ABSTRACT

The social make-up of Swahili settlements before 1500 ce is surprisingly poorly understood. Scholars have asked ‘Who are/were the Swahili?’ (for example, Eastman 1971), attempting to categorise the coastal population as a whole, but few have thought about the ways society within the towns was differentiated and organised. As the chapters in this volume relate, we know a great deal about religion, trade, economy and material life for eastern African coastal populations as a whole over the last 1,500 years, yet there is little written about the individuals who comprised the social fabric before the sixteenth century arrival of the Portuguese. The situation after that is rather different, as histories written by Europeans and increasingly by coastal residents themselves paint a richer picture of society on the coast. This chapter focuses on the period before 1500 ce, exploring what can be said about the various groups who contributed to Swahili society through time. First, I review the ways that anthropologies of the contemporary coast have been used to extrapolate back to understand pre-colonial populations, both by the anthropologists themselves and by archaeologists seeking to populate the spaces of the material record before 1500 ce. I argue here that the historical context of those ethnographies should be taken into account, inevitably limiting their usefulness for understanding the deeper past. I then explore the understandings of Swahili society available from history and archaeology. Our ability to comment on the social composition of early Swahili society is limited, partly because very few archaeological studies have attempted to explore this. Nevertheless, this chapter tries to draw out a sense of gendered, ethnic and status categories in the precolonial past, through a combination of historical and archaeological sources.