Persistence on a Perilous Coast

This paper considers Swahili responses to violence and instability on the eastern African coasts of the Indian Ocean at the onset of colonialism. In Zanzibar, Tanzania, archaeological research suggests a reorientation away from the extraverted, maritime Swahili spatial practices of the precolonial era and toward mobility, refuge, and the intensification of rural inland agricultural lifeways that enabled persistence through chronic coastal slave raiding from 1500 to 1900 CE. Surveys in the northeast of the island, viewshed analysis, oral interviews, and historical texts help contextualize rural settlement shifts off the coast and inland into difficult terrain. Closer to the urban center of Zanzibar Stone Town, Swahili communities built tombs and mosques in isolated rural places for the first time, which may reflect displacement out of the urban center of Zanzibar Stone Town. Finally, stone field walls across the island reflect intensified investments in agricultural production outside the plantation zone, enabling nonelite participation in local and regional cash crop economies. These changes were part of an island-wide reorientation toward terrestrial agrarian lifeways as coasts became increasingly dangerous and subject to foreign control. Framing these strategies in relation to perspectives on indigenous persistence, the study enriches global understandings of bottom-up social dynamics in colonial contexts.