Zanj - Division of East Africa

Division of East Africa

Geographers historically divided the coast of East Africa at large into several regions based on each region's respective inhabitants. In northern Somalia was Barbara, which was the land of the Eastern Baribah or Barbaroi (Berbers), as the ancestors of the Somalis were referred to by medieval Arab and ancient Greek geographers, respectively. In modern-day Ethiopia was al-Habash or Abyssinia, which was inhabited by the Habash or Abyssinians, who were the forebears of the Habesha.

Arab and Chinese sources referred to the general area south of the Abyssinian highlands and Barbara as Zanj, or the "country of the Blacks". Also transliterated as Zenj or Zinj, it was inhabited by Bantu-speaking peoples called the Zanj. The core area of Zanj occupation stretched from the territory south of present-day Mogadishu, to Pemba Island in Tanzania. South of Pemba lay Sofala in modern Mozambique, the northern boundary of which may have been Pangani. Beyond Sofala was the obscure realm of Waq-Waq, also in Mozambique. The tenth-century Arab historian and geographer Abu al-Hasan 'Alī al-Mas'ūdī describes Sofala as the furthest limit of Zanj settlement and mentions its king's title as Mfalme, a Bantu word.