A serious debate has been going on over the past three decades on the nature of the East African coastal society: was it primarily an oriental transplant or purely African? For a littoral society at the confluence between Africa and the Indian Ocean, both protagonists have been misguided by focusing on one and ignoring the other. As Professor Abdalla S. Bujra has argued, both have erred by concentrating on the racial origins of a major culture and society rather than on the basic nature and historical role of that society.

      The identity and history of the Swahili have long been contentious. Spear argues that this is partly a function of the politics of history within a highly diverse and stratified society, in which people frequently invoke historical claims regarding foreign origins, social and religious status, or genealogy to substantiate contemporary political, social, or economic positions (1). While this may be so, the proposition seems to throw the baby with the bathwater, dismissing all such traditions as teleological, lacking any historical substance. Spear and others, for example, have tended to reject the Shirazi tradition among the Swahili out of hand, presumably because it came from across the sea, while embracing the Shungwaya tradition more readily largely because it is autochthonous.

      Professor Bujra has proposed a rethinking in a more holistic way, taking into consideration the strategic position the Swahili occupy between the African continent and the Indian Ocean. He has urged a closer examination of the economy, society, and way of life developed by the littoral people along the East African coast who have always looked both ways. The land provided the habitat in which the Swahili economy developed, including local agricultural and industrial production as well as exchange with the hinterland. It also provided the basic stock of population and the prevalent Bantu language. It is within this context that a diachronic and synchronic reconstruction of the Swahili language can proceed to show the relationship between the Swahili language and neighbouring Bantu languages, and between different dialects of the Swahili language from the Benadir coast of Somalia to the Comoros.

      But the sea also played a vibrant role in the life of the coastal people, producing not only sea-foods for subsistence but also articles for local and oceanic exchange. As Middleton says, the Swahili use the sea as though it was a network of roads, and is divided into territories owned by families and protected by spirits just like stretches of land. The sea enters their everyday life at every step, and even into their proverbs, prose and poetry.

      The interaction between land and sea gave rise to a polyglot and poly-ethnic society, and the culture that was developed over several millennia of intercourse between Africa and the lands across the Indian Ocean has been distinctly cosmopolitan, immersed in dense webs of production and exchange, ethnicity, kinship, and residence, with influences on material culture, social institutions, belief systems, language and literature, etc. Middleton views Swahili society as comprising a single maritime civilisation, with marked regional and temporal variations, a middleman society composed of commercial and cultural brokers who mediated between the commercial world of the sea and the productive one of the hinterland. It has given rise to a distinctive maritime culture. A history of cross-cultural interaction, trade and intermarriage with other littoral peoples all around the rim of the Indian Ocean leads Swahili peoples to situate their identity in the context of wider global exchanges. ‘Together with Middleton’s analysis of middlemen society’, concludes Spear, ‘we now see Swahili towns not as exclusive foreign transplants nor as solely local development, but as dynamic cultural and commercial entrepots in an Indian Ocean world stretching from East Africa to Malaysia…. the dynamic interaction between local and international forces in an expansive maritime world.’

      However, the confluence between cultures left a joint, a potential cleavage between the continental and oceanic faces of the Swahili culture. Coupled with a history of slavery and of colonialism, the society sometimes came apart at the seams. Economic hardships, and social and political tensions came to a head in the 1964 Zanzibar Revolution which sought to tear asunder centuries of miscegenation and cultural assimilation, asserting African identity while trying to erase the other side of the Swahili coin. Links with the hinterland have been strengthened, in the case of Zanzibar with the formation of the Tanzanian Union, and in the case of Kenya by political and economic domination of the interior over the coastal belt, now under the overall hegemony of the neo-liberal glolbalisation. However, it still has to be seen whether millennia of cultural interaction between the littoral people of the Swahili corridor from Mogadishu to Sofala, and their counterparts in the hinterland on the one hand and around the rim of the Indian Ocean on the other, and the distinctive civilization and language that have been engendered, will still stand the test of time, as it has done for centuries past.

      Much of the social science research being done in Zanzibar by visiting scholars from the West, and we hope also from the East as well as from Africa and within the country, in one way or another, touch on the history and culture of Zanzibar and the Swahili coast, such as history, anthropology, language, literature and music. The Institute could provide important facilities and guidance to these researchers.