Academic Reading — Test 121

Reading passage

For roughly a thousand years, a chain of prosperous towns stretched along the eastern coast of Africa, from the southern reaches of present-day Somalia down to the northern coast of Mozambique. These settlements, known collectively as the Swahili towns, were not a single empire ruled from one capital. Instead, each was an independent city-state with its own ruler, customs and alliances. What bound them together was a shared language, a common religion and, above all, a dependence on maritime trade. The word "Swahili" itself derives from an Arabic term meaning "of the coast", a fitting description for a civilisation whose fortunes rose and fell with the sea. The prosperity of these towns rested on their position within a vast network of trade that linked the African interior to the lands bordering the Indian Ocean. Each year, the monsoon winds reversed direction with remarkable regularity. From roughly November to March they blew from the north-east, carrying vessels from Arabia, Persia and India towards the African coast; from April onwards they blew from the south-west, allowing those same ships to return home. This predictable rhythm meant that merchants could plan long voyages with confidence. Gold, ivory, animal hides and, regrettably, enslaved people were gathered from the interior and exchanged at the coastal markets for cotton cloth, glazed pottery, glass beads and porcelain brought from distant ports. The Swahili merchants acted chiefly as intermediaries, and it was this role as middlemen that generated their considerable wealth. By the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, several of these towns had grown into impressive urban centres. Kilwa, situated on an island off the coast of modern Tanzania, became perhaps the most celebrated of them all. It controlled the trade in gold that flowed northwards from the inland kingdom of Great Zimbabwe, and the revenue from this commerce funded the construction of remarkable stone buildings. The Great Mosque at Kilwa and the nearby palace of Husuni Kubwa, with its courtyards and even a bathing pool, testified to the town's affluence. The Moroccan traveller Ibn Battuta, who visited in the 1330s, described Kilwa as one of the most beautiful and well-constructed towns he had seen. Coins were minted locally, a sign of both wealth and political confidence. The architecture of the Swahili towns reflected their distinctive culture. The wealthier residents built houses of coral stone, quarried from the reefs and bound together with lime mortar. These dwellings, sometimes several storeys high, were arranged around interior courtyards and decorated with carved plasterwork and recessed niches. The ordinary population, however, continued to live in simpler houses of mud and thatch. This contrast in building materials reveals a society sharply divided by wealth. The Swahili were Muslims, and almost every town of any significance possessed at least one mosque, yet their faith and culture blended influences from Africa, Arabia and Persia into something genuinely new rather than borrowed wholesale from any single source. The decline of the Swahili towns is often attributed to the arrival of European powers, though the picture is more complicated than that. When the Portuguese explorer Vasco da Gama reached the coast in 1498, he found a thriving commercial world that he and his successors were determined to control. Over the following decades the Portuguese seized key ports, demanded tribute and attempted to divert the lucrative trade into their own hands. They built fortifications, the most famous being Fort Jesus at Mombasa, completed near the end of the sixteenth century. Yet the Portuguese never fully mastered the region. Their grip was frequently challenged, and the rerouting of much Indian Ocean commerce gradually undermined the old trading patterns on which the towns depended. Some settlements were sacked; others simply faded as their markets shrank. It would be a mistake, however, to imagine that Swahili civilisation vanished entirely. Although many of the great stone towns were reduced to ruins, the coastal culture endured and adapted. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries the island of Zanzibar rose to prominence under the rule of the Sultanate of Oman, becoming a major centre for the trade in cloves and, once again, enslaved people. The Swahili language survived and spread, and today it serves as a lingua franca for tens of millions of people across East Africa. The crumbling palaces and mosques that remain along the coast are a reminder of a sophisticated, cosmopolitan world that flourished for centuries through its mastery of the sea.