Artistry Permits and Custom May Ordain - Northwestern University

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the Swahili world—without challenging notions of ideal material and social well-being—to
the extent that dress, economic trends, and state display legitimized images of elite status
throughout the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. 15
Channels of social communication—stimulated by commercial demand both
within and between Swahili towns and apparent in the consumption of like
materials—strengthened the social and aesthetic bonds within coastal society such that a
communality of culture—a unit accurately termed Swahili—developed despite the
absence of large-scale population movements or transcoastal political hegemony. A sign of
economic dependence on both local production and foreign trade, cloth consumption
integrated local and regional marketplaces, merchants, menial laborers, and rulers alike in a
cohesive and distinct material sphere.
The consumption of textiles, multifarious in their uses, created and recreated social
identities and empowered religious authority. Textiles enhanced ceremonial display,
enshrouded the dead, served as decoration and as payment, and became an indicator of
social change over time. To illustrate the importance of cloth in the social and economic
relations of the Swahili world, I will first look at other material and economic forms that
helped to keep the Swahili coast an integrated socioeconomic unit in the sixteenth
century. After discussing the material and social structure of Swahili society, I will analyze
the production and exchange of cloth, the role of individual consumption in the
construction of status, the various modes of state consumption, and the use of materials
in the negotiation of power.
1 �� The social and material textures of the Swahili world, circa 1500
Unfortunately, histories of the East African coast addressing the period under study have
neither identified nor defined the most basic themes in Swahili socioeconomic
organization. Though several studies have brought to light important details of Luso-
Swahili relations and quantitative data on trade involving Portuguese factories, the
fundamental structures of Swahili economic, political, and social relations have largely
gone unnoticed. 16 In this section I attempt to define Swahili society geographically and to
frame Swahili social groups and productive and commercial networks in the context of
15 The notion of material consumption as integral to the recreation of culturedness is best treated in R.
Goldthwaite, Wealth and the Demand for Art in the Italian Renaissance: 1300-1600. Baltimore, 1993.
16 See E. Axelson, South-east Africa, 1488-1530. New York, 1940; J. Strandes, The Portuguese Period in East Africa.
Nairobi, 1989; and A. Lobato, A Expansão Portuguesa em Moçambique de 1495 à 1530. 3 Vols. Lisbon, 1960,
respectively.