History of Kenya - Early Arab and European Presence

Early Arab and European Presence

Arab traders began frequenting the Kenya coast around the 1st century AD. Kenya's proximity to the Arabian Peninsula invited trade and later colonization. Between the first and the fifth centuries AD, Greek merchants from Egypt had some stake in the trade. About 500 AD, traders from the Persian Gulf, southern India and Indonesia made contact with East Africa. Trade led to establishment of commercial posts. Eventually, these commercial posts became Arab and Persian city-states along the coast. By the 8th century these city-states tended to have rulers that had accepted Islam.

Muslim traders had little incentive to go beyond the coast into the interior of Africa. The goods they sought—gold from the mines of Rhodesia, ivory, slaves, tortoise shell and rhinoceros horn—could more conveniently be gathered by local people in the interior and sold to the traders at the coasts during seasonal markets.

Swahili, a Bantu language with many Arabic loan words, developed as a lingua franca for trade between the different peoples. A Swahili culture developed in the towns, notably Pate, Malindi, and Mombasa.

The Portuguese explorer Vasco da Gama reached Mombasa in 1498. The goal of Portuguese presence was not settlement but the establishment of naval bases that would give Portugal control of the Indian Ocean. After decades of small-scale conflict the Portuguese were defeated in Kenya by Arabs from Oman. Under Seyyid Said, the Omani sultan who moved his capital to Zanzibar in the early 19th century, the Arabs created long-distance trade routes into the interior. The dry reaches of the north were lightly inhabited by seminomadic pastoralists. In the south, pastoralists and cultivators bartered goods and competed for land as long-distance caravan routes linked them to the Kenya coast on the east and the kingdoms of Uganda on the west. Arab, Shirazi, and coastal African cultures produced an Islamic Swahili people trading in a variety of up-country commodities, including slaves.

The Portuguese were the first Europeans to explore the region of current-day Kenya, Vasco da Gama having visited Mombasa in 1498. Gama's voyage was successful in reaching India and this permitted the Portuguese to trade with the Far East directly by sea, thus challenging older trading networks of mixed land and sea routes, such as the Spice trade routes that utilized the Persian Gulf, Red Sea and caravans to reach the eastern Mediterranean. The Republic of Venice had gained control over much of the trade routes between Europe and Asia. After traditional land routes to India had been closed by the Ottoman Turks, Portugal hoped to use the sea route pioneered by Gama to break the Venetian trading monopoly. Portuguese rule in East Africa focused mainly on a coastal strip centred in Mombasa. The Portuguese presence in East Africa officially began after 1505, when flagships under the command of Dom Francisco de Almeida conquered Kilwa, an island located in what is now southern Tanzania.

The Portuguese presence in East Africa served the purpose of controlling trade within the Indian Ocean and securing the sea routes linking Europe to Asia. Portuguese naval vessels were very disruptive to the commerce of Portugal's enemies within the western Indian Ocean and were able to demand high tariffs on items transported through the area, given their strategic control of ports and shipping lanes. The construction of Fort Jesus in Mombasa in 1593 was meant to solidify Portuguese hegemony in the region, but their influence was clipped by the English, Dutch and Omani Arab incursions into the region during the 17th century. The Omani Arabs posed the most direct challenge to Portuguese influence in East Africa and besieged Portuguese fortresses, openly attacked naval vessels and expelled the remaining Portuguese from the Kenyan and Tanzanian coasts by 1730. By this time the Portuguese Empire had already lost its interest on the spice trade sea route because of the decreasing profitability of that business. Portuguese-ruled territories, ports and settlements remained active to the south, in Mozambique, until 1975.