TRADE WINDS: THE COSMOPOLITAN SWAHILI WORLD
Professor Anthony Gorton, historian, France
Monday 19–Tuesday 20 January 11.15 am COURSE FEES R230; Staff and students R115
The Swahili world stretches 3 000 kilometres along the African coast from Somalia to Mozambique. For two thousand years the peoples of the East African coast have interacted with Indian Ocean trade networks, creating the dynamic Swahili world. This course will introduce this cosmopolitan culture through written and material evidence from antiquity to the twentieth century.
The Periplus Maris Erythraei, a first century CE guide for merchants trading in the Indian Ocean, is the earliest written record of the coast. The North African scholar and traveller, Ibn Battuta, left a famous report of the coast in the early fourteenth century. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries European views appear in the writings of Portuguese sailors and adventurers. The eighteenth and nineteenth centuries saw the region largely dominated by Omani rulers based in Zanzibar. By the late nineteenth century, Omani rule had been replaced by British and German imperial control. Independence from colonial rule came in the 1960s.
Lecture titles
- Africa, the Swahili world and the Indian Ocean from ancient times to 1840
- A world transformed: the Swahili world from the mid-nineteenth century to independence
Recommended reading
Cartwright, M. 2021. The Portuguese in East Africa. World History Encyclopedia. https://www.worldhistory.org/article/1798/the-portuguese-in-east-africa/
Hazell, A. 2012. The Last Slave Market. London: Constable & Robinson.
Ruete, E. 2009. Memoirs of an Arabian Princess from Zanzibar. New York: Dover Publications. Wynne-Jones, S and LaViolette, A (eds). 2018. The Swahili World. Abingdon: Routledge.
Recommended viewing
Badawi, Z. 2019. Coast and conquest. (History of Africa with Zeinab Badawi 12), BBC documentary. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8hKeMgH6A34&list=PLajyiGz4JeyPq2lpEt2skZRhQsAspIQCp&index=12
TO BOOK: https://www.webtickets.co.za/performance.aspx?itemid=1575291783
Anthony Gorton studied at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) of the University of London and the University of Wales. He was professor of History for seventeen years at the Swiss campus of Pepperdine University (Malibu, USA) where he taught the Modern History of Africa and the Modern History of the Middle East. He retired in 2024. He has also taught in Portugal, Ethiopia, and the UK.