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ISLAM IN THE INTERIOR OF PRECOLONIAL EAST AFRICA: EVIDENCE FROM LAKE TANGANYIKA

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 August 2019

PHILIP GOODING
PHILIP GOODING*
Affiliation:
McGill University
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Abstract

Most histories of East Africa's precolonial interior only give cursory attention to Islam, especially in histories of present-day west-central Tanzania and the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo. Most converts to Islam in this context are usually viewed as ‘nominal’ Muslims. This article, by contrast, builds on recent scholarship on other regions and time periods that questions the conceptual validity of the ‘nominal’ Muslim. New converts necessarily questioned their social relationships, ways of living, and ritual practices through the act of conversion. On the shores of Lake Tanganyika, new converts were observable through the act of circumcision, dietary restrictions, abidance by some of Islam's core tenets, and the adoption and adaptation of certain phenomena from East Africa's Indian Ocean coast and islands. Interior populations’ conversion to Islam was bound up with broader coast-interior material, cultural, and religious exchanges.

Keywords

precolonialIslamslaveryTanzaniaCongoBurundiZambia

Information

Type
Re-Interpreting Affiliations in 19th Century Records
Information
The Journal of African History , Volume 60 , Issue 2 , July 2019 , pp. 191 - 208
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2019 

Few historians have included the interior of precolonial East Africa as part of a broader history of Islam. Those who have done so have tended to focus on Buganda and the region around Lake Malawi. In an extract that is characteristic of the general attitude towards Islam's history in the broader region in this time-period, David C. Sperling wrote in 2000: ‘Because of the limitation of our sources and the consequent lack of knowledge, the history of Islam necessarily lies hidden behind the secular and commercial activities whose details are so much better known.’Footnote 1 The apparent impossibility of reconstructing a history of Islam for the interior of precolonial East Africa has led some historians to conclude that Islam had little impact in this context.Footnote 2 When Islam is acknowledged to have had an impact, it has only made a qualified entry into the historiography. Melvin E. Page and David Northrup respectively refer to ‘semi-Islamized’ and ‘partly-Islamicized’ populations to the west of Lake Tanganyika, and Stephen J. Rockel writes of ‘familiarity with Islam’ rather than Islamic conversion amongst certain populations in present-day west-central Tanzania.Footnote 3 Within this context, there is a sense in the historiography of Islam only making a limited entry into the lives of interior East Africans during the nineteenth century.Footnote 4 ‘Semi’ or ‘partly’ Islamised interior populations have been viewed as ‘nominal’ rather than ‘fully-fledged’ Muslims.

Historians of other time periods and regions have recently critiqued the idea of semi-Islamisation amongst new converts. In her case study on southeast German East Africa, Felicitas Becker argued that ‘the notion of nominal conversion is dubious.’Footnote 5 In so doing, she pointed out that ‘becoming Muslim’ questioned new converts’ ways of living, social relationships, and ritual practices, even if they did not become ‘model Muslims’ by academic Islamicists’ standards.Footnote 6 In this context, even if pre-existing rituals or practices were not abolished by conversion to Islam, they were often modified to fit how new converts interpreted their new religion. Using similar perspectives, Rudolph T. Ware III notes the ways in which spirit possession amongst Muslim converts in West Africa evolved in ways that were influenced by Islam; M.C. Ricklefs explores how received Islamic practice was adapted by Javanese populations to fit their pre-conceived knowledge of the spiritual world; and Sebastian Prange argues that in monsoon Asia ‘local receptions, understandings, and practices were crucial to [Islam's] historical development’.Footnote 7 In these analyses, the ongoing evolution of ostensibly local practices has been seen as vital to each regions’ Islamic history, rather than as representative of only nominal conversions.Footnote 8

Understanding the interaction between Islam and pre-existing belief systems as crucial to the history of Islam is at the core of this article on nineteenth-century Lake Tanganyika. This is the period in East Africa's history in which Muslims from maritime regions of the western Indian Ocean world — mostly from the East African coast and Oman — entered the interior for the first time, primarily in search of ivory. This body of people (hereafter: coastal traders) were a mixture of Ibadhis and Shafi'i Sunnis. Most of the former had kinship links in Oman, and most of the latter were from the East African coast or its islands, though these associations were not absolute.Footnote 9 Many from among both denominations were also influenced by the arrival of Sufi scholars to Zanzibar during the second half of the nineteenth century.Footnote 10 Historians such as J. Spencer Trimingham and others have seen the lack of a proselytising ethic amongst Ibadhis and Shafi'is as a barrier to conversion in East Africa's nineteenth-century interior.Footnote 11 However, focusing on the attitudes of coastal traders denies interior populations agency, underestimating their capacity to convert themselves through their and their belief systems’ encounters with newly-arrived Muslims. Additionally, it fails to acknowledge the ways in which coastal traders adapted their religious practices to the lakeshore and other interior contexts. Through a critical re-evaluation of archival sources and the use of oral testimony, this article argues that interpretations of Islam were a central feature of the material and cultural exchanges between coastal traders and certain interior populations on the shores of nineteenth-century Lake Tanganyika.

LOCATING MUSLIM CONVERTS ON LAKE TANGANYIKA'S SHORES

Lake Tanganyika lies almost at the centre of the African continent. It is approximately 1,000 kilometres from the East African coast at its closest point, and it took traders around six months to travel between the two by foot. The first coastal traders likely arrived by around 1830, but it was not until the 1860s when they established their first permanent lakeshore settlement at Ujiji. Conversion to Islam is visible in the archive from soon after this second date. The first converts, however, were probably not Jiji; rather they were from Manyema, a heterogeneous region in the present-day eastern Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). Coastal traders’ entry into Manyema was contemporaneous with their kin's settlement of Ujiji. Many Manyema — mostly women and children — arrived on Lake Tanganyika's shores in captivity, and nearly all — including men — were impoverished. Their primary route into lakeshore societies was through bondage to a coastal trader. Most were agricultural or domestic slaves as they entered the coastal traders’ households or followings, but some (exclusively male) among them improved their condition over time to become proxy traders, boatmen, and soldiers — positions that re-defined their bondage in terms of clientage.Footnote 12 As they became clients, they also claimed to be ngwana (Swahili: gentlemen; sing: mwungwana; pl: waungwana), a term that implied respect and freeborn status.Footnote 13 This claiming of ngwana status coincided with their conversion to Islam.Footnote 14

For the purposes of this article, it is necessary to refer to Muslim converts on Lake Tanganyika's shores as ‘interior ngwana.’ This is to distinguish them from ngwana of the coast, who used the same terminology to define themselves, but whose historical trajectory differed from their counterparts in the interior. In general, nineteenth-century coastal populations regarded people of the interior as shenzi (Swahili: barbarians; sing: mshenzi; pl: washenzi). This was the antithesis of ngwana: it implied that interior peoples were of slave stock, which disqualified them from being accepted as freeborn and/or Muslim.Footnote 15 Although some people — most notably Nyamwezi pagazi (porters) — blurred the lines between ngwana and shenzi in the coastal imagination by being recognised as free-waged porters (and thus not of slave stock), such people were rarely recognised as being of ngwana status on the coast.Footnote 16 There was thus a ‘social continuum’ between ngwana and shenzi, which nevertheless barred interior populations from being regarded as ngwana amongst coastal communities.Footnote 17 The interior ngwana, meanwhile, claimed ngwana status in the interior context. The fact that they have yet to be recognised as Muslims in much of the historiography may partly be attributable to nineteenth-century coastal views of their conversions as heretical or ‘blasphemous.’Footnote 18 Additionally, European explorers and missionaries usually referred to them as slaves, a paradigm which, if accepted, would have barred them from being Muslim according to Islamic Law.Footnote 19 Revisionist approaches to the interior ngwana's conditions of bondage in terms of clientage, therefore, call for a re-appraisal of their status vis-à-vis their being Muslim.

Focusing on the interior ngwana in East Africa's Islamic history differs methodologically from older histories of Islam in other interior regions of East Africa. Edward A. Alpers and Arye Oded focused on the conversions of elites within the context of centralised political structures in their respective studies of the southern interior (the vicinity of Lake Malawi) and Buganda.Footnote 20 Alpers argued that the intersection of pre-existing chiefly and religious values amongst the Yao ‘favourably predisposed [them] for the spread of Islam among them.’Footnote 21 Similarly, Oded claimed that widespread conversion to Islam in Buganda between 1867 and 1875 was tied to the kabaka's (king's) own adoption and promotion of Islamic beliefs and practices.Footnote 22 In this sense, conversion was seen as tied to prevailing norms, which were to a large degree centralised, even if subaltern individuals had their own motivations for conversion.Footnote 23 Lake Tanganyika's polities lacked the degree of centralisation that Buganda and the Yao had.Footnote 24 Even though Michele Wagner notes that some Jiji chiefs acculturated some aspects of Islam, they did not have the required level of authority to enact mass-conversion.Footnote 25 As neither the Ibadhi nor Shafi'i coastal traders were particularly motivated to convert populations from a spiritual standpoint either, the agency of the interior ngwana in desiring conversion is implied.

Locating the interior ngwana in the archive is a process that is filled with ambiguity. European explorers and missionaries used the term waungwana to refer to various people. Frequently, they referred to traders from the coast as waungwana, a term that distinguished them from Omani ‘Arabs’, although the distinctions between these two peoples were certainly blurred.Footnote 26 Thus when news of a caravan of waungwana traders was rumoured to be in a particular locality, it is unknown whether the author of the source was referring to a caravan of coastal people or of individuals referred to here as interior ngwana. On other occasions, Europeans used the term waungwana to refer to coastal traders’ ‘emancipated’ bondsmen, who also originated on the coast.Footnote 27 In such instances, these accounts tapped into coastal paradigms that associated the idea of being ngwana with coastal origins and being ‘free’. Additionally, commentators often restrained themselves from referring to coastal traders’ bondsmen from the interior as ngwana, even if some Europeans acknowledged that they were Muslim or accepted ‘some Islamic doctrine’.Footnote 28 For example, in 1880, William Griffith, a missionary of the London Missionary Society (LMS) based in Uguha, wrote ‘Besides the coast people, there are vast numbers of Arabs’ slaves, dependents, and followers, improperly called by the natives “Wangwana” [sic].’Footnote 29 Europeans were mostly loath to attribute ngwana status to people from the interior who they also saw as slaves, despite local populations using this terminology.Footnote 30

There are, however, two key features of the archive that make the interior ngwana visible to historians apart from the occasional reference that refers to them directly as Muslim.Footnote 31 Primary among these are the terms of their labour. In 1882, Griffith wrote that ‘Those slaves who are willing are taught to repeat their devotions [to Islam], and if they continue faithful[ly] they obtain their freedom.’Footnote 32 Yet, most former-slave Muslim converts did not take up the option to become ‘free’. Most, instead, remained bonded to a coastal trader in a patron-client relationship.Footnote 33 These bondsmen were primarily boatmen, soldiers, proxy traders, and governors of trading stations.Footnote 34 Coastal traders sometimes reserved these most important of positions for their bondsmen from the coast, but by the 1870s, increasing numbers of labourers of interior origin filled these ranks.Footnote 35 At one stage, these labourers from the interior may have been slaves in the fields or in the house, but they were elevated to positions of higher social status as they responded to coastal traders’ labour needs and gained their trust through cultural and religious assimilation. This process of ‘social elevation’ could take between five and ten years, according to contemporary sources.Footnote 36 Apart from performing their labour roles, the intervening period was a time during which people converted to Islam.

The interior ngwana are also visible through their adoption and adaptation of certain coastal cultural forms. Amongst men, the interior ngwana's cultural forms included speaking Swahili, preferring rice over cassava, wearing merikani cloth (white undyed sheeting) in the style of a kanzu (a form of long dress-shirt), carrying a gun, and converting to Islam.Footnote 37 Many also claimed coastal origins, even though they were born in the interior.Footnote 38 Apart from conversion to Islam and assertions of coastal ancestry, none of the other cultural features were exclusive among interior populations to the interior ngwana. Merikani cloth, guns, and rice were demanded by numerous lakeshore populations, and Swahili was the lingua franca of long-distance trade. Nevertheless, the coalescence of all these features within one person was synonymous with being Muslim and of ngwana status in the interior.Footnote 39 There are, of course, parallels with the coastal populations in these respects. Kanzus were fashionable amongst men, rice was the staple of the elite, and Islam and versions of the Swahili language had been present there for centuries.Footnote 40 Additionally, many members of the coastal elite dressed their slaves and other bondsmen in merikani cloth. Thus, there was an association between merikani and servile status.Footnote 41 This, however, did not apply in the interior. Indeed, merikani was a prized and valuable item to most interior populations.Footnote 42 The interior ngwana's adoption of goods such as merikani cloth represents their veneration for coastal cultural forms alongside their demand for goods that were considered valuable in the interior. In this sense, their conversion to Islam was part of broader coast-interior cultural and material exchanges.Footnote 43

The oral record emphasises the importance of Islam for an understanding of the interior ngwana. In 2013, I conducted 27 interviews over a three-month period with elders on the eastern shore of Lake Tanganyika, from Bujumbura in the north to Mpulungu in the south. Of these interviews, 12 were conducted in Ujiji and its environs, and they involved a total of 14 participants. All but one Ujiji interview was conducted with people claiming historical ties to Oman, the coast, and/or Manyema. The ‘Manyema diaspora’ is a prominent group in many of present-day Tanzania's urban centres.Footnote 44 They descend from people from Manyema who migrated into present-day Tanzania between around 1860 and 1910.Footnote 45 Although they are referred to as Manyema in the present, in the precolonial period those Manyema who became part of a coastal traders’ following eschewed this label in favour of being ngwana. This was at least partially because people from the east of Lake Tanganyika frequently accused the Manyema of cannibalism.Footnote 46 This accusation was rooted in the lack of respect that they believed the Manyema to be worthy of. They regarded the Manyema in ways that were similar to how coastal populations referred to interior populations as shenzi.Footnote 47 Becoming ngwana instead of ‘Manyema’, therefore, was a route to respect from coastal traders and interior populations. The re-appropriation of the label ‘Manyema’ and its disassociation from cannibalism occurred during the colonial period.Footnote 48

According to informants, Islam appeared on the shores of Lake Tanganyika with the arrival of the first coastal traders.Footnote 49 Some reported that a few Manyema were Muslim before they got to Ujiji (a reflection of coastal trader influence in Manyema itself), but that Islam was more entrenched in Ujiji at this time and that Ujiji was where most conversions took place.Footnote 50 Most Islamic learning occurred in the domestic sphere.Footnote 51 This was no doubt partly a symptom of there being no mosque constructed in Ujiji (or anywhere else in what became west-central Tanzania or the DRC, for that matter) until the colonial period.Footnote 52 Informants emphasised a high degree of ‘respect’ and ‘closeness’ between coastal traders and Manyema, with marriage between male coastal traders and female Manyema often underpinning their relationships.Footnote 53 In using these terms, informants challenged prevailing conceptions of ‘slavery’ in popular western discourse. Rather than treating slaves with brutality or coercion, they argued that the coastal traders came in ‘peace’.Footnote 54 In this context, Manyema populations did not simply convert to Islam because they were taught about it — rather, they converted of their own accord because of their perceptions of the coastal traders’ ‘character’.Footnote 55 For one informant, the whole region (including Uhehe, Unyamwezi, and Buganda) became Islamised through this process of respectful interaction between coastal traders and interior populations.Footnote 56 This is an overstatement of Islamic influence and it underestimates the violence associated with initial enslavement — especially in rural areas — but it does point to the importance of Islam in Ujiji's collective memory of the precolonial period.

Recognition of the oral record necessitates modifying some aspects of nineteenth-century East Africa's historiography and a re-reading of the archive. Firstly, the idea of semi- or part-Islamisation does not hold water for the interior ngwana. Islam was a key feature of the encounter between coastal traders and Manyema populations, not an unfinished or partially-established concern. Secondly, informants stressed new converts’ agency in the conversion process. This is opposed to the view that Islam had to be purposefully spread by traders or proselytisers. This perspective is also explored in Becker's analysis of southeast German East Africa. In her study, agency was partially established through interior Africans acquiring knowledge of Islam and converting other interior Africans.Footnote 57 Although interviews in Ujiji did not explicitly point to this process on the shores of nineteenth-century Lake Tanganyika, archival evidence suggests it may have occurred there, too. Missionaries frequently lamented the influence of the coastal traders’ followers, who they believed prevented them from converting others to Christianity.Footnote 58 In an extract that is characteristic of the missionaries’ general attitude, D. Picton Jones of the LMS in Uguha wrote in 1884:

The introduction of the slave trade into a country is the introduction of a moral poison… . It is a remarkable fact that these Zanzibar men have had far more influence over the natives than we have ever had — in many little things they imitate them, they follow their customs, adopt their ideas, imitate their dress, sing their songs, and it was with great difficulty I could get those of the Baguha [sic] on the station to speak their own language. I can only account for this by the fact that the Wangwana [sic] live amongst them in a simple manner like themselves, intermarry with them, and to some extent partake of their notions.Footnote 59

Given the demographics of the coastal traders’ labour recruitment at the time of writing, many of the ‘Zanzibar men’ or ‘Wangwana’ that Jones referred to were likely from Manyema and elsewhere in the interior. It is unlikely that missionaries were able distinguish people from the coast and the interior with the same cultural features, particularly given that many interior ngwana claimed coastal or Zanzibari origins. Jones does not mention Islam explicitly in this cultural encounter. However, a critical approach to missionary understandings of slavery and the slave trade coupled with an appreciation of the oral record indicates that it was an integral feature.Footnote 60

PRACTICING ISLAM ON THE SHORES OF NINETEENTH-CENTURY LAKE TANGANYIKA

This analysis of Islamic practice on the shores of nineteenth-century Lake Tanganyika begins with a search for some of the orthodox tenets of Islam in the archive. These include circumcision, dietary restrictions, and adherence to the five pillars of Islam. The uneven response to these orthodox phenomena meant that academic Islamists may have doubted the extent of the interior ngwana's faith if they ever came into contact with them. However, in the absence of such academics, strict conformity was not required of new converts on Lake Tanganyika's shores. This is in common with nineteenth-century Buganda, where lack of circumcision did not prevent conversion; southeast German East Africa, where ‘oral embroidering’ in a mostly illiterate society replaced or heavily supplemented direct references to Islamic scripture; and numerous other regions of the Muslim Indian Ocean world where Islam has been adapted to pre-existing cultural contexts.Footnote 61 Islam had adaptive qualities on Lake Tanganyika's nineteenth-century shores — qualities that the interior ngwana and the coastal traders helped to shape. Furthermore, the interior ngwana augmented perceptions of their spiritual capabilities by interacting with a pre-existing religious framework that was indigenous to Lake Tanganyika. The ways they did this were heavily influenced by material and religious phenomena that they associated with the coast. The interior ngwana's understanding of Islam were rooted in their comprehension of ostensibly coastal objects and beliefs in the context of Lake Tanganyika's shores.

The clearest expressions of Islamic orthodoxy amongst the interior ngwana were circumcision and dietary restrictions. Circumcision appears to have been at the heart of the conversion process. According to Walter Hutley of the LMS:

There were many of these slaves [of the coastal traders] circumcised, which they deem quite sufficient to convert a man form being an mshenzi [sic] or pagan into an Mgwana [sic], which is the generalised term [in the interior] for Islamised native.Footnote 62

From the point of circumcision onwards, the coastal traders’ followers were known to eat only halal meat and to slaughter animals in the Islamic fashion.Footnote 63 The prominence of circumcision in this context offers a divergence from the Nyamwezi and Ganda, amongst whom it was rare.Footnote 64 The relative lack of circumcisions amongst Muslims in Buganda is likely attributable to pre-existing customs that ‘abhorred any mutilation of the body’.Footnote 65 It is notable then, that circumcision was customary amongst populations of the present-day eastern DRC before the arrival of Muslims.Footnote 66 This suggests a compatibility between pre-Islamic and Islamic customs that shaped the rites of conversion in the vicinity of Lake Tanganyika.Footnote 67 Furthermore, although David Livingstone wrote in his diary in 1866 that coastal traders sometimes took their slaves to be circumcised at the coast, making this journey for this purpose was probably not universal, especially as the coastal traders’ followings grew in size and they headed deeper into the interior during the 1870s and 1880s.Footnote 68

Despite circumcision being a marker of conversion, declarations of faith (shahada: the first pillar of Islam) by new Muslim converts are largely absent in the archive. However, this is likely more a symptom of the archive's authorship than due to the absence of converts on Lake Tanganyika's shores. The absence of a mosque in the region meant that ceremonies marking circumcision and conversion took place in the domestic rather than the public sphere. European explorers and missionaries were rarely welcomed into these zones. On the occasions when they were, it was usually for discussing the terms of their presence or their ongoing travel. Only on rare occasions were missionaries able to ascertain a process of conversion within a coastal trader’s following. Griffith's aforementioned reference to slaves ‘repeating their devotions’ in a process that gave them opportunities for freedom is one of the few examples.Footnote 69 Additionally, in 1881, Hutley wrote of a ‘slave-boy’ from Manyema who ‘taught himself to read and write’.Footnote 70 His coastal trader master then taught him more, and allowed him to be circumcised and to convert to Islam.Footnote 71 In this process, the ‘slave-boy’ was seen to have transitioned from being a shenzi to an ngwana, at least in the context of the interior.Footnote 72 Although not referring to declarations of faith explicitly, these extracts point to an environment in which such declarations would have taken place.

The absence of discussion in European writings about the coastal traders’ domestic sphere means that women's conversions to Islam were even more hidden than those of men. Women — whether captive from Manyema or free — were primarily domestic or agricultural workers. Missionaries tended to only comment on women's lives when women left these roles and entered the public sphere. On the lakeshore, this usually only occurred in cases of neglect on the coastal traders’ part. Thus, reading ‘along the archival grain’ gives the impression of a harsh and brutalised condition for all women on the lakeshore.Footnote 73 In reality, the lives of women in the domestic sphere likely varied depending on a range of factors. This assumption is supported by the oral record, in which women's role is remembered in terms of domesticity, Islamic study, and marriage, rather than brutality.Footnote 74 Marriage was particularly important to coastal traders because they were exclusively male, and because women from the coast did not enter the interior.Footnote 75 From a female perspective, and using Marcia Wright's Strategies of Slaves as precedent, marriage to a coastal trader may have been welcomed, as it meant protection from the region's violence.Footnote 76 Conversion to Islam was likely expected in this context, and women may have gained ‘free dependent’ status upon birthing a child of their master's kin.Footnote 77 These examples and the collective memories of Ujiji informants suggest, therefore, that the brutalised women in Ujiji referred to in the archive were exceptional. Women likely converted to Islam in a hidden, domestic arena as part of a process that incorporated them into coastal traders’ kinship networks.Footnote 78

There is evidence that some interior ngwana prayed (salah; the second pillar of Islam) and fasted (sawm; the fourth pillar) according to orthodox Islamic doctrine. Many European explorers and missionaries were sceptical of the interior ngwana's ability to pray in the Islamic fashion. Both Livingstone and Hutley claimed that Islamic prayer was rare or non-existent amongst the Jiji and the coastal traders’ followers.Footnote 79 However, Jérôme Becker of the AIA has noted that the coastal traders’ followers recited the Fātihat al-kitāb (the opening verse of the opening surah (chapter) of the Qu'ran) twice per day. They did so, he wrote:

With faces turned in the direction of Mecca and hands crossed on the stomach or hanging [by their sides]. Then, they raise their arms to the heavens, pass their hands over their eyes and end by prostrating themselves, their elbows and forehead touching the ground.Footnote 80

Hutley and Livingstone's overlooking of such examples mean that they could have been rare. However, they may also have simply not recognised interior Africans’ prayer as ‘Islamic.’ Becker himself was sceptical of interior Africans’ capacity to convert to Islam. He claimed that ‘slaves’ prayed because they were obliged to do so by coastal traders, and that they did not yet understand the act even if they ‘wanted’ to convert.Footnote 81 Such statements were rooted in highly-problematic racialised frameworks that were demeaning of Africans’ mental capacities.Footnote 82 For at least some interior ngwana, prayer was likely a key act of their Islamic faith.

Further evidence for some interior ngwana's adherence to the second pillar of Islam comes from accounts of caravan journeys. Hutley noted that coastal traders prayed only three times per day while travelling.Footnote 83 This likely represented the customary practice of jam’, in which the second and third (Zuhr and ‘Asr) and the fourth and fifth (Maghrib and ‘Isha) prayers of the day are combined. How and if coastal traders’ followers from the interior participated in prayers ‘on the road’ is not entirely clear from the sources. Tippu Tip mentions in his autobiography that he prayed on the road with his associates in the interior, but neither the Swahili nor the translations make it clear who these associates included.Footnote 84 They could conceivably have just been coastal traders, even if, given Becker's account, this seems unlikely.Footnote 85 Also, the practicing of jam’ shows how the functioning of the caravan was affected by an Islamic prayer schedule, and vice versa. As Rockel argues, the caravan was a site of cultural exchange and Islam was a facet of this broader process.Footnote 86 Crucially, populations from the interior were active agents in this cultural exchange. Thus, breaks in the journey to pray for coastal traders were likely interpreted by at least some interior ngwana as breaks to pray for them as well.

There is also evidence that some interior ngwana observed Ramadān, though Richard Burton is the only European explorer to refer directly to interior populations of present-day Central Tanzania fasting.Footnote 87 Primary sources refer to large-scale participation in festivals marking the beginning and end (Eid) of Ramadān, possibly by Muslims and non-Muslims alike.Footnote 88 There was thus a consciousness of Ramadān's importance, even if the meanings of the fast may not have been apparent to all festival participants. Also, both Ramadān and Eid had the capacity to affect the formation and travel of caravans. Livingstone noted that his travel was interrupted until Eid was over in Manyema in 1871, and Becker observed that a doctor who treated him in Tabora and then returned to the coast the day after Ramadān ‘would benefit from the end of the fast’.Footnote 89 Becker did not make clear what these benefits were, but it is notable that the caravan in question was composed primarily of people from the interior.Footnote 90 This could imply that some porters from the interior were more willing and available once their fast was over. Furthermore, explorer and missionary references to the interior ngwana's demand for halal meat show the importance of diet in the interior ngwana's faith, which may have extended to further dietary restrictions during Ramadān.Footnote 91 Finally, many Ganda populations (including kabaka Mutesa in 1867–75) observed Ramadān after the first conversions were made in the 1860s, as did some Nyamwezi chiefs in the early 1880s.Footnote 92 Ramadān was clearly important to both coastal traders and new converts in the chiefly classes; some evidence suggests it may also have been important to at least some interior ngwana.

Overall then the evidence for interior ngwana practicing some of the core aspects of Islamic orthodoxy is patchy. This is partly a symptom of the sources themselves, given that the Europeans who authored most of them failed to acknowledge Islam as important to the interior ngwana. However, it is also a result of the uneven adherence to orthodox Islamic practices amongst the interior ngwana. Although there is evidence that some interior ngwana prayed and observed Ramadān, many likely did not. No evidence has been found that any interior ngwana adhered to the third (zakat; charity/alms-giving) or fifth (the Hajj; pilgrimage to Mecca) pillars of Islam. Thus, by academic Islamist standards, the interior ngwana's commitment to the faith was probably doubtful. Indeed, when interior ngwana visited the coast, they often found that their claims of being Muslim were dismissed by the coastal elites, although this was as much a symptom of their interior/shenzi origins as it was the ways they practiced Islam.Footnote 93 However, such standards were not set in the interior. As Oded argues, the decision of kabaka Mutesa I of Buganda to not be circumcised was ‘tolerated’ by coastal traders, and there is no evidence that they publicly refused to consider him a Muslim.Footnote 94 Oded's reasoning stems from the coastal traders’ prioritising commercial motivations over any motivation to proselytise.Footnote 95 A similar point could be made about the coastal traders’ attitudes to the interior ngwana's conversion. The necessity of assimilating specialised, trustworthy, and ‘respectable’ labourers would have trumped any scruples they may have had about their lack of Islamic orthodoxy.

Further reasons for the coastal traders to respect the nature of the interior ngwana's conversion come from their own Islamic practices. This can partly be established by an examination of Islamic practice on the coast, which was heavily intertwined with beliefs in nature spirits, ritual healing, and spirit possession.Footnote 96 Islam on the East African coast has had ‘popular’, heterodox elements since its arrival in the eighth century.Footnote 97 However, coastal traders made further adaptations to Islamic practice in the interior. For example, they did not construct a mosque in any part of present-day west-central Tanzania or the eastern DRC.Footnote 98 This meant that the key piece of infrastructure was not in place for them to follow the third pillar of Islam. They instead used the verandas of their tembes (houses) as the venue for their prayers, a practice which further illustrates that the domestic environment was key to Islamic conversion and practice on the shores of Lake Tanganyika. Additionally, it is unlikely that many of the coastal traders went on the Hajj. Missionaries painted a picture of fixed residence in the interior for most coastal traders, with them only returning to the coast or Zanzibar once every five or six years to settle their debts.Footnote 99 In nineteenth-century East Africa, the Hajj appears to have been reserved for permanent residents of the coast and its islands.Footnote 100 Also, the leading member of the coastal trader community in c.1870–1885, Mwinyi Kheri, was illiterate.Footnote 101 Although some of his subordinates could read, this potentially shows a lack of knowledge of Islamic texts at the core of Ujiji's coastal trader leadership. Coastal traders necessarily adapted their Islamic practices to the interior context, and this led them further from Islamic orthodoxy.Footnote 102

The adaptive processes associated with the spread of Islam to the interior of East Africa are further illustrated by pervasive beliefs amongst Muslims in nature spirits in Lake Tanganyika. Beliefs in spirits in the lake pre-existed the Muslim arrival at the lakeshore. They were ‘earth spirits’ that demarcated the regional scope of chiefs’ power over different parts of the shoreline. Amongst the Tabwa, they were referred to as ngulu; amongst the Fipa, as amaléza; and amongst the Jiji, as ibisigo or mashinga.Footnote 103 Spirits were believed to control storms over the lake and to sometimes take the form of crocodiles or hippopotami who ‘devoured’ those with whom the spirit was disgruntled.Footnote 104 Appeasement of the lake's spirits was achieved through a combination of canoe construction, pre-launch rituals, and sacrifice of valuable goods at the location of the spirit — usually the tip of a peninsula or headland jutting into the lake.Footnote 105 The most prominent spirits who appear in the archive were those located at Kabogo point (the western tip of the present-day Mahale Mountains National Park, Tanzania), Karema (Tanzania), and the north end of the Ubwari peninsula (near present-day Kalole, DRC; opposite the town of Baraka).Footnote 106 Appeasement of these spirits and numerous others was a crucial function of local chiefly authority for the well-being of their communities.Footnote 107

However, by the mid-1870s, local chiefs had ceased being the most prominent ‘appeasers’ of Lake Tanganyika's spirits. That role instead shifted to the interior ngwana and, to a lesser degree, coastal traders. This is evident from European-authored sources. Reporting on his visit to Ujiji in 1876, for example, Henry Morton Stanley wrote:

The Arabs’ slaves had spread such reports of… hobgoblins, fiery meteors, [and] terrible spirits, such as Kabogo, Katavi, Kateyé, and Wanpembé, that the teeth of the Wanyamwezi [sic] and [coastal] Wangwana [sic] chattered with fright.Footnote 108

In a similar vein, the White Fathers on the lake's northwestern shore in 1882 wrote ‘It is not the [locals] who have the greatest fear of the spirits, it is mainly the Wangouana [sic]’.Footnote 109 This is not to argue that the interior ngwana entirely replaced local spiritual functionaries. The Tabwa, for example, maintained a prominent religious framework associated with spirits in the lake well into the colonial period.Footnote 110 Also, the Jiji boatmen in the second half of the nineteenth century continued to sacrifice livestock, crops, beads, and cloths to spirits as they encountered them.Footnote 111 However, the interior ngwana's position within the coastal traders’ commercial networks gave them more access to beads and cloths to sacrifice to the spirits, and their role as boatmen on sailing craft allowed them to travel further and faster than locals in canoes. They used this position to make larger and more frequent sacrifices to the Lake Tanganyika's spirits than non-Muslim lakeshore populations.Footnote 112

Muslims’ interaction with Lake Tanganyika's spirits was rooted in an adaptation of coastal material, cultural, and religious phenomena. Key to this process was veneration for zimu (Swahili; sing: mizimu; pl: mizimu), a general term used to describe nature spirits in parts of the Great Lakes region and on the coast (including by coastal Muslims).Footnote 113 Gradually, the term zimu became increasingly prominent in the conceptualisation of Lake Tanganyika's spirits as well. Fipa and Tabwa populations appear to have used it alongside their respective amaléza and ngulu in the late-nineteenth century, but the Jiji probably ceased using ibisigo and mashinga as early as the 1860s (although they still used them to refer to terrestrial nature spirits). This is reflective of the coastal traders’ and interior ngwana's larger and longer-term influence in Ujiji than in other lakeshore and nearby regions. Additionally, the interior ngwana appear to have exclusively sacrificed imported beads and cloths to Lake Tanganyika's spirits, when the Jiji and other lakeshore populations sacrificed livestock and crops as well.Footnote 114 They thus only sacrificed goods that were brought from the coast, some of which were associated with being ngwana in the interior. Finally, the coastal traders had oculi (eyes) painted on their lacustrine craft, which were ubiquitous decorations on coastal dhows in the Western Indian Ocean.Footnote 115 These oculi were meant to protect sailing craft from malignant spirits.Footnote 116 In this way, popular spiritual beliefs from the coast were adapted to the lakeshore environment. This adaptive process was intertwined with broader coast-interior material and religious exchanges that were also associated with conversion to Islam.Footnote 117 Rather than antithetical to their Islamic faith, the ways they interpreted Lake Tanganyika's spirits were tied to their understanding of Islam through their impressions of coastal culture.

CONCLUSION

This article suggests that more histories of Islam in the interior of precolonial East Africa are yet to be written. The sources for such histories are somewhat problematic — as they are for most East Africanist perspectives on the precolonial period, but they are especially so for the history of Islam. The European authors of documentary sources were largely uninterested in Islam and they misunderstood the multiple ways in which it could be interpreted, particularly by new converts. Additionally, the oral record overstates the extent of conversion to Islam in rural areas and understates the levels of violence therein. Nevertheless, the aggregation of the evidence, despite being at times sparse and more suggestive than definitive, is significant. As informants in Ujiji discussed the importance of Islam to their town's precolonial history, they contested conventional interpretations of the archive that stressed the ‘nominal’ nature of conversion to Islam on Lake Tanganyika's shores and elsewhere in the interior. Moreover, re-reading the archive with a sympathetic ear to oral testimony — and with recent publications on other Islamic histories in mind — sheds light on the way Islam spread into the interior. Islam was an important feature of the encounter between coastal traders and interior populations, and especially so in relation to the factors that influenced forms of bondage and beliefs in Lake Tanganyika's spirits.

The perspective taken here is that the agency of people who converted is key to the history of Islam in precolonial East Africa, and, in this instance, this means an analysis of the coastal traders’ slaves and former slaves. These people's desire to cease being considered slaves, cannibals, and ‘savages’, and to acquire ‘respectability’ and ngwana status encouraged conversion. Ibadhi and Shafi'i Sunni coastal traders, who did not enter the interior of East Africa with a specifically proselytising agenda, generally encouraged such conversions because it built trust between them and their followers from the interior. This was essential for when coastal traders needed to employ their followers in ‘higher-stakes’ labour roles, including as soldiers and as proxy traders. Furthermore, this emphasis on the role of new converts provokes questions for the future study of Islam in interior regions where Islam is already known to have had an impact. In Buganda and amongst the Yao, pre-existing political structures have been seen as crucial to the dissemination of Islam. This article implies that greater consideration could be given to the needs and motivations of individual converts.

On the shores of nineteenth-century Lake Tanganyika, Islamic practice was intertwined with broader material, cultural, and religious exchanges between coastal traders and interior populations. In terms of Islamic orthodoxy, most interior ngwana became Muslim through circumcision, restricting themselves to halal meat, and, in some cases, abiding by three of the five pillars of Islam. Yet, there were additional, heterodox aspects of their faith as well. The interior ngwana absorbed certain coastal cultural phenomena and adapted them to the lakeshore environment. Dress, diet, and language were all crucial in this context. Additionally, the interior ngwana and the coastal traders adapted coastal beliefs in zimu (spirits) to pre-existing beliefs in spirits in the lake. These beliefs were not antithetical to Islamic faith, as older histories would perhaps suggest. Rather, they can be interpreted as a reverence for all things ‘coastal,’ of which Islam was an integral component. Indeed, in this context, ‘coast’ and ‘Islam’ cannot be separated — for the interior ngwana, the adoption of coastal material, culture, and spiritual phenomena represented their assimilation to the coastal religion. In the absence of mosques, literacy, and opportunities to go on the Hajj, Muslims on the shores of nineteenth-century Lake Tanganyika looked to the coast as the source and inspiration for their Islamic faith. They then used coastal phenomena to make, in their eyes, Islamic interpretations of Lake Tanganyika's spirits. This distinctive pattern of adaptation highlights the diversity of Islamic forms that characterise recent histories of Islam in other regions of Africa and the Indian Ocean world.

Footnotes

I wish to thank Richard Reid, Giacomo Macola, the late Jan-Georg Deutsch, Gwyn Campbell, Shane Doyle, and two sets of anonymous readers for The Journal of African History, all of whom provided valuable insights at various stages of this article's formulation. I am also grateful for the support of the Wolfson Foundation and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, both of which funded some of the research for this article. Finally, thank you to the School of Oriental and African Studies and the Indian Ocean World Centre, McGill University for their institutional support. Author's email: philip.gooding@mcgill.ca

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62 CWM/LMS/06/02/006 Walter Hutley, ‘Mahommadanism in Central Africa: Its influence’, Aug. 1881.

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99 CWM/LMS/06/02/006 Walter Hutley, ‘Mahommadanism in Central Africa: Its professors’, Aug. 1881.

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102 See also Abel, Les Musulmans noirs, 37–8.

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105 Hore, E., Tanganyika: Eleven Years in Central Africa (London, 1892), 106–7Google Scholar; Gooding, ‘Lake Tanganyika’, 138–40; Swann, Fighting the Slave-Hunters, 77–8.

106 A.G.M.Afr. C.16-7. Journal du P. Deniaud, 9 Oct. 1879, 21 Oct. 1879; Speke, J. H., ‘Journal of a cruise on Tanganyika Lake, Central Africa’, Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, 86 (1859), 349Google Scholar; Stanley, Dark Continent II, 67.

107 See also Gooding, ‘Lake Tanganyika’, 141–2; Roberts, ‘“Fishers of men”’, 49–50, 54; Wagner, ‘Environment, community and history’, 181–6.

108 Stanley, Dark Continent II, 67.

109 A.G.M.Afr. Diaire de Massanze, 17 Oct. 1882. The author's translation. See also RMCA HA.01.017-7 Emile Storms, ‘Resistance des marcheurs en caravan’.

110 Roberts, ‘“Fishers of men”’, 49–70.

111 A.G.M.Afr. C.16-7 Journal du P. Deniaud, 9, 21 Oct. 1879; A.G.M.Afr. Diaire de Massanze, 17 Oct. 1881; Von Wissmann, Hermann, My Second Journey Through Equatorial Africa from the Congo to the Zambesi in the Years 1886 and 1887, trans. Bergmann, M. J. A. (London, 1891), 258Google Scholar; Jacques and Storms, Notes sur l'ethnographie, 84; National Archives – Royal Geographical Society (NA RGS) JMS/2/144 V. L. Cameron, ‘Diary of a Boat Journey’, 19 Mar. 1874, 1, 3, 4 Apr. 1874.

112 See also Gooding, ‘Lake Tanganyika’, 144–68.

113 Faki, E., Kasiera, E. M., and Nandi, O. M. J., ‘The belief and practice of divination among the Swahili Muslims in Mombasa district, Kenya’, International Journal of Sociology and Anthropology, 2:9 (2010), 216Google Scholar; RMCA Henry Morton Stanley Archive (HMSA) 18. Field Notebook, 31 Aug. 1876; Schoenbrun, D. L., ‘Conjuring the modern in Africa: durability and rupture in histories of public healing between the Great Lakes of East Africa’, The American Historical Review, 111:5 (2006), 1424–7CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed; Wagner, ‘Environment, community and history’, 191.

114 A.G.M.Afr. Diaire de Mkapakwe, 18 Nov. 1884; NA RGS JMS/2/144 V. L. Cameron, ‘Diary of a Boat Journey’, 4 Apr. 1874; RMCA HA.01.017-7 Emile Storms, ‘Rapport de voyage à Oudjidji’, 7 July 1883.

115 Swann, Fighting the Slave-Hunters, 77.

116 Agius, D. A., ‘Decorative motifs on Arabian boats: meaning and identity’, in Starkey, J., Starkey, P., and Wilkinson, T. (eds.), Natural Resources and Cultural Connections of the Red Sea (Oxford, 2007), 105Google Scholar; Agius, D. A., In the Wake of the Dhow: The Arabian Gulf and Oman (Reading, 2009), 52, 67–8Google Scholar, 93.

117 For West/North African case studies in which formerly non-Muslim slaves converted to Islam and adapted pre-existing spiritual practices to their understanding of their new faith, see Hunwick, ‘The religious practices of black slaves’, 149–71; I. M. Montana, ‘Ahmad ibn al-Qāḍī al-Timbuktāwī on the Bori ceremonies of Tunis’, in Lovejoy, Slavery on the Frontiers, 173–98.