Artistry Permits and Custom May Ordain - Northwestern University

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The social and economic communality of Swahili society, across thousands of
kilometers of coastline, is unique in Africa. Swahili civilization developed maritime
commercial hubs at various points on the coast, shifting through time but always
projecting wheel-like spokes to distant towns and cities. 5 Multidirectional spokes
connecting rural regions to the major city-states crossed the entire East African coast
before the twentieth century. Though no single state—except for the sultanate of
Zanzibar in the 1800s—exercised military hegemony over the coastal towns, a macroscale
network of commercial and social relations, facilitated by oceanic travel, functioned as a
taut web of Swahili interaction in the precolonial period. In the fifteenth and sixteenth
centuries the cohesiveness of intra-Swahili socioeconomic relations and spheres of
interaction was apparent in a community of material culture that remained relatively
constant over 3,000 kilometers of archipelagic civilization. 6
In this paper I will analyze how material items—cloth in particular—both reflected
social attitudes and stratification and served as culturally relative instruments for
maintaining or challenging status in city-states and towns along the East African littoral. 7
Taking material consumption as an index of social interaction, I will first reassess the
physical extent and socioeconomic structure of earlier Swahili society. Then I will try to
answer the question of how power and status were understood, maintained, and contested
in the Swahili world during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.
I define consumption as the processes involved in using materials, including
socially valued modes of distribution. As such, it is a phenomenon shaped and
constrained by culture. 8 The consumption of material goods can engender and sustain
relationships between individuals and groups in society through mutually appreciated
forms of personal adornment, display, and (by extension) exchange. As Douglas,
Isherwood, Appadurai, McCracken, and others have argued, goods are often acquired not
5 P. Sinclair develops the idea of a “Swahili wheel” as opposed to M. Horton’s “corridor” in “The Origins of
Urbanism in Eastern and Southern Africa: A Diachronic Perspective,” in Islamic Art and Culture in Sub-Saharan
Africa. Eds. K. Ådahl and B. Salhström. Uppsala, 1995. 107.
6 Material culture is here defined in a broad sense (following Geary) as: material manifestations of African and
extra-African ingenuity and creativity, spanning from prestige items to more accessible goods of common usage.
C. Geary, “Sources and Resources for the Study of African Material Culture; Introduction,” History in Africa. 21
(1994): 323.
7 J. Perani has likewise traced the development of cultural congruities through the idiom of cloth consumption
in “Northern Nigerian Prestige Textiles: Production, Trade, Patronage and Use,” in Man Does not Go Naked:
Textilien und Handwerk aus afrikanischen und anderen Ländern. Basel, 1989. 65-76.
8 After Rutz and Orlove, “Thinking About Consumption: A Social Economy Approach,” in The Social Economy
of Consumption. Eds. H. Rutz and B. Orlove. Lanham, 1989. 1-44; and J. Carrier, Gifts and Commodities: Exchange
and Western Capitalism since 1700. New York, 1995.