Ancient African History: The Lands of the Zanj (Race Question Unsettled)

by Independent Thinker, October 2, 2019, Raceology. 

Zanzibar Slave Market 1860 (only mentioned at very end of article)

Approximate land of Zanj

Source: http://cfsafricanhistory.wikispaces.com/Land+of+Zandj

Preface:

Short Version:

This article is more like notes to myself that I made from a variety of sources, some of it may be speculative or inaccurate, and/or based on revisionist content.  Please do not blame me one way or the other, I do not have the time to read entire books on this topic.  This is more of a start for further exploration, so hopefully...enjoy. To be revised and expanded on later. 

Long Version:

This was originally supposed to be just a chapter summary of a short 1960s book on Ancient African history, which is fairly short.  I was simply planning on summarizing it, and then adding other information, that may or may not have been included due to political correctness, or new findings or whatever.  Unfortunately, after writing this consulting Wikipedia and other sources that use more recent information, I'm a bit stuck actually as it seems there are conflicting accounts of all of this.  Is some of this revisionist history?  Honestly, I have no idea, it seems like historians STILL disagree to this day about some of the issues.

It seems to me that one of the central issues is in fact, the question of race.  What race were these people of the Zanj?  Were they Black sub-Saharan Africans, who mostly ruled their own kingdoms?  Or were the kingdoms mostly set up and owned and run by Arabs, and Persians, who oversaw the administration, commercial activities, and so forth, with some miscegenation between the Arab colonizers, and local Negroid women?  Based on the conflicting accounts I've found I'd say that the jury is still out on that one.  I don't have the resources, or time to research any of this in detail greater than the historians that devote most of their time to it, nor am I inclined to do so at this point.  Some of the information that I've seen written here and there though is obviously asinine and fails the test of genetics, for example, speaking of the Kushites based on some of the old writings and legends they tell of as though they were Black Africans, who mixed with European savage men or something like that.  Just pure nonsense, totally refuted by genetic studies of Arabs, in studies by Cavalli-Sforza, and more recent ones.  Anyway, there's basically just a lot of crap to sift through don't blame me for it one way or the other all I've done is tried to summarize the information here and there and offer differing perspectives. I think that the account given in the book is probably at least somewhat accurate however, and that the administration of the states was handled by Persian, and Arab peoples, that to some extent mixed with the Bantu tribes. This was written by the wife of one of the founders and leading pioneers of African archeology (who incidentally was at one point a Communist), anyway the work is outdated however.

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My postings, and an overall article of ancient African history is LONG overdue, like a year or so, it always got sidetracked for something else, but now I am starting to work on it again for better or worse.  This post summarizes and discusses what I learned from a chapter of a book I read on Ancient African history, however I have also tried to include additional information I've found from other sources.   Feedback as to the writing, inclusion of certain points, and the information contained would be appreciated. To be supplemented, edited and revised at a later time (possibly).

The first posting I will make will be on The Lands of the Zanj, which is close to what present day Tanzania is.  Next, I will move onto the most ancient sub-Saharan African kingdom of all, the Kingdom of Kush.

Article:

When Portuguese explorers came to the Southeast coast of Africa they were amazed at what they had seen, a relatively wealthy port, where the locals took little notice of them and were used to travelers. The head of the expedition Vasco de Gama said the locals "valued nothing we gave them".

Roman coins were found at sites along the coast dating to around the 3rd or 4th century AD. Even prior to this in the work "The Periplus of the Erythrean Sea" (A sailor's guide) a work of probably a Greek living in Alexandria and dating to around 110 AD, he described areas south of the Red Sea and the trade that went on there. When the winds were favorable the trade was to the north-west coast of India, and the locals traded items such as gold, and rhinoceros horn, which was thought to have magical powers in the ancient world, and was in great demand.  Apparently the locals were very tall, and the Arabs intermarried with them, although aside from "tall" the work tells us little else about them.

A little later a writer called Claudius Ptolemy, in his work Geography, which is dated to around 200 A.D. but was published in an edited form in 400 A.D., told us that dark-skinned people started moving in towards the southernmost part of the coastal strip, about as far north as the norther boundary of Mozambique. Thus it appears that by the 4th century black Bantu speaking people started to move in the coastal areas from the West perhaps between the Zambesi and Congo rivers. From that time until the 10th century there is little written information about it aside from Arabia, Persia, Indonesia, and China who mention the black slaves from there.

According to Masudi, the famous Arab geographer, by the 10th century the whole coast was populated by dark-skinned people as far North as the boundary between Kenya and Somaliland. It is likely they are the ancestors of the modern day people there.

Apparently the land was explored by Arabs, and used as a port for trading.  Then sometime in the 10th century AD the coast came to be settled primarily by dark-skinned sub-Saharan Africans, who most likely spoke a Bantu language.  Aside from them, several Arab refugees from Oman, where they had lost an argument over who was the true successor of the prophet Mohammed later, according to traditional stories, groups of Persians joined them. The Arabs called the locals Zanj (also transliterated as Zenj or Zinj), which now survives in the name of the island Zanzibar. According to Wikipedia, possibly based on newer information, however:

While the urban ruling and commercial classes of these Swahili settlements included some Arab and Persian immigrants, the vast majority were African Muslims. Mythic origins from Persia or Arabia should not be taken literally, but rather as a widespread element of Islamic society to legitimate elite status..^[16][17][18]

According to the book the immigrants apparently established famous places like Mombassa, Pembla, and Kilwa.  The history of which is recorded but may not be accurate as it is traditional history, and not the work of a historian. Masudi, the geographer was one of the people who came there and wrote a work called, The Meadows of Gold and the Mines of Gems. Little mention is made of events that were happening inland from the coast however.

An Arab sailing ship the dhow.

The coastal people were skilled in metal work, and worked with iron as opposed to silver and gold.
They were diligent traders and hunted for elephant tusks which they would use for trade in the Far East where it was in high demand. The ivory was shipped to Oman where it was later shipped to India and China. In India for making the hilts of swords and daggers, scabbards, and ornaments such as gaming pieces and chessmen. In China it was used to make chairs for kings, civil and military servants who were carried into the royal presence.  Iron could not be used, the chair was only allowed to be made of ivory. The Zanj used oxen for beast of burden and for war. Bananas, millet, meat, honey and coconuts were the main foodstuffs, they also used a root called 'Kalari'.

Another Arab writer wrote an account in the 11th century AD, and wrote about how the trade had increased and good were sent as far as Northern China, and visiting Indonesia and Malaya. The coastal towns and harbors grew, Lamu, Malindi, Pemba, Kilwa, Sofala, Zanzibar, and Mombasa.

1572 Mombassa from Civitates Orbis Terrarum by Georg Braun and Hogenberg.

They were independent each with their own ruler, but owed allegiance to the Arabs of Southern Arabia, who controlled the commercial activity. The Zanj did not have their own ships and used ships from Oman, and other countries. However according to the revisionist (?) works quoted on Wikipedia, some historians believe that:

According to other sources, the heavily Bantu Swahili peoples already had seafaring vessels with sailors and merchants trading with Arabia and Persia, and as far east as India and China. (This seems spurious to me).

They were exporting gold, ivory, tortoise shells, and slaves. The iron trade may have been the most important however, and the exports were especially heavy to India. Iron was in great demand in India, partly due to the dearth, and because they became masters of fashioning it into weapons. Many of the weapons of the Middle East were made from Zanj iron, fashioned in India.

The Zanj people imported Indian cloth, beads, and porcelain from China, as well as stoneware from Siam. Trade from the 12th century until the arrival of the Portuguese in the late fifteenth must have been on a scale unknown to the rest of the world. A lot of these imports such as the Chinese pottery must have cost a very large sum of money.

A picture of the Mosque ruins of Kilwa, which may have been visited by the Berber traveller from North Africa Ibn-Buttata.

In the sixteenth century a Portuguese writer and explorer, Duarte Barbosa, gives a description of Mombasa as a fine city, a city of the Moors. Which was full of beautiful buildings, and good streets. The king was a Moor. The towns were bustling harbors full of goods, and ships, but they remained separate and did not work together even when conquered and attached by the Portuguese. The language spoken there was "Swahili" Arabic for "the coast". Although it has many words derived from Arabic, the grammar is that of the Bantu languages, and it has loanwords from a very diverse array of languages that the people came in contact with.

Portuguese Colonization:

According to the book, the Portuguese arrival was disastrous for the civilization there, as they saw the riches of the Indian Ocean and wanted to control it, and grab as much loot as possible. "They fell upon the towns...with a cruelty and ferocity which the coastal people were unable to resist". They wanted to subdue the coastal towns and use them as a base for attacking countries further east.  Mozambique was the first city to fall to the Portuguese. They agreed to live in friendship with the Portuguese, but the Portuguese also forced them to pay a token to the King of Portugal. Ultimately Mombassa and many other coastal cities were destroyed, and their citizens massacred. The towns were seized, and the trade routes altered to suit the new rulers. Forts were built to house garrisons to control the local populations.

After control of the cities by the Portuguese the towns never recovered their prosperity, this is partly due to the fact that they altered the trading routes to suit their trade better in other parts of Africa where they were more firmly established like Mozambique. Going from Goa in India to Mozambique instead of the old and tested Arab routes of Cambay, India, to Kilwa, and Malindi. They didn't understand that the towns had little to export, and were dependent on caravans from inland to bring in supplies of ivory, gold, etc. They never gained the goodwill of the people so trade, and wealth declined until another African people, the Zimba conquered the towns of Kilwa and Mombassa from the Portuguese and sacked them.

Swahili culture never disappeared and went through periods of revival.  in the 17th and 18th centuries the area was again rules by kings in their own states, but the real power was in the hands of some aristocrats apparently. Several ancient towns that lay in ruins were found during this period.  The author of the book states, that to a large extent this civilization was heavily influenced by Arab settlers.  Islamic customs and inspiration spread through all types of customs. Apparently the local people also fused their own customs with those of the Arab settler people to create a unique Swahili culture.

The people had African customs such as decorating their faces with cuts. Also they kept an ivory horn as a symbol of power as a ritual object, which is an African, and not Arab custom. Also, there were witch doctors among in the society.  How much Africans affected the Arab settlers or vice versa is not clear. What is clear is that the costal cities did not much affect the people inland aside from trading objects with the coast.

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Negative Views of the Zanj:

Now that is a basic summary of the content of the chapter, although I would say that there appear to be a few omissions that the author either was unaware of, or thought would not be politically correct to post.  They are the following:

According to Lewis (1990) cited in Rushton's Race, Evolution and Behaviour (3rd unabridged edition). Although there was no bar to interracial marriage in Islam the Arabs did not want their daughters to intermarry with Blacks. The Zanj (whom Rushton claims as being hybridized with Bantu and other Negroids from West and East Africa, or perhaps almost fully Negroid in origin?) were the least respected of the Islamic people along the Eastern coast of Africa, with those of "pure" Arabic stock being the most respected.

"Most African geographers speak of the nudity, paganism, cannibalism, and primitive life of the Africans, particularly of the Bantu-speakers of East Africa, alongside Zanzibar which the Arabs had colonized in 925 A.D." (Rushton 2000)

"Maqdisi depicted blacks as having the nature  'of wild animals...most of them go naked..., the child does not know his father, and they eat people". (cited in Lewis 1990: 52).

From Wikipedia:

A negative view of the Zanj is exemplified in the following passage from Kitab al-Bad' wah-tarikh,^[21] by the medieval Arab writer al-Muqaddasī:

"Kilwa is one of the most beautiful and well-constructed towns in the world. The whole of it is elegantly built. The roofs are built with mangrove pole. There is very much rain. The people are engaged in a holy war, for their country lies beside the pagan Zanj. Their chief qualities are devotion and piety: they follow the Shafi'i sect. When I arrived, the Sultan was Abu al-Muzaffar Hasan surnamed Abu al-Mawahib [loosely translated, "The Giver of Gifts"] ... on account of his numerous charitable gifts. He frequently makes raids into the Zanj country [neighboring mainland], attacks them and carries off booty, of which he reserves a fifth, using it in the manner prescribed by the Koran [Qur'an]."

Anyway, aside from this apparent Zanj race controversy, I will say that aside from the commercial activities with other nations, the extraction of iron, gold, and obtaining ivory, and some foodstuffs, along with architecture, and good infrastructure, there is no evidence whatsoever of any kind of high scientific or cultural and artistic achievements. Nothing, that I can find which essentially remains the case in all of sub-Saharan Africa.

  Today the average IQ of Tanzania is estimated to be 71. The GDP per capita (2017) is 936.33 USD (nominal).

PS: I realize that it is asinine for me to ask others here for more information due to the obscurity of the material, and I've probably read more about it than anyone else. I doubt anyone will even read what I wrote here. But in case you find something interesting to add to this please do.

More on the Race Controversy:

According to Wikipedia's entry on the history of Tanzania, during the Iron Age:

About 2000 years ago, Bantu-speaking people began to arrive from western Africa in a series of migrations collectively referred to as the Bantu expansion. These groups brought and developed ironworking skills, agriculture, and new ideas of social and political organization. They absorbed many of the Cushitic peoples who had preceded them, as well as most of the remaining Khoisan-speaking inhabitants. Later, Nilotic pastoralists arrived, and continued to immigrate into the area through to the 18th century.^[7][8]

(Sources 7 & 8:

History", Absolute Tanzania, archived from the original on 28 December 2009, retrieved 22 March 2010

 Martin, Phyllis; O'Meara, Patrick (1995). Africa. Indiana University Press. ISBN 978-0-253-20984-9.)

However, Zanj refers more to the state of religion than color or origin. The Swahili, a non-contemporary enthnonym, included both Zanj, non-believers, and the Umma, Islamic community. Since Arab and Persian identity is patrilineal, elite Swahili claimed, often fictionalized, prestigious Asian genealogy. Modern misconceptions of cultural fusion or Asian origins developed from the tendency of wealthy Swahili to claim Asian origins and the disproportionate 19th century importation of Omani elements to Zanzibari and Swahili society (standard Swahili is the Zanzibari dialect and thus includes far more Arabic loanwords than the other, older Swahili dialects.

So according to this they were mostly Bantu Negroid people. Though other sources as I explained claim miscegenation with the Arabs, and Persians and with them having leading positions in administration. 

Also if one looks for information on The Shirazi people, we can find a wealth of information.

Today they are concentrated in Zanzibar, Pemba, and the Comoros. From Wikipedia:

Their origins are linked to Shiraz (shiraz) and the southwestern coastal region of Persia (now Iran). 
They traded commodities and slaves. 

According to:

 Kaplan, Irving (1967). Area handbook for Kenya. American University (Washington, D.C.). Foreign Area Studies. pp. 38 & 42. Retrieved 28 November 2016. About 2,000 years ago Negroid Bantu and Nilotic groups pushed into the area of East Africa from the north and west in successive waves and displaced the Bushmanoid and other non-Negroid inhabitants of the area... The Shirazi, who were Islamized Persians, also arrived, and some towns, including Mombasa, came under Shirazi control for a time... Before the seventh century, non-Negroid people are thought to have inhabited the coastal areas visited by the early traders. After the seventh century, it is certain that the situation changed, for Negroid Africans were reported as inhabiting the coastal areas.

However, East African [my italics] and other historians dispute this claim. According to Gideon S. Were and Derek A. Wilson, there were Bantu settlements along the East African coast by 500 AD, with some of the settlements taking the form of "highly organised kingdoms governed by ruling classes with well-established traditional religions"

(Gideon S Were, is possibly an Afro-centrist Kenyan professors?)

From Wikipedia:

The second theory on Shirazi origins posits that they came from Persia, but first settled on the Somalia littoral near Mogadishu.^[7] In the twelfth century, as the gold trade with the distant entrepot of Sofala on the Mozambique seaboard grew, the settlers are then said to moved southwards to various coastal towns in Kenya, Tanzania, northern Mozambique and the Indian Ocean islands. By 1200 AD, they had established local sultanates and mercantile networks on the islands of Kilwa, Mafia and Comoros along the Swahili coast, and in northwestern Madagascar.^{[12][3][13][14][15]}

More:

 in 1948, about 56% of the Zanzibar population reported Shirazi ancestry of Persian origins.^[56][57] 

Genetic analysis by Msadie et al. (2010) indicates that the most common paternal lineages among the contemporary Comorian population, which includes Shirazi people, are clades that are frequent in sub-Saharan Africa (E1b1a1-M2 (41%) and E2-M90 (14%)).^[59] The samples also contain some northern Y chromosomes, indicating possible paternal ancestry from South Iran (E1b1b-V22, E1b1b-M123, F*(xF2, GHIJK), G2a, I, J1, J2, L1, Q1a3, R1*, R1a*, R1a1 and R2 (29.7%)),^[60] and Southeast Asia (O1 (6%)).^[61] The Comorians also predominantly bear mitochondrial haplogroups linked with sub-Saharan East African populations in East and South East Africa (L0, L1, L2 and L3′4(xMN) (84.7%)), with the remaining maternal clades associated with Southeast Asia (B4a1a1-PM, F3b and M7c1c (10.6%) and M(xD, E, M1, M2, M7) (4%)) but no Middle Eastern lineages.^[62] According to Msadie et al., given that there are no common Middle Eastern maternal haplogroups on the Comoros, there is "striking evidence for male-biased gene flow from the Middle East to the Comoros", which is "entirely consistent with male-dominated trade and religious proselytisation being the forces that drove the Middle Eastern gene flow to the Comoros" [my bolding].

One more thing, during the 19th century Zanzibar was the center of the Arab Slave Trade.

Overall, I'd say that it seems very likely that the Arab, and Persian communities brought their customs to the lands of Zanj, and mixed with the local populations, and were then supported by Omani, etc., commercial administration, and were generally at the head of the commerce, and administration, until the conquest of the Portuguese.  What do you think?  Is there some afro-centrist Mumbo Jumbo in there somewhere?