Athwart the gathered glooms of gloomiest night,’
and to end life in the firm conviction of fate and predestination. His commentary (the Kashsháf ’an Hikáik el Tanzíl) displayed a logical reasoning, a profundity of learning, and purity of style which made it popular throughout El Islam, and it cleared the way for a long procession of similar productions.
In modern degenerate days the Bayázis of Zanzibar have little education and no learning: they must even borrow from the Sunnis commentaries (Tafsir) and other religious works, whence they can extract food for their own cravings of belief. Of these the most popular are El Bokhári, the Jelálayn, and El Baghawi; the abstruse Bayzáwi is seldom troubled. Logic is neglected: history, philosophy, and the exact sciences are unknown. Being Arabs, they do not require El Sarf (accidence or the changes of the verb), and the Alfiyyeh of Ibn Malik is the only popular treatise upon the subject of El Nahw (syntax, and the changes of non-verbal parts of speech). The Kazis of the Bayázi and the Sunni schools lecture in their own houses upon the religious sciences, and the elementary establishments may number on the Island 15 or 16. Here boys learn to read the Koran, and to write the crabbed angular hand which distinguishes these Moslems. Nákhodás master a little arithmetic and navigation at Bombay and Calcutta. Some few have been sent to England and France, where they showed no want of attention or capacity: on their return to semi-barbarism, however, almost all went to the bad; they robbed and plotted, and most of them died of drunkenness and debauchery.
The best education to be had at Zanzibar can only exercise the memory; it does little to cultivate the understanding or to improve the mind. Yet the people, averse to literary labour and despising learning in the presence of business, pleasure, or idleness, are shrewd and plodding ‘thinkers,’ and probably for the reason that their wits are not blunted by books and lectures, they are a match for Europeans in the everyday business of life. It is evident that where the profoundest ignorance of our elementary knowledge co-exists with practical wisdom, there is a large field for the labours of civilization, and that the western school, if kept strictly secular and pure of proselytizing, would be a blessing to the children of both sexes at Zanzibar.
CHAPTER XI.
COMPARATIVE ANTHROPOLOGY (ETHNOLOGY) OF ZANZIBAR—THE WASAWAHILI AND THE SLAVE RACES.
‘Venti anni sono, il commercio di Zanzibar era nullo; ora il commercio li supera 50 milioni di franchi. Per alcuni articoli, per esempio, pel garofano, per la gomma copale, e per l’avorio, il mercato di Zanzibar è divenuto il principale del Mondo.’—P. 17, La grandezza Italiana, by the learned geographer Cavagliere Cristoforo Negri. Torino, 1864.
The Wasawahili, bounded north by the Somal and the Gallas, south by the so-called Kafir tribes, extend along the Indian Ocean from Makdishu to Mozambique, a coastal distance of some 1050 miles; they also occupy the Zangian Archipelago, and the islets that fringe the shore. They call themselves Wazumba, ignoring the term Jabarti or Ghiberti (Gibberti), still applied to them by the northern Moslems. It is given by El Makrizi to Zayla in Somaliland, and by other writers to the Abyssinian ‘Moors;’ vocatur quoque Jabarta, i. e. Regio Ardens. This insititious race might be called Hamito-Semitic if anywhere we could discern that the mythical Ham, or his progeny, ever became negroes. They are, as they confess themselves to be, mulattos, descended from Asiatic settlers and colonists, Arabs, and Persians of the Days of Ignorance, who intermarried with the Wakafiri or infidels. The author of the Natural History of Man is correct in asserting their African origin, but he under-estimates the amount of Asiatic innervation. The traveller still witnesses the process of breeding half-castes: Maskatis and Baloch still trade to the coast harbours, and settle as agriculturists in the maritime regions, whilst the African element is maintained in the Island by a steady importation of slave girls. The Wasawahili differ in one essential point from their congeners of mixed blood, Egyptian, Nubian, Abyssinian, Galla, Dankali, Somal, and the northern negroids; these have not, those like the Comoro men distinctly have, the negro effluvium, they are the ‘foumarts, not the civets,’ of the human race.
I am compelled by its high racial significance to offer a few words upon this unpleasant topic. The odour of the Wasawahili, like that of the negro, is a rank fœtor, sui generis, which faintly reminded me of the ammoniacal smell exhaled by low-caste Hindus, popularly called Pariahs. These, however, owe it to external applications, aided by the want of cleanliness. All agree that it is most offensive in the yellow-skinned, and the darkest negroids are therefore preferred for domestic slaves and concubines. It does not depend upon diet. In the Anglo-American States, where blacks live like whites, no diminution of it has been remarked; nor upon want of washing,—those who bathe are not less nauseous than those who do not. After hard bodily exercise, or during mental emotion, the epiderm exudes a fœtid perspiration, oily as that of orange peel: a negro’s feet will stain a mat, an oar must be scraped after he has handled it, and a woman has left upon a polished oaken gun-case a hemispherical mark that no scrubbing could remove. This ‘Catinga,’ as the Brazilians call it, taints the room, infects every part of the body with which it comes in contact, and exerts a curious effect on the white races. A missionary’s wife in Zanzibar owned to me that it caused her almost to faint. I have seen an Englishman turn pale when he felt that a crowded slave-craft was passing under his windows, and the late Sayyid could not eat or drink for hours after he had been exposed to the infliction.
The Wasawahili may be roughly estimated at half a million of souls. In 1850 Dr Krapf (Vocabulary of six East African Languages) proposed 350,000 to 400,000. In Zanzibar Island they are divided into two great families, a distinction hitherto disregarded by travellers. The Shirazi, or nobles, derive themselves from the Shangaya settlement, also called Shiraz, on the coast north of Lamu in about S. lat. 2°; thence they extended to Tungi, four days’ sail south of the Rufuma river. Asserting themselves to be Alawi Sayyids (descended from the Khalifah Ali) they take the title of Muigni, ‘lord,’ equivalent to the Arab ‘Sherif,’ whereas the other chiefs are addressed as B’ana—master. The last Msawahili Sultan in the days of the Arab conqueror, Ahmed bin Said, was Ahmed bin Sultan bin Hasan el Alawi. The actual head of the family is entitled Muigni Mku by his people; by the Europeans, ‘King of the Sawahili.’ His name is mentioned in the Khutbah or Friday Sermon; he collects the poll-tax, and receives a percentage, some say one half, others only $2000, when paying it into the Sayyid’s treasury. He was never, however, admitted to any equality by the Arab ruler. The Shirazi clan does not now contain more than a hundred families.
The Wasawahili race appears, from the ‘Kilwa Chronicle’ (Huma Chronica dos Reys de Quiloa) mentioned by De Barros (1st Decade of Asia, viii. 4, 5), to have been derived from the ‘Emozaydis’ (Amm Zayd) or followers of their Imam, Zayd bin Ali Zayn el Abidín bin Husayn, the grandson of the Prophet. He was proclaimed Khalifah at Kufa in A. H. 122 (A. D. 739), under the Khalifat of El Hesham bin Abd el Melek, the Ommiade, by whom he was conquered and slain. The pretender’s son, Yahya, fled to Khorasan, where the Abbasides were already making head against the Ommiades, and the tenets of his followers, the Zaydis, spread throughout Yemen, where they formed, and they still form, a numerous and influential class. Other ‘Shiah’ partisans took refuge from persecution in East Africa, fortified themselves upon the littoral about Shangaya, and, extending southwards, became lords of the land. Some generations afterwards an emigration of Sunni Arabs from El Hasa, in three ships, commanded by seven brothers flying from the tyranny of their chief, visited the coast, founded Makdishu and Brava, and extended to Sofala. The ‘Emozaydis,’ unwilling to accept orthodox rule, retired into the interior, intermingled with the Kafir race, and became the Bedawin of the country. The second Persian emigration took place early in our eleventh century. A certain Ali, son of a ‘Moorish’ Sultan Hasan, who governed Shiraz, by an Abyssinian slave, finding himself despised by his six brethren, fled with wife and family in two ships from Hormuz to East Africa. At Makdishu and Brava, finding Arabs of another faith (Sunnis), he went to Kilwa Island, bought land with cloth, took the title of Sultan, and fortified himself against the Kafirs and against the Moslems of Songo-Songo and Changa, whose dominion extended to Mompana (Mafiyeh). The latter, together with other islets, was conquered by his son, Sultan ‘Ali Bumale,’ and the dynasty lasted a grand total of 541 lunar years before the arrival of Cabral at Kilwa in July, A. D. 1500. These Shirazis originated the noble family of the Wasawahili, who do not claim descent from the older ‘Emozaydis.’[[103]]