Content area
Full text
Introduction
Pemba, the northernmost of Tanzania's three major offshore islands that include Zanzibar (Unguja) and Mafia, has been considered a peripheral, largely rural place in later Swahili historiography, the agricultural "breadbasket" of nearby Mombasa and other Swahili coastal towns and regions (Figure 1). This image derives from the post- 1500 period, when Pemba Island was indeed the location of much agricultural and arboricultural production for export to the mainland and to international markets, and when European accounts of the area begin. Older historical sources concerning Pemba do not abound. But those that do exist suggest a different history in which Pemba was a core area of the Swahili coast in the late first millennium and early second millennium AD, when Swahili polities controlled the southwestern rim of the Indian Ocean trade system.1
Al-Mas'udi, for example, wrote of his visit in 916 to an island he called Kanbalu (also Qanbalu), believed by some scholars to be Pemba.2 On this visit, he may have stopped at the now-ruined town of Ras Mkumbuu, which he described as having a "Muslim population and a royal family."3 Several other writers cite Kanbalu in the following centuries, based on information from Arab merchants and travelers who moved in and out of the region, including ibn Buzurg in the late tenth century, al-Idrisi in the midtwelfth century, and Yakut in his thirteenth-century Geographical Dictionary.4 Pemba's Arabic nickname was al Khudhra, the Green Island. The island's pre-1500 history as conveyed in such accounts indeed inspired the earliest professional archaeology on the island, by James Kirkman in the 1950s.5 Kirkman sought to connect the site of Ras Mkumbuu with Kanbalu, but failed to locate levels earlier than the thirteenth century in the stone-built areas he investigated.6
Pemba's towns were also noted by late fifteenth-, early sixteenth-century Portuguese visitors, who mention five sultanates or kingdoms there at a time when only one ruler was known in Zanzibar.7 But the Portuguese characterizations of Pemba's history, although mentioning the presence of towns, and elites, underscore the island's potential to provide food to the mainland, and it is this latter theme that foreshadows its future marginalization. Duarte Barbosa, a Portuguese factor who wrote in 1517-18, noted that the offshore islands had Moorish kings, and held a "great store...