Community and Identity in Material Culture

The identification of a cultural grouping termed ‘Swahili’ has long rested on the ability to discern a commonality of material and social environment across an enormous region, aspects of which have been discussed in previous chapters. Clearly, the coast and offshore islands of eastern Africa have been interconnected to a significant degree throughout the precolonial period, in a similar way to that noted in colonial histories. One of the key data sources for that ongoing interaction is the record of historical linguistics, which has traced a spread of Swahili languages from a north-eastern homeland southwards along the coast and to the Comoro archipelago. This has not only offered a crucial challenge to models of external origins, but also serves as a guide to the ongoing interactions that have made dialects of Swahili mutually intelligible more than 1,000 years since their original divergence. This mobility and entanglement are also invoked as causation for the ‘community of material culture that remained relatively constant over 3,000 kilometres of archipelagic civilization’ (Prestholdt 1998: 8). Certainly for the historical period, sources suggest that cultural cohesiveness was maintained through regular coasting travel along the littoral (Sheriff 2010). This seems likely also to have been the case in the deeper past, which resulted in similarities along the coastline over the longer term. Horton and Middleton (2000: 5) discuss this in enduring terms: ‘[the Swahili] have comprised a single social and cultural entity, Swahili society, with its own unique civilization of which they are deeply proud and possessive.’ These patterns of commonality have to some extent been the subject of this entire volume, but this chapter specifically explores the route by which communities of material culture were produced and maintained. Clearly this is more than simply a case of proximity or contact. Through attention to the shifting geography of coastal connections over time, it also becomes clear that the situation encountered by the Portuguese and later Europeans on the coast, while indicative, was not necessarily representative of the coast through time.

Aesthetics · Archaeology · Archipelagic state · Art · Civilization · Colonialism · Ethnology · Genealogy · Geography · Homeland · Identity (music) · Linguistics · Political science · Swahili · African history and culture studies · Global Maritime and Colonial Histories · History · Multilingual Education and Policy