Click to Download Document [pdf] - Trinitarian Bible Society

Issue Number: 599 – April to June 2012are hugely important. They are amongthe most widely-spoken languages inAfrica, and include Shona and Zulu. TheBantu language with the greatest numberof speakers (eighty million across eightcountries) is Swahili, a meld of Bantu andArabic which has yielded a trading andcross-cultural lingua franca. Swahili is thefirst official language of modern Kenya,alongside English.Europeans and ColonialismIn the centuries preceding Europeancolonisation, the Swahili coast of Kenyawas part of the East African maritimeand shipbuilding region, which tradedwith the Arab world and India for ivoryand slaves. Arab/Persian influence onthe Kenyan coast was eclipsed in 1498by the arrival of the Portuguese. Theircourageous mastery of the complicationsof navigating the West African coast toround the Cape into the Indian Oceanleft the other European seafaringnations trailing far behind. Portugal’sinfluence was to be diminished in turnby the Islamic dominion of the Imam ofOman in the 1600s; however, the lastinglegacy of Portugal on the East African coastMap of the region dating from 1890was to turn it into an enduring stagingpoint for journeys across the Indian Ocean.Although Zanzibar and Dar Es Salaam,south of Kenya, were the most importantports for this, the Kenya/India connectionalso existed. When the British were ableto lease part of the Kenyan coast from theSultan of Zanzibar in 1887, work began ona railroad from Mombasa to Lake Victoria,with significant use of Indian labour.Their descendants remained in Kenya,forming the core of several distinct Indiancommunities, including Muslim and Sikh. 6The colonial history of Kenya derives fromthe Berlin Conference of 1885, where theEuropean powers divided East Africa into‘spheres of influence’. To avoid tripping overeach other in this region, Germany andBritain agreed thatthey would divide the area between them.When the Sultan of Zanzibar disagreed,19