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SWAHILI 733
with the Persian Gulf. Their Swahili language is basically Bantu, but modified
through the need for a medium of communication between the largely Arab
traders who sailed (and still sail) their dhows to the East African coast on the
seasonal monsoons and the Bantu-speaking Africans of the region. The Swahili
are distinguished from the Northeast Bantu not only by the fact that they employ
Swahili as their first language (rather than as a lingua franca for intergroup
communication) but also by their being 100 percent Sunni Muslim and by various
aspects of their material culture (see Bantu-speaking Peoples).
Technically, Swahili is an adjective, as in "Swahili people." Within the Bantu
noun-class prefix system, the people are Waswahili, the language ATi'swahili
(which is less complex than most Bantu languages, probably because of the
simplification characteristic of languages that have been used as trade languages).
Linguistically, then, the Swahili people may be thought of as Bantu; culturally,
however, they are distinct.
Swahili is not the name of any tribal group; rather, it is the name of the
collection of those groups which share a common culture, Uswahili. They are
people who consider themselves to be distinct from other Muslim peoples of the
coast: Arabs, Asians and converted coastal Northeast Bantu. Much of the existing
literature stresses that Swahili are believed to be the descendants of the children
of Arab traders and Bantu women, especially those descendants who cannot
trace their ancestry back through an exclusively male line. This definition, however,
causes the term to appear as a racial one rather than the cultural or organizational
term it is, and it downplays the indigenous cultural aspects which are
not by-products of the African-Arab admixture. Arab and Persian influences,
certainly, cannot be denied; but this aspect of Swahili origins has been overstated.
Uswahili is unique; it has been modified and enriched by these influences, but
not formed by them.
Given the range of influences and the number of peoples who have visited
the coast, and given that the East African littoral covers a great expanse of land,
it would be a mistake to assume that the Swahili represent a homogeneous entity.
Yet, as a result of their common language and religion, some degree of homogeneity
does exist, and it is possible to describe the life-style and social structures
as if they represent a single socio-cultural configuration, bearing in mind that
regional variations exist and that the boundaries separating the Swahili from
various Arab and Northeast Bantu groups are tenuous and often transparent.
Akin to many of the coastal Northeast Bantu groups and some up country
peoples as well, the Swahili are believed to have originated in an area known
as Shungwaya on the coast of what is now Somalia. Various groups of these
people migrated southward and settled along the coast; certain areas, those points
at which foreign traders established their ports, developed into the modern urban
centers of the region, each forming its own linguistic and cultural variation of
the theme. This southerly migration can still be seen in the gradual depopulation
of the northern urban centers. Once settled, these groups subdivided into smaller
enclaves occupying separate quarters or neighborhoods, each with its own po-