Artistry Permits and Custom May Ordain - Northwestern University

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prestige-value were crucial to the accretion and preservation of power in coastal society,
and thus debates over leadership were often argued in a language of material symbolism.
Power in Swahili society could be contested through the consumption of materials, and
although group boundaries were fixed, they were not impermeable, as shown by the fact
that those with access to foreign and regional marketplaces were able rise in rank.
Material consumption serves as a lens through which the socially defined contours of
status, authority, consumer demand, and taste in Swahili society can be discerned.
Plotting Swahili modes of consumption not only offers a snapshot of the “artistry” of the
Swahili world but also exposes the social realities of mundane and extraordinary existence,
or how the Swahili essentially ordered life: the “custom” of Camões. This paper has
attempted to map materials through arenas of Swahili experience, and I hope that it has
thereby exposed enough of the complex strands (to borrow a rather appropriate metaphor
from Nurse and Spear’s seminal study of Swahili society) of Swahili social history to
provide an idea of how the whole fabric might have appeared.