Chapter 1 - East Africa

Summary

Introduction

This chapter will consider the eastern-facing littoral and its hinterland of the African coast, from the Horn of Africa to the Cape that borders the Indian Ocean as well as the offshore islands, of which the largest is the subcontinent of Madagascar. This is a straight-line distance of over 6,000 kilometres, running both north and south of the equator including the tropical and torpid zones. This huge area has often been neglected in modern discussions of globalization, partly because of poor documentary survival before the first Europeans rounded the Cape in 1488, and Vasco da Gama's voyage along the East African coast on his way to India in 1498. In recent years, the better understanding of the Arabic, Persian, and Chinese sources, as well as indigenous historical chronicles, combined with archaeological field and scientific evidence, including aDNA and chronometric dating, have transformed our understanding of the region, its population history, trading connections, and social processes.

One of the historiographical issues in understanding this region in the Early Middle Ages (600– 900 CE) is in the delicate balance of older— often colonial-period— interpretations of Africa's perceived “primativeness” where any innovation was externally driven through foreign colonization and settlement, and the nationalistic interpretations where all social processes were entirely indigenous and remote from external contact. More recently, African scholars have embraced a more global perspective in which African society was connected with a globalizing world, from at least the Bronze Age, and certainly in the early medieval period. It is this viewpoint that this chapter will adopt, that there were connections which often reached far into the African interior. These connections fed into indigenous social change and even state formation through, for example, the supply of prestige goods and the creation of wealth through the export of high-value commodities such as ivory, minerals (copper, gold and iron), slaves, natural products (such as timber, skins, aromatics), and precious stones (such as rock crystal) into the Indian Ocean world.