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The Lunatic Express
By Charles Miller Head of Zeus Ltd
Copyright © 1971 Charles Miller
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-78497-271-4
CHAPTER 1
Ivory, Apes and Owen
"A good Lamu man has a thousand wiles; so a bad Lamu man, what will he be like?"
The same monsoon breezes which air-conditioned Mombasa for George Whitehouse also served, over many millennia, as the key to foreign exploitation of east Africa. As far into the past as human knowledge can grope, this seasonal wind has been breathing back and forth across the Indian Ocean with metronome regularity. Local sailors know the monsoon by its two Swahili names. Between October and April, when blowing down from the northeast, it is called the kazkazi; when it veers on a 180degree angle and retraces its invisible path for the next six months, it becomes the kuzi. Although brisk and at times vigorous, neither kazkazi nor kuzi can be called tempestuous, and both drive as steadily as well-tended dynamos. Until the age of steam, one could think of the monsoon as a sort of meteorological paving machine which converted the Indian Ocean into a boulevard for whatever maritime nations chose to ply it in their pursuit of commercial or imperial expansion on the east African coast.
For many centuries, political domination of this land was not considered worth the effort of the outsiders. Trade was the major inducement. Over a period of more than four thousand years before the birth of Christ, merchant sailors from India, the Persian Gulf and the eastern Mediterranean were utilizing the monsoon in a spirited commerce with east Africa's coastal inhabitants. What drew these venturesome businessmen were natural resources at once exotic and profitable. A single dhow of eighty tons could take on sufficient elephant tusks to furnish every room in a maharajah's palace with ivory chairs and tables, enough rhino horns to keep a dozen sultans in aphrodisiacs for a year. Slaves and concubines were easily obtained on the coast. There was a thriving trade in tortoise shell, favored by cabinet makers for inlay work. The perfume manufacturers of the Orient paid huge sums for diminutive flagons of the ambergris spewed up by stranded whales on beaches between Mogadishu and Mombasa. Just behind the Benadir coast — present-day Somalia — lay an inexhaustible wealth of cinnamon, frankincense and myrrh; Cape Guardafui, at the tip of Africa's "horn," was long known as the Cape of Spices.
Far to the south, at the port of Sofala, in what has since become Mozambique, the dhows took on cargoes of gold which had been extracted from the almost legendary mines of Ophir in the interior. It is believed that Ophir was the ancient and hardly less mysterious city of Zimbabwe, whose ruins still baffle archaeologists. But the working of gold is known to have been one of Africa's earliest industries. Perhaps the most familiar and probably the most beguiling reference to this trade is found in the Book of Kings: "And Hiram sent in the navy ... with the servants of Solomon. And they came to Ophir and fetched from thence gold, four hundred and twenty talents, and brought it to King Solomon ... once in three years came the navy of Tharshish bringing gold and silver, ivory, and apes and peacocks."
By way of payment, the foreign merchants brought in cotton cloth, axes, spearheads, knives, flint glass, ghee, wheat, rice, sesame oils, wines and other manufactured or processed goods. In modern eyes, these imports may seem to suffer by comparison, at least for their lack of glamour, but to the industrially immature peoples of the coast they were of inestimable value. Neither party to a barter contract was likely to feel that he had been euchred. Kazkazi and kuzi wafted with them the sweet smell of success.
To Europe, this trade wind was something of a trade secret for nearly five thousand years, although the curtain was drawn back briefly some time between the first and third centuries a.d., when an Alexandrine Greek sailor made a long voyage down the coast. His book, The Periplus of the Erythraean Sea (meaning a pilot's guide to the Indian Ocean) described the flourishing east African commerce in detail, but it did not bring on a stampede of gold- and ivory-hungry Europeans. The anonymous author had picked the wrong time to write his prospectus, for the so-called dark ages were then overtaking the West, while a not dissimilar stagnation was concurrently settling over the coast itself. No one is altogether sure how the latter hibernation came to pass, although a principal cause was probably a prolonged period of raids on the coastal towns by warlike tribes from the interior. At about this same time, east Africa also lost one of its larger export outlets, southern Arabia, which staggered in the throes of a lengthy economic depression touched off, it is believed, by the bursting of a great reservoir which transformed the already harsh existence in that land to bare survival. Such disasters were not conducive to trade, and east Africa as a member of the Indian Ocean community fell into a coma that lasted more than five hundred years.
What awakened the coast from its uneasy slumber was Islam — or more specifically, the death of the Prophet in 632 and the ensuing clashes among splinter groups asserting rightful succession to Mohammed's spiritual stewardship. Persia and Arabia in particular did not seem big enough to hold the two main sects, known as Shias and Sunnis, whose bitter conflicts resulted in a wave of Sunni migrations to east Africa that were not unlike the later Puritan exodus to New England. It is hard to say which dhow was the Muslim Mayflower — we have evidence of amoebic settlements springing up on the Benadir coast and the Lamu archipelago as early as the seventh century — but all these pilgrim fathers were responsible for the first foreign-ruled dominion in east Africa.
Known as Zinj — a Persian word meaning land of the black people — this realm was not really an empire as we understand the word. Perhaps it would be better described as a loosely knit confederation of some dozen-odd city-states, scattered like small change along two thousand miles of littoral and seldom if ever pledging allegiance to a single ruler. At first predominantly Persian in culture, Zinj gradually took on an Arab personality with a steady influx of immigrants from sheikdoms along the Red Sea, the Hadramaut and Oman. All these colonists, Persian and Arab alike, gave the coast a remarkable face-lifting.
From the very outset, Zinj enjoyed a robust economic health. The settlers cultivated the land and harvested the sea, but the lifeblood of their prosperity was the same foreign commerce that had attracted their forbears. This trade underwent certain marked changes. While gold, ivory and spices continued as the leading exports, they now fetched higher prices, partly because of a tariff system and probably because Persian and Arab middlemen could bring to bear a keener business acumen than had less shrewd African merchants. The greater profits in turn permitted a vastly broader range of imports, which reflected the colonists' high living standards and cultivated tastes. The dhows brought in carpets and silks from Persia, cut gems, bracelets, necklaces and gold and silver ornamentation from India, silver plate and tempered steel swords from the Levant. Fine porcelain, in great demand, arrived in the holds of Chinese junks which made regular voyages to the coast for several centuries. Splendid mansions mushroomed. Built of wood, cut stone or coral and lime, these houses had pillared verandas and arched porticos, and they girdled spacious courtyards that glowed in smotherings of oleander, jasmine and roses. Indoor furnishings bragged tastefully. Alongside the polished crystal glassware on any well-set table lay silver cutlery and emerald-encrusted gold fingerbowls. Retiring for the night, one mounted a silver stepladder to reach an elevated bedstead of ivory-inlaid rosewood. Gold-embroidered silk robes were everyday garb. Thumb-sized rubies set off the silver hilts of the curved, razor-sharp jembias worn at every waist. Some towns had their own mints, which struck coinages of silver and copper. The historian Basil Davidson has likened such places as Kilwa, Pemba and Mombasa to "'city empires' in the same sense as medieval Venice or Genoa."
While it must not be supposed that Zinj was a millionaire's club, few went hungry. Ibn Batuta, the great fourteenth-century Moroccan traveler, describes the typical diet of the typical town of Mogadishu: "The food of these people is rice cooked with butter. ... With it they serve side dishes, stews of chicken, meat, fish, and vegetables. They cook unripe bananas in fresh milk, and serve them as a sauce. They put curdled milk in another vessel with peppercorns, vinegar and saffron, green ginger and mangoes." As an afterthought he remarks that the citizens of Mogadishu are "very fat and corpulent." Even the poverty-stricken could find the living easy. Ibn Batuta mentions a Kilwa sultan who literally gave the silks off his back to a beggar, and threw in a substantial gift of slaves and ivory. Almost apologetically, Ibn Batuta adds that in Kilwa "the majority of presents are of ivory: gold is very seldom given."
Despite (or possibly because of) its opulence, Zinj was often depicted by outsiders as a bizarre never-never land. This image may or may not have been deserved, although it must have resulted at least in part from the same notions of Africa that inspired medieval European cartographers to people the continent with comic-strip bestiaries. One Masudi, who traveled down the coast in the tenth century, declared that Zinjians rode oxen that could gallop as swiftly as horses. A fifteenth-century writer named Abu al-Mahasin had an alarming account of an ape invasion; in Mombasa, he said, "the monkeys have become rulers. ... When they enter a house and find a woman, they hold congress with her. ... The people have much to put up with." Even the one European to report, none other than Marco Polo, asserted that the inhabitants "are so stout and large-limbed that they have the appearance of giants. ... They have big mouths and their noses are so flattened and their lips and eyes so big that they are horrible to look at. Anyone who saw them in another country would say that they were devils." Perhaps this extravagance can be forgiven since Marco Polo never traveled within a thousand miles of Zinj.
The settlers themselves do not seem to have been put out of countenance by foreign misrepresentations, being occupied as they were with concoctions of their own. Most city- states had what might be called historical societies whose records, largely endless catalogues of begats and battles, uniformly reveal a singular gift for fabrication. Perhaps the most representative is the so-called Pate Chronicle, which covers events in the Lamu archipelago from the year 1204 to the late nineteenth century, long after the Zinj era itself had ended. This work would do credit to the Thousand and One Nights. We read of how a Pate sultan, fleeing from enemy dhows, scribbled hastily on a piece of paper and threw the note overboard, causing a shoal to spring up and halt the pursuing fleet; of how a maiden, about to be raped by a soldier, called out to the earth, "Open that I may enter," whereupon the earth obeyed and the soldier "gave up the profession of arms" on the spot. There is the islands' own Robert the Bruce, an aspiring explorer whose expeditions unfailingly ended in shipwreck, and who was pondering a new career when he observed the successful perseverance of a cockroach trying to scale a bathroom wall. "I have been outdone by that cockroach," declared the young man, "for it fell twice and tried a third time. God has sent it to teach me a lesson. I must set forth again." He did, and discovered an island of silver ore.
But the Pate Chronicle — indeed, all local histories — are largely records of scheming and aggression, lavishly spiced with episodes in which "Bwana Bakari stayed at Amu and the Pate people did not like him and made a plot to dethrone him."... "When Fumoluti seized his sword he struck Suleimani, who ran away and fell, outside, split in two halves."... "Thus it was that Pate conquered the country of Manda in one day. ..." For Zinj may have been history's most quarrelsome assemblage of feudal states. Diplomacy suggests a kaleidoscope of shifting alliances and palace coups animated by lust for power, relish for intrigue, damaged pride and simple orneriness. The Lamu archipelago was one of the busiest arenas of conflict, with its islands and towns of Lamu, Shela, Pate, Manda and Faza forever at one another's throats — a condition that might correspond roughly to hostilities among the five boroughs of New York. No one here, at least according to the chronicles, was ever to be trusted: "A good Lamu man has a thousand wiles; so a bad Lamu man, what will he be like?"... "The Pate people weave discord, then it is unravelled, and they ask, 'Who is it that began the quarrel?'" A war could be fought because of someone's failure to open a city's gates to visitors. One Manda elder, offended because he had not been notified of a council meeting, betrayed his country to Pate. A persistent call to arms rose from flaws to the title to the ceremonial brass horn of Lamu, which was pilfered from its rightful owners, whoever they may have been, with tedious regularity. Hostilities once broke out when Pate shipwrights at work on a dhow ignored warnings that their hammering disturbed the sleep of a Manda prince.
There was a lyrical quality to all these affrays. When surprise attack was deemed discourteous (which is to say impossible), declarations of war could take the form of verse, with opposing generals shouting metric insults for the better part of a day. Wars could end abruptly if the combatants became bored or if a heavy run of turtles called for the services of all available fishermen. Cease-fires were arranged with no more trouble than it took to shake a bag of sequins, recognized throughout Zinj as a flag of truce.
To whatever extent one chooses to believe the chronicles and other imprecise records, this was life in Zinj for nearly five hundred years: commerce, gracious living, intrigue and war in an atmosphere of Arthurian pageantry. It was a quaint and unorthodox little realm, apparently possessing fewer obnoxious features than do most imperial undertakings. Zinjians may have thrived on armed conflict, but they fought only among themselves and evinced little desire for territorial aggrandizement. What they had they held, and if one town forced another into subjection for a few years, the second community would have its turn in due course. One might almost say that these city-states saw their struggles as a sort of diversion, in which few innocent bystanders came to harm. It was all, so to speak, in the family.
Zinjians were also unique in that they made no real effort to impose their ways on the original inhabitants. Islam and Arab customs did come to shape the character of the coast, but the process was not one of decree; it came instead from absorption through widespread intermarriage among settlers and Africans, producing the people and the lingua franca called Swahili. Here, too, the Zinjians showed a striking aspect of their imperial personality: an indifference to racial immaculacy; their Swahili descendants were accepted on an equal footing in all walks of life. Certainly repression and inhumanity existed, mainly in the form of slavery, but this was not a Zinj or even an Arab innovation. Nor did the sale of slaves run into large numbers. (That would come under a different rule.) If Zinj could not be called a Utopia, it nonetheless gave a respectable account of itself as empires go.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Lunatic Express by Charles Miller. Copyright © 1971 Charles Miller. Excerpted by permission of Head of Zeus Ltd.
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