East African Coastal History (original) (raw)

1999, The Journal of African History

be very risky to rely on linguistic evidence alone to establish the absolute dating of the processes it describes. Moreover, linguists can provide only reasonable approximations as to where language-speaking groups ancestral to modern language-speakers might have been located. Because the interpretation of Nurse and Hinnebusch ventures into such terrain, this facet of their work invites critical commentary. Essentially, the language history Nurse and Hinnebusch present adheres closely to one that has evolved among ethnolinguists over the past two decades and which was outlined in far less detail in an earlier volume Nurse co-authored with Thomas Spear.# This model holds that the original core Swahili-speakers, the Proto-Swahili, and their nearby hinterland neighbors stemmed from remote Eastern Bantu-speakers who first had inhabited the region between the Western Rift and Lake Nyanza sometime after  .. Their closest coastal-hinterland ancestors had been the Proto-Northeast-Coastal Bantu, who the authors and other linguists believe had appeared in the interior between the Wami and Rufiji rivers, c. - .. Soon, the Northeast-Coastal grouping split into several divergent language clusters, including the Proto-Sabaki-speakers. Spreading (or migrating, as Nurse and Spear believe), along the coast and coastal hinterland, the Proto-Sabakispeakers were an extremely short-lived, though relatively compact community. According to Nurse and Spear, and Nurse and Hinnebusch, they migrated northwards across the Juba River to a location associated with the legendary Shungwaya, and there began evolving into separate proto-language-speaking communities, namely the Swahili, Mijikenda, Pokomo, Elwana\Malankote and Comorians. By late in the first millennium, this process had reached a very advanced stage. The Swahili then split into two, broad, dialect-speaking groups, Northern and Southern Swahili. This paradigm also suggests that the ancient Swahili and their Sabaki-speaking relations inherited a host of cultural traits from their ancestors that included, among other things, a wetland farming tradition that later, with expansion into drier environments, saw the addition of cereal cropping, livestock breeding, limited fishing and iron-working (pp. -). Some of these practices long before had been passed to their Eastern Bantu ancestors from Southern Cushitic-speakers who inhabited the region between Lake Nyanza and the Eastern Rift. Additionally, Northeast-Coastal-and Sabaki-speakers continued having significant contact with Southern Cushitic groups who dwelt around the headwaters of the Wami River, as well as in the Taita Hills (pp. -). Southern Cushitic terms concerning cereals cultivation and livestock, for example, were borrowed in Northeast-Coastal and Sabaki. Later, Pokomo and Northern Swahili-speakers continued borrowing from Southern and Eastern Cushitic groups found in the Tana River area (p. ). Indian and Persian terms concerning kinship (e.g. bibi and bwana), coconut and mango cultivation, cotton, fishing and spices also found their way into Sabaki and Proto-Swahili, attesting to the adaptations to the coastal environment that occurred in both those stages, as well as to new cultural influences (pp. -, ). As in the earlier Nurse and Spear volume, Nurse and Hinnebusch indicate that most Arabic cultural influences date from this later period (pp. -, -). This book also includes fresh attestations concerning the post-sixteenth-century history of Swahili, for example evidence of a heavy preponderance of northern cultural influences, primarily from the Lamu archipelago, on southern dialects between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries (pp. -). This was followed in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries by the pre-eminence of Kiunguja, the Zanzibar dialect, which of course became the standard form of Swahili.