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History of East Africa Kiswahili original
Walking upright
Millions of years ago
A long time ago there were many animals on earth. But there were no people yet. Some animals which lived in that time are the ancestors of the people. These ancestors did not look at all like people. They looked more like monkeys. Some types of monkeys developed who started to walk upright, not on four legs, but only on two legs. They were very small, only one meter. The bones of those animals were found in Kenya and Ethiopia. They lived millions of years ago.
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We do not know more about them because they did not write. We found only their bones and their tools. Their tools were only pieces of stone. The books of the authorities of today say that humans are the descendents of animals like these. Part of those humans left Africa to go North to Egypt, North West to Europe, and East to China, then crossing the ocean over a small dry place, to Alaska and into America. Who are we not to believe what the learned people say? If they will say differently later, we will believe them again.
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Egyptians are coming
8000 years ago (6000 BC)
The first people who had taught themselves to write truly are the Egyptians. They started writing by carving stones. We found the stones, thus we can read the issues they wrote about. The Egyptians started to write 8000 years ago. This is how we know that they had dhows. 5000 years ago the Egyptians even left the Red Sea (Bahari ya Sham) to discover coasts further way, also East Africa.
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Bantus are coming
2500 years ago (500 BC)
The Egyptians did not find many people at the coasts there. In particular, not in East Africa. The people who now live in Uganda, Kenya and Tanzania, are mostly Bantu, but, 5000 years ago, when the Egyptians started to sail along the African coast, there where only very few Bantus and they lived in West Cameroon.
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But the Bantus started to increase in numbers, because they learned themselves how to make iron. Therefore, they had good tools for digging, and good spears and arrows to fight enemies. Thus, the Bantus occupied East Africa. They did not all move there together in one period. Every time there was not enough space for their many children to dig and herd, groups went a little east until they found some free land to found a tribe. The Bantus needed almost 3000 years to reach Lake Victoria. That period was 500 years before Christ,
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Arabs are coming
2000 years ago (1st Century AD)
May be even 2000 years ago, the Arabs started to sail South, down the coast of East Africa. This was the period of Christ and the Roman Empire. These Arabs were not Islamic. Mohammed was born 800 years later. Some Arabs were Christians, many of them were pagans. But, they knew very well how to sail, even on the Indian Ocean. After the Arabs became Islamic, many of them sailed to the shores of Africa to trade.
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Also the number of Bantus in Uganda, Kenya and Tanzania started to grow a little (though nowadays there are more than 1000 times more Bantus in East Africa). Very few of them sailed, but they traded with the sailors who visited them. The Bantus sold mainly ivory and slaves. Slaves usually were African people who had fought a war with them and who had lost that war. Slave trade was normal in Africa, just as it was in the period of Antiquity in Egypt, Europe and Asia, this is the period of early civilizations, until the fall of the Roman empire.
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Like in Antiquity, slaves were used to do to work, and they were sold to other people, like the Arabs. Like in Antiquity slaves were also used as human sacrifice to the gods and the ancestors. In a sacrifice they were killed. In many African tribes, the slaves killed in sacrifice were eaten. This is called cannibalism.
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The slave and ivory trade between Bantus and Arabs became huge. The Arabs even had trade towns at the East African coasts. Also, the Arabs traveled in the inland to trade with villagers and tribal kings.
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Europeans are coming, and more Arabs
Starting 500 years ago (starting 16th Century)
The Portuguese started to sail South along the West African coast in search of gold. They knew that there was gold somewhere there because they were used to buy gold from Arabs, and these Arabs brought it from somewhere South of the Sahara desert, using camels. So, the Portuguese sailed off to find the place of the gold.
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It took them more than 40 years but in 1472 they found it It is Ghana. The people of Ghana are the Akan. The Akan tribe had many gold mines and that was where the Arabs were buying gold to take through the desert and to sell to the Portuguese. Now, the Portuguese could buy gold themselves, directly from the Akan. They did not need the Arabs anymore. That was much cheaper because the Arabs were used to ask a high price.
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To buy the gold, the Portuguese took from home horses, grain, silver, cotton cloth and wool. But they had to give them a lot of those things for little gold. They did not like that. The Akan asked them: “Can’t you sell us slaves? We need many slaves to plough our fields, to work in our mines, and to use them as human sacrifice and eat them”.
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Like all African tribes, and the Arabs too, the Akan were used to slave trade. It was something new to the Portuguese. On their own continent, Europe, many farmers were treated like slaves: they were told which to work to do and they were not allowed to leave their bosses, the nobility. Since the fall of the Roman Empire there had been not much trade in Europe. In the recent centuries, there had come more trade in things in Europe, but not in slaves.
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The Portuguese quickly learned the slave trade from the Africans. Selling their home products, they would buy the slaves from coastal African tribes North of the Akan. Then they would sell them to the Akan in exchange for gold.
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It was not often necessary for the Portuguese to catch people themselves to sell them as slaves. Local African tribes had caught many slaves already and were eager to bring them to the Portuguese trade posts at the coast to sell them in exchange for European things. Horses were much desired. Africans needed a lot of horses for war because in the African climate, horses died quickly.
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The Portuguese did not only join the African slave trade to get a better price for their home products in Africa. They also sailed to America. They found people there whom they called Indians because they thought it was India. But is was not India. So, nowadays we call these people Red Indians. They are really not Indians at all. The Portuguese started plantations there for cotton and other things. They quickly learned that Indians were no good field workers. They quickly got ill and died. So, African slaves were useful to be put to work on their American fields, as they had seen African tribes doing on African fields.
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Not much later, the Dutch and the English people started to do the same: sailing to all coasts of the world, founding colonies for agriculture and bringing African slaves to work on the fields. Though these Europeans had learned the slave trade from the Africans, they now traded more slaves around the world then anybody else (but they did not sacrifice or eat them).
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The Portuguese also were the first Europeans to sail around Africa to reach the coasts of East Africa. When they arrived they did not fear the Bantus very much, but they did fear the Arabs, because the Arabs had dhows and guns. They immediately started fighting with the Arabs, shooting their dhows and burning their towns, like Kilwa. The Arab dhows were easy to sink with cannon balls because they had no frames. Later, the Arabs seized some dhows of the Portuguese and they saw the frames. Then they started to build their dhows also with frames.
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Though they were more powerful in war at sea and on land, the Portuguese did not like to fight the Arabs because they could trade more easily by going to India. Also, in Africa they could build their trade towns South of the coasts where the Arabs were, in Mozambique. Mozambique even is a Portuguese name. The Portuguese controlled Mombassa, Lamu and Malindi for a period, but they were only asking tributes and did not take the government from the Arabs.
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Then came a time in which many Arabs and Persians came from their home country to live in the Arab coast cities of East Africa and Zanzibar. Islam spread all over East Africa. Now many different goods were exported from the East African coast, also special types of wood, spices and sugar. But ivory and slaves remained the main export products. The Arabs at the coast sold all this to the dhow captains to get from them dates, carpets and gold.
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The Arabs and Bantus had problems to communicate, because Arabs spoke Arabic, and the Bantus spoke many different Bantu languages. Traders developed a common language which is called Kiswahili. Kiswahili is not similar to Arabic, but it has very many Arabic words. Kiswahili is like a Bantu language, but it differs from all real Bantu languages. To trade in East Africa you had to learn Kiswahili. The mixed group of Arabs and Bantus who roamed East Africa to buy slaves and take them to the coast were called the “Swahili-people”.
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Around 1815, an Arab Sultan even moved to Zanzibar and started to rule from there.
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More Europeans are coming: they prohibit slave trade then take power in Africa
200 years ago (19th Century)
After buying millions of slaves offered by people from African tribes and bringing them to America to work on their plantations, the Europeans changed their minds. They started to think that trading and using slaves was not good. It started in England. Some people there said that the slave trade was bad and that it should stop.
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After a little while so many English people started to agree with them that the English government decided to prohibit the slave trade. This was in 1807, 200 years ago, a very long time indeed. It was even before the Europeans like Stanley and Livingstone started to explore the African inland. From that time, the English tried to stop all slave trade. Also the slave trade of the Dutch, Portuguese, Spanish and Arabs. They started to police the African coasts with warships and sometimes even captured slave ships on the sea and bringing them back to their ports of departure to release the slaves. Other Europeans stopped slave trade later in the 19th century. The Arabs and the Africans continued the slave trade.
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Stopping the slave trade did not mean the Europeans wanted to stay away from Africa. Quite the contrary. Now they were really coming. First came the explorers of the African inland. The Europeans knew the coast but they did not know what was inside Africa. The Arabs already knew very well what was inside, because they had traveled there to trade ivory and slaves. They knew Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania, Rwanda, Burundi and even Congo, because Arab trade took place in all those countries. This even had spread Kiswahili to all those countries. But the Europeans did not know these places. They did not even know that there was a big lake where the Nile was starting.
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In Egypt the English reopened the Suez channel between the Mediterranean Sea and the Red Sea. This was a very old canal which was dug by the pharaoh’s 2500 years earlier. It had collapsed. After that, the Europeans sailed to East Africa through the Suez canal which is much shorter than by going around South Africa.
For Europeans, traveling at sea now went even faster for European because they had learned how to build big and strong metal ships and how to build powerful steam engines in them. These engines were running on wood fire and coal heating water. The hot steam was rotating the engine. Also, they had improved their guns and cannons. So, nobody could win a fight from them anymore. A little later, they learned how to use electricity. Thus, the Europeans became the most powerful people in the world.
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The British started to control the Arabs. They took the Sultan of Zanzibar as a kind of prisoner in his own palace. The Sultan had to follow the orders of the British.
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The Europeans entered the African inland to rule there also. European businessmen wanted to dig the gold, the silver and the diamonds The wanted to grow the crops valued in Europe, like palm oil, cotton and sisal. The example of those colonists was South Africa, where Europeans had taken massive areas of land. They had started to organize production there in the European way. But they were using slaves, which was now forbidden. They reluctantly released their slaves to hiring them in such as way that they could be called workers and apprentices.
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But the contracts of the former slaves did not make them very free to choose, and white police was there to discipline, if necessary, workers who wanted to go their own way. In many areas elsewhere in Africa, the European businessmen who started to explore got permission from their home country to rule there as if they were a government.
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This was something new: not only to trade with the people living in Africa but to take the power over them and start to rule them. Europeans thought that taking power over African tribes was better than slavery. Businessmen of many European countries, like Britain, France, Germany and Belgium took control over big areas of land where many different tribes were living. These many different tribes all had been ruling themselves and were not used to be ruled by one authority, which many times was not even another country, but a business company.
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Moreover, the African tribes were used to trade with the Arabs only what they had on offer. But the Europeans wanted them to produce more by working harder on the land. Europeans wanted the Africans to work to build roads and railroads to bring to to the big European steamships at the shore crops and other export goods. The Africans were not used to that and they did not like it at all.
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The Europeans tried to force the Africans to work. They made money in Africa. Then they introduced a hut tax. Africans had to pay money for every hut.
The Africans asked: “How do we get money?”
The Europeans said: “We will give you money if you come to work for us”.
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The Indians are coming
125 years ago (end of 19th Century)
The Africans did not like that. Many tried to escape the tax. Not enough Africans came to work in the plantations, to build the roads and the railroads. Therefore, the Europeans started to bring Indian people to work in Kenya. That is how the first Indians came to live in East Africa. After building the railroads, many of them stayed there. They started to do businesses and build shops and workshops. This is how many towns developed in East Africa. They were built by the Indians. Indians hired Africans to do the work. Finally, Indians showed that they were better in getting Africans to work than Europeans. The Africans did not like that. And even today they do not like it. But the Indians make sure that you can buy a lot of things in Africa.
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Hundred years ago, in 1900, the railroad from Mombasa reached Kisumu town at Lake Victoria. Later, the railroads even reached Kampala and northern Uganda, near Sudan.
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Even More Europeans settle in Africa
100 years ago (beginning of 20th Century)
Many Europeans came to East Africa. Some started big farms, growing sugar cane, cotton, tea, coffee and sisal. Others came to help ruling the country as government officers, police or military man.
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Meanwhile the Europeans learned how to make small engines running on oil or petrol. These they put in cars, trucks and airplanes. They learned how to make telephones and radios, so they could talk to each other even if one was in Nairobi and the other was in London.
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From 1914 to 1918 there was a big war in Europe. Great Britain, France, Italy and Russia fought against Germany, Austria and Turkey. Germany, Austria and Turkey lost the war. The English took Tanzania from the Germans. The Belgians got Rwanda and Burundi. That is why in Rwanda and Burundi they now speak French. French is the language which was used by the Belgians. The German government of Tanzania used to speak Swahili. After this big war, the English government of Tanzania introduced English. That is why all Tanzanian laws are written in English until today.
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The Europeans went on turning large pieces of land into plantations and forcing the Africans to work there by introducing money and taxation. Many Africans lost their land. The Europeans went on building roads, railroads, trains, ships and towns. They imported trucks and cars from Europe. They [trucks and cars, hence “ya-”] came on the big steel ships. They introduced electricity in the towns, so there would be electric light on the streets and in the houses. Engines, big generators, were producing electricity. Later they even built power dams in rivers. They introduced schools and hospitals.
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East Africa got richer but many Africans were not satisfied. They wanted to be the owners of their own land. They wanted to rule their own country. Several times people in East Africa tried to start rebellions. Instead of working and producing riches, they now were fighting other Africans who were soldiers for the Europeans.
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Meanwhile, also the Europeans were disappointed. They had been dreaming about earning much money in Africa, but now they were earning little and they had a lot of trouble. European governments did not want to spend more money to help ruling the colonies. Demand for many products of African farms was declining, such as demand for cotton and sisal. All other products suffered ever heavier competition from other parts of the world so the prices and the profits went down even more. So, many Europeans wanted to leave. In haste, the Europeans granted independence to the countries of Africa. This happened in the sixties of the last century.
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Europeans go
50 years ago (1960’s)
The Europeans left, but the countries of Africa did not become like they were before the Europeans arrived. The Europeans had changed Africa profoundly. In East Africa, before the Europeans went inland, there were many tribes, all ruling themselves. The tribes held land, but many times they left one place, to go to another place. Sometimes they would move to free land, sometimes they would chase another tribe in a war. The tribe was the same, the land could be changed. The Europeans had made very large pieces of land into single countries with a single government. Now the people on one big piece of land were ruled by one country government, not every tribe by its own leaders. The countries made by the Europeans, like Tanzania and Kenya, were huge, and had very many tribes. After independence, the new African leaders wanted to continue like the Wazungu. They did not want to do like in Afrika in the past. They wanted to have one army, one police and one government for all tribes in the country. They did not want to give independence to every tribe. They did not want to give independence to all tribes. The tribes remained dependent on the central government of the country.
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So, independence was not independence for everybody. This caused a lot of problems. In every country, there were many groups who wanted to rule the country. They started to fight with each other. Many times different groups started to fight for power with guns. Military groups were usually winning the fight because they had the weapons. Usually, leaders of countries were generals.
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Military rulers know how to stay in power but they do not know how to rule a country. The result of the mistakes of uneducated soldier kings was that the people were becoming poor. There was no money to maintain the roads. Tarmac was disappearing everywhere. The roads became full of potholes. In the cities, the street lights and the sewage pipes got broken. Under such military governments everybody was poor, and everybody was fearing, even the military leaders themselves.
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Police and soldiers often were badly controlled. They did what they wanted. They harassed people to extort the little money they had, which became less and less, until you could be killed for your knife, your cooking pot or some firewood. This was the result of independence.
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But until today all Africans celebrate the day of their independence every year.
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The situation today
Today, in most of the African countries, the most damaging enemies of the common people are the governments. This ranges from presidents to the policemen on the streets. But everybody is trying also to get a government job and become an enemy of the common people too.
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Fortunately, there are other people who make sure most people have food and other things they need: these are the women, who work on the land, the children, who help the women and bring water, and the Indians, who import goods, organize factories and plantations, and create opportunities to work and earn money.