East Africa still preserves traditions of two distinct colonizations from Persia. The first is that of the ‘Emozaydiys,’ or ‘Emozeides’ (Amm Zayd), who conquered and colonized the sea-board of East Africa, from Berberah of the Somal to Comoro and Madagascar, both included. A second and later emigration (about A.D. 1000) occupied the south Zanzibarian coast, and ruins built by the Shirazían[Shirazían] dynasty which still lingers, are shown on various parts of the sea-board. Of these Persian occupations more will be found in the following pages. (Part 1, Chap. I, and Part 2, Chap. 2.)
Persia has left nothing of her widely extended African conquests but a name. In modern days she has become more and more a non-maritime power. She has wholly retired from the coast; and Time, who in these lands works with a will, presently obliterated almost every trace of the stranger. A few ruins at Aden and Berberah, and the white and black sheep of Ormania (Galla-land) and of Somali land, are almost the only vestiges of Persian presence north of the Equator. On the Zangian mainland wells sunk in the rock, monuments of a form now obsolete; mosques with elaborate minarets and pillars of well-cut coralline; fortified positions, loopholed enclosures, and ruined cities whose names have almost been forgotten, are the results of the civilization which they brought with them southwards.
The limits assigned by the Arab geographers to the ‘Land of the Zinj’ are elastic. While some, as Yakut, make it extend from the mouths of the Jub River (S. lat. 0° 14 30″) to Cape Corrientes (S. lat. 24° 7′ 5″) and thus include Sofala; others, with El Idrisi, separate from it the latter district, and unjustly make its southern limit the Rufiji River (S. lat. 7° 38′), thus excluding Kilwa. It should evidently extend to Mozambique Island (S. lat. 15° 2′ 2″), where the Wasawahíli meet the ‘Kafir’ races. The length would thus be, in round numbers, 15° = 900 geographical miles, whilst the breadth, which is everywhere insignificant, can hardly be estimated.
The Arabs, who love to mingle etymology with legend and fable, derive the word ‘Zanzibar’ from the exclamation of its pleased explorers, ‘Zayn za’l barr!’ (fair is this land!). Similar stories concerning Brazilian Olinda and Argentine Buenos Aíres are well known. ‘El Sawáhil,’ the shores, evidently the plural of Sáhil, is still applied to the 600 miles of maritime region whose geographical limits are the Jub River and Cape Delgado (S. lat. 10° 41′ 2”[2”]), and whose ethnographic boundaries are the Somal and the ‘Kafir’ tribes. Others derive it from El Suhayl, the beautiful Canopus which, surrounded by a halo of Arab myth, ever attracts the eye of the southing mariner. The Wasawahíli,’[[29]] or slave tribes, are fancifully explained by ‘Sawwá hílah,’ he ‘played tricks,’—rascals all.
The coast races who, like their neighbours the Somal, have their own African names for places, call Zanzibar Island by the generic term Kisíwa—insula. It is thus opposed to Mpoa-ni, the coast, and to Mrímá, the mainland.[[30]] The latter, however, is properly speaking limited to the maritime uplands between Tanga and the Pangani river. Zanzibar city is Unguja (pronounced Ungudya, not Anggouya). The word appears in an ancient settlement on the eastern coast of the island, and the place is still called Unguja Mku, Old Unguja. Some still call it Lunguja, apparently an older form. We find ‘Lendgouya’ in the Commercial Traveller Yakut (early thirteenth century); but ‘Bandgouia’ (Abd el Rashid bin Salih el Bakui, A.D. 1403) is clearly a corruption.
Finally, Zanzibar has been identified by palæogeographers with the Ptolemean Μενουθιὰς or Μενουθεσίας (iv. 9), and with the Μενουθιὰς of the Periplus (Geog. Græci Minores of R. Muller, Paris, 1855), in some copies of which Menouthesías also occurs. Its rivals, however, for this honour are Pemba, Mafiyah (the Monfia of our maps) and Bukini, the northern and north-western parts of Malagash or Madagascar.[[31]] Ptolemy, it may be observed, places the two important sites, Menouthias and Prasum (or Prassum) in a separate chapter (iv. 9), whereas his principal list of stations is in Book iv. chapter 7. He lays down the site of Menouthias in S. lat. 12°, and nearly opposite the Lunar Mountain, and the Lakes whence the Nile arises (S. lat. 12° 30′). The mouth of the Rhapta river and Rhapta, the metropolis of Barbaria, are in S. lat. 7°, the Rhapta promontory is in S. lat. 8° 20′ 5″, and the Prasum promontory in S. lat. 15°. By applying the correction as before, we have for Menouthias S. lat. 6° (the capital of Zanzibar being in S. lat. 6° 9′ 6″); for the Lakes, 6° 30′, which would nearly bisect Tanganyika; for Rhapta river and city, S. lat. 1° (or more exactly, S. lat. 1° 10′); the mouth of the Jub river being in S. lat. 0° 14′ 30″; the Rhapta promontory in S. lat. 2° 30′, corresponding with the coast about Patta; and finally, for Prasum S. lat. 9° 10′—Cape Delgado being in S. lat. 10° 41′ 12″.
The account given of Menouthias in the Periplus (written between A.D. 64, Vincent, and A.D. 210, Letronne[[32]]) is that of an eyewitness: ‘After two nychthemeral days (each of 100 miles) towards the west [here the text is evidently corrupt] comes Menouthias, altogether insulated, distant from the land about 300 stadia (30 geographical miles), low and tree-clad. In it are many kinds of birds and mountain tortoises (land turtle?). It has no other wild beasts but crocodiles (iguanas), and these do not injure man. There are in it sewn boats and monoxyles (canoes), which they use for salt-pans [here the text is defective] and for catching turtle. In this island they trap them after a peculiar fashion with baskets (the modern wigo) instead of nets, letting them down at the mouth of stony inlets’ (chap. i. 15).
The next chapter informs us: ‘From which (island) after two runs (each 50 miles)[[33]] lies the last emporium of the continent of Azania, called Tà Rhaptà, thus named from the before-mentioned sewn-together vessels. In it are much ivory and tortoise-shell. The men, who in this country are of the largest size, live scattered (in the mountains?), and each tribe in its own place is subject to tyrants’ (‘tyranneaulx’ or petty chiefs).
Here, then, we have Rhapta 33 leagues (100 miles = 1° 40′) beyond Menouthias. Captain Guillain (Prem. Partie, p. 115) would make the former correspond with the debouchure of the Oufidji river (Rufiji or Lufiji), in S. lat. 7° 50′. But the Periplus, unlike Ptolemy, alludes only to a port, not to a river mouth, nor does the coast-line here show any promontory. Others have proposed Point Puna (S. lat. 7° 2′ 42″), the south-western portal of the Zanzibar manche, near the modern trading port of Mbuamáji, which in former ages may have been more important. D’Anville, Vincent, and De Froberville boldly prefer Kilwa (in round numbers S. lat. 9°), which is distant 157 geographical miles from the southernmost point of Zanzibar, and I think they are right. It is safer in such matters to suspect an error of figures and of distances than of topography, especially where the geographical features are so well marked and cannot be found in other places. Computations of ancient courses and log-books can have little value except when they serve to confirm commonly topographical positions. Kilwa has ever been a central station on the Zanzibar coast, and the slaves brought from the interior are still remarkable for size. Moreover, as Dr Beke well observes (Sources of the Nile, p. 69), ‘In attempting to fix in the map of Africa the true position of Ptolemy’s lakes and sources of the Nile, we must discard all notions of their having been determined absolutely by means of astronomical observations, special maps of particular localities, or otherwise, and regard them simply as derived from oral information, and as laid down relatively to some well-known point or points on the coast.’[[34]]
Zanzibar, the principal link in the chain of islets which extends from Makdishu (Magadoxo), in the Barr el Benadir or Haven-land, to Cape Corrientes, is a long narrow reef, with the major axis disposed from N. N. W. to S. S. E., and subtending a deep bight or bend in the coast, justly enough called the Barbaric Gulf. The length is 48·25 geographical miles from Ra’as Nunguwi, the northern (S. lat. 5° 42′ 8″ Raper), to Ra’as Kizimkaz, the southern, extremity (S. lat. 6° 27′ 7″ Raper). The breadth is 18 miles from the Fort in E. long. 39° 14′ 5″ Raper’s correction, to the continental coast in E. long. (G.) 39° 32′ 5″. French travellers assume a max. length of 83 kilomètres, and a max. breadth of 33. The capital (S. lat. 6° 9′ 6″) corresponds in parallel with the Pernambucan province to the west and with Java and central New Guinea to the east. The corrected longitude (laid down by Captain Smee in 1811 as E. lat. 39° 15′) gives a difference of Greenwich time 2h. 36m. and 56s.. From Southampton round the Cape the run is usually laid down at 8500 miles, viâ Suez 6200. The Lesseps Canal has shortened the distance from Marseille by 2000 leagues, and thus has placed Zanzibar within 1600 leagues of the great port—in fact, about the distance of the Gaboon ex-colony.