THE spread of Islam South of the Sahara, took place almost entirely through peaceful means.
On the eastern coast, Islam influenced the development of the Swahili culture and language, a unique blend of African, Indian and Arabian traditions, while Islamic traders linked the region to India, China and the Indies.
In sub-Saharan Africa, dynamic processes of state-building and trade were the main forces for cultural change.
Muslim expansion from the Arabian Peninsula, across the Red Sea, to the Horn of Africa, then southward along the coast of East Africa represented a third direction of Islam’s growth in Africa.
From ports on the Red Sea to the Gulf of Aden, maritime trade carried Prophet Mohammed’s teachings to East Africa and the Indian Ocean.
Islam’s rapid expansion along Africa’s east coast reached as far south as Kilwa in the 13th Century.
From 1178 to 1195, Kilwa made a fortune from the gold trade from Sofala, which undoubtedly came from MaDzimbahwe’s mines. Sofala, a vassal of Kilwa City, maintained commercial relations with the Shona kingdom of Great Zimbabwe; the rise of Great Zimbabwe was closely linked to gold trading with Islamised people.
The participation of East African port towns in the lucrative South Seas trade was an ancient trade.
Arabs, Indonesians and even some Indians had been absorbed into what had become, during the first millennium, a predominantly Bantu-speaking population from Somalia south.
From the 8th Century onward, Islam travelled with Arab and Persian sailors and merchants to these southerly trading centres of what the Arabs called the land of the zanj, or ‘blacks’ (hence ‘Zanzibar’).
Conversion to Islam, however, occurred only along the coast. The harbour trading towns were the administrative centres of the local Swahili States, most of them sited on coastal islands or easily defended peninsulas.
The Swahili coast was divided into several independent sultanates, including Kilwa, Mombasa, Malindi, Pate and Mogadishu.
Merchants from Mogadishu, Barawa, Malindi, Mombasa, the Lamu Archipelago and the Comoros traded in Madagascar.
Merchants came from abroad and from the African hinterlands, some of them descended from Hadrami and Yemeni extractions who settled in the regions.
The 11th and 12th centuries was a period of transition at the crossroads of Islamic and African religions, architecture and cultures.
Mosques were erected and the Swahili city-States were established, the most famous being the Kilwa.
Between the 8th and 10th centuries, Muslims founded the port city of Mogadishu; Somalia’s capital city today.
In the 12th Century, Mogadishu developed into a Muslim sultanate that employed a slave military corps against foreign and domestic enemies.
In the 13th Century, Muslim traders from Arabia and Iran began to dominate the east coastal cities from Mogadishu to Kilwa.
The Swahili civilisation reached its apex in the 14th and 15th centuries.
Swahili coastal centres boasted an advanced, cosmopolitan culture.
The ruling dynasties of the Swahili States were likely of African origin, though elite families often included Arab or Persian members.
Swahili traders in East Africa were major suppliers of gold to Asia in the Red Sea and Indian Ocean trade routes.
They served as middlemen connecting African goods to Asian markets and Asian goods to African markets. Trade links included the Arabian Peninsula, Persia, India and China.
The flourishing trade of the coastal centres was based on ivory (their most demanded export taken from inland elephants) followed by gold, slaves, turtle shells, ambergris, leopard skins, pearls, fish, ebony and sandalwood.
The main imports were cloth, porcelain, glassware, glass beads and glazed pottery.
Cowrie shells were a common currency in the inland trade, but coins, minted at Mogadishu and Kilwa from the 14th Century onward, were progressively used in the trading centres.
This was in contrast with the Horn of Africa, where Islamic kingdoms developed both in the Somali hinterland and on the coast.
The spread of Islam among Swahili people was, on the main, limited to the coastal civilisation, with the possible exception of the Zambezi Valley, where Muslim traders had penetrated upriver.
In the 16th Century, the original Swahili civilisation collapsed.
Trade waned with the arrival of the Portuguese, who destroyed both the Islamic commercial monopoly on the oceanic trade and the main Islamic city-States along the coast.
Decreases in rainfall and/or incursions from peoples from inland regions may have also contributed to the decline of the Swahili State.
Undoubtedly, the Portuguese intended to gain control of the South Seas trade.
In Africa, as everywhere, they viewed the Moors (Spanish and Portuguese term for Muslims) as their implacable enemies and saw the struggle to wrest the commerce and the ports of Africa and Asia from Islamic control as a Christian crusade.
Portuguese missionaries arrived in Zanzibar by 1499.
Their presence there, however, ended in 1698, due to the Oman-Arab conquest.
After their initial victories along the African coast, the Portuguese, however, made no concerted effort to spread Christianity beyond their fortified coastal settlements.
Consequently, the long-term cultural and religious consequences of the Portuguese presence along the African coast were negligible.
However, extensive economic decline was caused by the Portuguese.
Africans living inland refused to co-operate with them, and Muslim coastal shipping from India and Arabia was greatly reduced.
Ottoman efforts in the late 16th Century failed to defeat the Portuguese, until after 1660, when the strong eastern Arabian state of Oman raided the African coast with impunity.
In 1698, the Omanis took Mombasa and expelled the Portuguese from everywhere north of Mozambique where they remained in power until 1975.
Under the Omanis, Zanzibar became a new and major power centre in East Africa.
By the later 18th Century, the control of the coastal ivory and slave trades fueled the region’s prosperity.
Zanzibar itself benefitted from the introduction of clove cultivation in the 1830s; cloves became its principal export.
The clove plantations also became the chief market for a new internal slave trade.
Omani African sultans dominated the east coast until 1856, when Zanzibar and its coastal holdings became independent under a branch of the same family that ruled in Oman, Zanzibar passed eventually to the British in the late 1880s.
The Islamic imprint on the coast, however, still survives today.
In central and South Africa as well as in the West African forests, older African traditions held sway, and there was little or no evidence of Islam beyond individual Muslims involved in trade.
In West African forests, the Kongo (Congo) Kingdom (Kongo dia Ntotila), located on a fertile, well-watered plateau south of the lower Zaïre River Valley, spanned the border between forest and grassland.
Dating from the 14th Century, the Kongo kings had built a central government based on a pyramid structure of tax or tribute collection.
The king’s authority was tied to his role as a spiritual spokesman for the gods or ancestors.
By 1600, Kongo was half the size of England and boasted a high state of specialisation in weaving and pottery, salt production, fishing and metalworking.
When the Portuguese came to central Africa in 1483, Kongo was the major State with which they dealt.
The Portuguese brought Mediterranean goods, primarily luxury textiles, from North Africa, to trade, and slaves became the primary export.
Although imported luxuries augmented the prestige and wealth of the ruler and his elites, they did nothing to replace the labour pool lost to slavery.
The Portuguese initially invested time and effort into education and Christian proselytising, but eventually the desire for more slaves outweighed these concerns.
As demand grew, local rulers increasingly attacked their neighbours to garner slaves for Portuguese traders
The first group of Christian missionaries arrived in the Kingdom of the Kongo in 1491, where they built a church at the royal capital and baptised King Affonso I, (r. c.1506-1543).
The Kongo ruler was a Christian convert who initially welcomed Jesuit missionaries and supported conversion to Christianity but broke with the Jesuits in time.
He had constant difficulty curbing the more exploitative slaving practices and independent-minded provincial governors, who undermined royal authority by dealing directly with the Portuguese.
Finally, Affonso’s successor restricted Portuguese activity to Mpinda Harbour and the Kongo capital of Mbanza Kongo (São Salvador).
Portuguese attempts to name the Kongo’s royal successor a few years later caused a bloody uprising against them which, in turn, led to a Portuguese trade boycott with the Kongo Kingdom.
lnternal wars and slavery contributing to provincial unrest subsequently shattered the Kongo State.
Independent Portuguese traders and adventurers conducted their business outside government channels and tried to manipulate the kings.
In the 17th Century, the kingdom enjoyed renewed strength.
The kings ruled as divine-right monarchs at the apex of a complex socio-political pyramid.
The financial base of the kingdom rested on tribute from officials as well as taxes and tolls on commerce.
Royal power came to depend on hired soldiers armed with muskets. Christianity, the State religion, was accommodated to traditional beliefs. Sculpture, iron and copper technology, dance as well as music flourished.
In Portuguese Angola, to the south, the Ndongo Kingdom flourished among the Mbundu people during the 16th Century; the Portuguese controlled parts of Angola as a proprietary colony — the first white colonial enterprise in Africa where the experience was even worse than in Kongo.
Christianity in Angola began in 1492.
By the end of the 1500s, Angola was exporting thousands of slaves yearly through the port of Luanda.
As a result, the hinterland had been depopulated in less than a century.
New internal trade in salt and the spread of American food crops, such as maize and cassava, which became part of the staple diet of the people, produced some positive changes in the interior, but the Portuguese brought catastrophe in the coastal region.
Dr Michelina Andreucci is a Zimbabwean-Italian researcher, industrial design consultant and is a published author in her field. For comments e-mail: linamanucci@gmail.com