Artistry Permits and Custom May Ordain - Northwestern University

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Comoros. 22 Such reconstructions have produced a picture of a remarkably unified realm of
Swahili and Comorian speakers (and speakers of related dialects) comprising a far-flung
and largely coastal linguistic community. While linguists have traced the movements of
Swahili people as far south as northern Mozambique, the extreme southern
coast—defined here as extending from Mozambique Island to just south of Sofala in the
fifteenth century—has been largely excluded from linguistic analyses. 23
The linguistic communality that characterized the East African coast from Barawa
to Sofala in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries until the middle of the seventeenth
century is evident from contemporaneous written sources. 24 Portuguese sources are very
clear that the language of the East African coast was not Arabic, though undoubtedly
some Arabic speakers were in the region. Instead, coastal East Africans spoke what
Europeans often referred to as the “language of the coast,” distinct from that of interior
peoples and a “soft” language unlike the “harshness” of Arabic. 25 Thus Chittick’s
assertion that a form of Swahili was spoken in the sixteenth century is probably accurate
for much of the coast as well as the extreme southern maritime communities. 26 Suggestive
of the relationship between the languages of the southern and central coasts—defined
here as the area between the sultanates of Sofala and Malindi—the language of Zanzibar
22 The most comprehensive studies include Hinnebusch and Nurse, Swahili and Sabaki: A Linguistic History.
Berkeley, 1993; and D. Nurse and T. Spear, The Swahili.
23 The extreme south has been neglected primarily because Swahili dialects are no longer spoken south of
Mozambique Island. On languages of coastal northern Mozambique, see E. Rzewuski, Vocabulario da Lingua
Mwani. Maputo, 1979; and A. Prata, “Análise Etno-Linguística do Xecado de Sangage,” Trabalhos de Arqueologia
e Antropologia. 2 (1987): 26-37.
24 Though Merka is often considered a Swahili city in the sixteenth century, V. Grottanelli’s “The Peopling of the
Horn of Africa” (in East Africa and the Orient: Cultural Syntheses in Pre-Colonial Times. Eds. N. Chittick and R.
Rotberg. New York, 1967. 44-75.) suggests that by the fifteenth century it was largely Somali-speaking.
25 The Portuguese often termed the entire Swahili coast the “coast of Melinde,” since their connections to the
city-state were so strong. Luiz Mariano, in discussing Malagasy at the turn of the seventeenth century, contrasts
it with the language spoken on the East African coast. P. Luiz Mariano, “Exploração Portugueza de Madagascar.”
cf. Manuel de Faria e Sousa’s mention of place names on the coast between Kirimba and Sofala. Asia Portuguesa.
In Records. 1:22. Like other sources, de Figueroa noted that the language of the coast was “clearer than Arabic.”
M. de Figueroa, Conquista de las Indias de Persia e Arabia que hizo la armada del rey don Manuel de Portugal. In A
Spaniard in the Portuguese Indies. Ed. J. McKenna. Cambridge, 1967. 62. R. Gregson reviews the physiognomy
of what the Portuguese called East African “Moors” in “Trade and Politics in South-East Africa,” 413-43. Briefly,
the Portuguese distinguished between “white mouros” from the northern Indian Ocean and “dark” or “tawny
mouros” (and in some cases simply “black”) on the East African coast. Indeed, Europeans often described the
physiognomy of coastal Muslims in the same terms as non-Muslims of the southern African interior. J. Fryer, for
example, described the Sultan of Nzwani, a “White Turbant” Muslim, as a ‘Wooly-pated Coffery.” A New Account
of East India and Persia. Vol. 1. Ed. W. Crooke. London, 1909. 62.
26 N. Chittick, “The East Coast, Madagascar and the Indian Ocean,” Cambridge History of Africa. Vol. 3. London,
1977. 218-19. cf. G. Freeman-Grenville, “Medieval Evidences for Swahili,” Journal of the East African Swahili
Committee. 29. 1959. 1-23; and Nurse and Spear, The Swahili, 49-51.