ABSTRACT
Pemba Island, 50 km off the northern Tanzanian coast and a similar distance north of Zanzibar, was a Swahili heartland from the mid-first millennium ce. Today it is predominantly rural and in the economic shadow of Zanzibar, belying its second-millennium urban settlement system, supported by a verdant landscape, many deep inlets and resources provided by mangrove forests, reefs and the Pemba Channel (Lane and Breen, this volume). Early success was based on mixed agricultural/fishing villages, among which Tumbe emerged to prominence on Pemba and the late first-millennium coast (Fleisher and LaViolette 2013; Fleisher, ‘Tumbe’, this volume). In the early second millennium, we see a shift to stonetown polities, absorbing a large proportion of rural dwellers into their growth (Fleisher 2010a, ‘Town’, this volume). This urbanisation aligns with broader coastal transformations yet was particularly vibrant here until the sixteenth century. In the fourteenth–fifteenth centuries, for example, some 15 contemporaneous settlements with stone architecture ringed the island; many were smaller earth-and-thatch settlements with a single stone mosque or tomb. At least five settlements were larger, with stone houses, mosques and tombs plus numerous earth and timber structures – Mtambwe Mkuu, Ras Mkumbuu, Mkia wa Ngombe, Chwaka, Pujini – but many of the smaller settlements with even one stone building were around for many centuries, not to mention all the village settlements. It is notable that in the late fifteenth/early sixteenth centuries, Portuguese sources observed five sultanates or kingdoms on Pemba (Barbosa in Freeman-Grenville 1981: 133).
