Kilwa Sultanate - Society & Economy

Society & Economy

Despite its origin as a Persian colony, extensive inter-marriage and conversion of local Bantu inhabitants and later Arab immigration turned the Kilwa Sultanate into a veritable melting pot, ethnically indifferentiable from the mainland. The mixture of Perso-Arab and Bantu cultures is credited for creating a distinctive East African culture and language known today as Swahili (literally, 'coast-dwellers'). Nonetheless, the Muslims of Kilwa (whatever their ethnicity) would often refer to themselves generally as Shirazi or Arabs, and to the unconverted Bantu peoples of the mainland as Zanj or Khaffirs ('infidels', later adopted as a racial epithet by European settlers).

The Kilwa Sultanate was almost wholly dependent on external commerce. Effectively, it was a confederation of urban settlements, there was little or no agriculture carried on in within the boundaries of sultanate. Grains (principally millet and rice), meats (cattle, poultry) and other necessary supplies to feed the large city populations had to be purchased from the Bantu peoples of the interior. Kilwan traders from the coast encouraged the development of market towns in the Bantu-dominated highlands of what are now Kenya, Tanzania, Mozambique and Zimbabwe. The Kilwan mode of living was as middlemen traders, importing manufactured goods (cloth, etc.) from Arabia and India, which were then swapped in the highland market towns for Bantu-produced agricultural commodities (grain, meats) for their own subsistence and precious raw materials (gold, ivory, etc.) which they would export back to Asia.

The exception was the coconut palm tree. Grown all along the coast, the coconut palm was the mainstay of Kilwan life in every way - not only for the fruit, but also for timber, thatching and weaving. Kilwan merchant ships - from the large lateen-rigged dhows that ploughed the open oceans to the small zambucs used for local transit - were usually built from the split trunks of coconut palm wood, their sails made from coconut leaf matting and the ships held together by coconut coir.

The Kilwa Sultanate conducted extensive trade with Arabia, Persia, and across the Indian Ocean, to India itself. Kilwan ships made use of the seasonal monsoon winds to sail across to India in the summer, and back to Africa in the winter. Kilwan pilots had a reputation for extraordinary sailing accuracy. The Portuguese marveled at their navigational instruments, particularly their latitude staves, which they considered superior to their own.

Nonetheless, the coir-sewn Kilwan ships were not seaworthy enough to brave the treacherous waters and unpredictable violent gusts around Cape Correntes, so the entire region south of that point was rarely sailed by Kilwan merchants. Inhambane was the most southerly settlement that can be considered part of the Kilwan trading empire.