentils and spices.5 These food plants enhanced the lives of Africans right across the continent as they spread inland from community to community, starting at the coast around the Zambezi delta, which directly faced the early Waqwaq settlements on the western side of Madagascar. It is possible to re-create some of the routes by which these new crops advanced into Africa: what has been nicknamed the ‘Banana Corridor’ takes in a great swathe of land right up to the equator from near the mouth of the Zambezi. Bananas ultimately became the staple diet in Uganda, among peoples who knew nothing about the Indian Ocean or the origins of this new type of food.
The Waqwaq influence can also be traced in African musical instruments such as the xylophone,6 as well as in fishing and farming methods; a mounted file used in Madagascar for opening coconuts, as well as a double-valved bellows for blowing life into fires, are both unmistakably Indonesian.
Although they brought much to Africa that was new, the Waqwaqs became indifferent to their own past. As generations passed, the truth about their origins became merged into mythology and they grew ever more remote from the culture of Indonesia, clinging only to their language and their obsession with death and burial customs; one of these involves digging up corpses after seven years and carrying them in procession through the community, the ‘return of the dead’. As the population in the coastal regions of Madagascar became predominantly African, the Waqwaqs moved further into the mountainous interior of the great island. In the manner of colonizers elsewhere, they abandoned a skill they no longer needed, the ability to cross the open seas. Although they still buried their rulers in silver canoes, they could never go home again.
FOUR
Islam Rules in the Land of Zanj
The Zanj have no ships in which they can voyage, but boats land in their country from Oman, as do others that are going to Zabaj [Indonesia] … The inhabitants of Zabaj call at Zanj in both large and small ships and trade their merchandise with them, as they understand each other’s language.
—Al-Idrisi (1110–65), A Book of Entertainment for One Desirous to go Round the World
UNLIKE THE INDONESIANS, who forgot their original homeland after migrating to Madagascar, the Arab and Persian settlers on the East African coast always looked back to the great cities of the Middle East. They looked back quite literally, bowing towards Mecca in their mosques, where they heard the sermons of imams who read the Qur’ān and sustained their faith. The dhows sailing south to Africa on the winter monsoon brought goods which sustained their cultural links with Islam.
The earliest settlements, dating to A.D. 750 or earlier, had been rudimentary, laid out in an African style, with protective wooden palisades. Such places were too remote to make use of artisans who built in stone in the Arabic manner. Sites of the first mosques are revealed by traces of wooden post-holes in the earth, and these show a curious error: the alignment is not directly towards Mecca, as the Prophet had ruled. This suggests that the newcomers were simple traders who could not ‘read’ the night sky correctly, since their only way of finding a precise bearing was from the stars.
The logical first step for Arab newcomers was simply to install themselves in an established African fishing village, near a bay where boats could be safely run up on the beach at high title for unloading and loading. In such places, nameless and ungoverned, life was ruthless. As well as the threats from within an encampment, there was always the danger – with nobody to call upon for help – of surprise attacks by seaborne raiders. One settlement in the Comoro islands, far to the south, was built on top of a cliff, through fear of the Waqwaqs from nearby Madagascar.
It was not only to protect themselves from one another that the rival settlers tended to live on islands. They had good reason to maintain a safe distance from the Africans of the mainland. Several early communities chose islands more than a day’s sailing out in the ocean, such as Zanzibar, Pembra and Mafia, all big enough to be self-supporting in times of war. African dugout canoes, used for fishing inside the coral reefs, could not reach such islands to retrieve captives, and there was no risk that newly-acquired domestic slaves might try swimming back to shore.
Safe on their islands, the Arabs never wished to venture into Africa. They merely waited for the products of the interior to come to them. At their backs the mainland was a brooding and hostile giant, whom none cared to challenge. Local women taken as wives or concubines, and the slaves working in the gardens, were converted to Islam.1 But there was no attempt to spread the faith within Africa – its people remained kafirs.
After a few generations the settlements grew more prosperous and secure. Bigger mosques were built, and although still of wood they were now on a true alignment to Mecca. When trading ships came over the horizon from the Gulf and the Red Sea, the settlers could afford to barter for many luxuries. By the ninth century they were eating off Chinese floral-pattern plates, as well as oriental stoneware and opaque white porcelain. These outposts could tap into trade routes reaching all the way, through cities such as Siraf, to the great ports of Tang China.
The settlers also possessed pottery and glass goblets from Persia, phials containing attar of roses, many household ornaments, and brass oil-lamps. Their combs were made of tortoiseshell, cosmetics were kept in carved copper bowls. They stored their water in tall pottery jars, originally used to transport oil and wine from the Persian Gulf.
In exchange for these reminders of a distant splendour, the settlers had more than gold, ivory and slaves to offer. There were leopard-skins used on saddles, rhinoceros horns for making medicines, and the buoyant pale blue ambergris – as valuable, weight for weight, as gold – which the winds and currents swept up on to the sandy beaches. The ambergris was used to ‘fix’ perfumes, and for scenting the oil in lamps: a tenth-century poet writes of the way ‘gilded lamps, fed with ambergris, shine like pearls’.
The Chinese in particular valued this mysterious substance which, apart from its other qualities, was vaunted as an aphrodisiac; yet they did not know exactly where the ambergris came from, and named it ‘dragon’s spittle’. (The Zanj people simply called it ‘treasure of the sea’.) In fact, it was an excretion of solidified fluids, sometimes as big as an ostrich egg, from the stomachs of the sperm whales which in those times abounded in the Indian Ocean.
As the Muslim pioneers grew even richer they began building with coral stone and bricks carried from Persia as ballast. Orange and lemon orchards and vegetable gardens were planted round their homes. The animal enclosures contained sheep, goats and even camels.
The sea itself was a ready supplier of food, although some species were gradually hunted into oblivion along the East African coast. An early victim was the dugong, a large harmless mammal living on sea plants. It was often to be seen basking on coral rocks, and from a distance could look almost human, so that it became the source of many Arabic tales about mermaids. By A.D. 1000 the dugong had vanished for ever from the western side of the Indian Ocean.
Other sea creatures to suffer at the hands of the newcomers were giant tortoises and turtles, valuable for their shells. According to Muslim law, the eating of tortoises was forbidden, and this should have been obeyed not only by the faithful, but also the kafirs working for them as slaves. However, there is evidence from ancient rubbish dumps that tortoises were consumed with gusto in some early settlements. Far in the south, in the Comoro islands, there was an equal readiness to eat lemurs, which would certainly have been prohibited fare for devout Muslims, since these animals live in trees and have monkey-like bodies.
This may suggest that some early settlers on the East African coast were fugitives or outcasts from the Arab world. In their isolation on the remote African shore they would be beyond the reach of enemies, and may have ignored some more inconvenient religious rules. It is hard to be sure, however, because legends about the identity of the Arabs who migrated to the Land of Zanj often contradict one another.
One popular account tells how Abd-al-Malik, an early caliph, gave orders that all of Oman’s independent chiefs should be deposed. This was harsh treatment, for Oman had accepted Islam as early as A.D. 630, during Muhammad’s lifetime. So two brothers, Sulaiman and Sa’id, organized the defence of Oman and drove back a land and sea attack by 40,000 men. Finally, 5,000 cavalry were sent in and the brothers could resist no longer. They decided to flee to Africa, taking with them their families and followers. The date, it is said, was around A.D. 700.
Other events in the expansion of Islam may also have sparked off migrations to East Africa. Most crucial was the overthrow of the original dynasty, the Umayyads, in 750, by the caliph Abu-al-Abbas, the ‘Shedder of Blood’. He had defeated and executed his predecessor, then organized a banquet of conciliation for the dignitaries of the former regime. The guests arrived, sat down to eat, then were murdered to a man before they could start. A carpet of leather was thrown over the bodies, then the host and his followers sat down on it to enjoy a hearty meal. Supporters of the Umayyad dynasty – which re-established itself in Spain – would have been understandably keen to put some distance between themselves and Abu-al-Abbas; an expanse of Indian Ocean might have seemed appropriate.
Some newcomers ventured into little-known waters, far to the south. The Chibuene settlement was several days’ sailing beyond Sofala towards the Cape of Good Hope, and its merchants traded inland along the Limpopo and Sabe river valleys. An eighth-century Islamic burial site has been found at Chibuene, and the town may even have been founded in pre-Islamic times.
When later communities arrived in Zanj, their leaders were quick to assert independence. Each proudly called himself a sultan and some claimed as their ancestor, real or symbolic, a famous trader named Ahmed bin Isa, who had left Basra for Arabia in the year 930. More importantly, these new rulers were all sharifs, meaning that they claimed descent from the Prophet. Their arrival in East Africa, towards the end of the eleventh century, marked the start of a visibly different era.2 New towns, with mosques and palaces built of coral blocks, were established on offshore islands or mainland strongpoints. Soon there was rivalry between the towns over the size of their mosques and palaces and the elegance of their architecture.
The self-confidence of these new rulers was symbolized by the large-scale minting of coins. Although in earlier centuries some simple copper currency had been produced in the Land of Zanj, coins were now also cast in silver, and a few even in gold. They all bore a Qur’ānic inscription on one side and the name of a sultan on the other. The tiny copper coins, made from metal smelted in the African interior, were for buying goods in the local markets; they were intended to replace cowrie shells, the traditional form of currency brought from the Maldive islands.3 The gold was likewise African, but the silver had to be imported – usually in the form of coins, which were then melted down. Foreign money, mainly Arab and Egyptian dinars, was also used. Traders brought home Indian and Chinese coins, but these were merely souvenirs. A pit at the site of one coastal town has yielded up an eleventh-century Hindu statuette; it possibly served as a trader’s weight.4
Among the ruling families, at least on the male side, there was a high degree of literacy. This is reflected in the stylized script known as kufic, carved on coral slabs in the mosques and on tombstones; brought to perfection in Siraf, the floriate kufic was admired as far away as Spain. The flat-roofed stone houses of the wealthiest families displayed a regard for orderly comfort not witnessed before in Zanj: they had bathrooms and plumbing, glazed windows and plastered walls. Some buildings were three storeys high, with carved and brass-studded front doors, behind which entrance halls led into receiving rooms. The designs on the Persian carpets spread over the floors and hanging on the walls symbolized Arab society: the centrepiece represented the sultan, with his courtiers surrounding him, and the outer parts of the patterns stood for the villagers, artisans and slaves.
Although the new rulers, as well as their law-makers and courtiers, were certainly literate in Arabic, no contemporary accounts of how these dynasties established themselves have survived. A fragmentary chronicle, written at least four centuries later, tells the history of the island city-state of Kilwa, founded by a Persian named Ali bin al-Hasan. The name Kilwa means ‘fishing place’ and the chronicle says the island was bought from an African chief with enough cloth to stretch right round the island (a distance of about fifteen miles); in truth, the chief was probably given only a few bales.
Kilwa was to grow into the wealthiest city on the entire coast, able to control a nearby part of the mainland known as Muli, where rice and other crops were grown. It had the advantage of being several days’ journey south of Zanzibar, and thus was strategically placed to exact tolls from ships travelling to and from the gold port of Sofala. Although Kilwa was remote, an experienced captain who knew exactly when to set out could sail there from India or Arabia in one monsoon season. It was a terminus of the ocean trade with Africa.
A few of the visitors to the coast took a perceptive interest in the mainland Africans. One was Abu’l Hasan ‘Ali al-Mas’udi, an Arab writer who first sailed to Zanj from Siraf in A.D. 916, when he was in his early twenties. He was the type of traveller, always asking questions, whose enthusiasm never waned. Born in Baghdad, he made journeys to India, Persia, Armenia, the Caspian Sea, Syria and Egypt. While in East Africa he stayed mainly at Qanbalu, whose population he describes as a ‘mixture of Muslims and Zanj infidels’, speaking the ‘Zanjiyya language’. The language was elegant, and the Zanj preachers would often gather a crowd and exhort them to ‘please God in their lives and be obedient to him’. The crowd would then be told to remember their ancestors and ancient kings. Al-Mas’udi’s account goes on: ‘These people have no religious law … every man worships what he pleases, be it a plant, an animal, or a mineral.’ This is the earliest description of the local Swahili (coastal) people of East Africa, and shows that some, at least, still clung to their African religions.5 Plainly, the towns had a ruling élite and a black population with which the Arab settlers were more or less integrated.
The villages of the Zanj, according to al-Mas’udi, stretched for 700 parasangs (2,500 miles) along the coast; an accurate estimate of the distance from the entrance of the Red Sea to the mainland facing southern Madagascar. Although he twice visited East Africa, he does not say if he travelled as far south as Sofala, but is quite definite that a king of the Africans ruled in that distant region, and had many lesser chiefs subject to him. This matches what is known from archaeology, that embryonic African states were taking shape at that time in the hinterlands of Mozambique and Zimbabwe. Since merchants travelled regularly up and down the coast, it would have been easy, even in Qanbalu, to learn about the cattle-keeping kingdoms of the distant south.
