Zanj

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Zanj (Arabic and Persian زنج, "Land of the Blacks") was a name used by medieval Arab geographers to refer to a portion of the East African coast. The geographers divided the coast into several regions and Zanj (also transliterated as Zenj or Zinj) covered the coast from roughly Mogadishu in the north to Pemba Island in the south. (To the north of Zanj lay the Somali coast, termed the Land of Berber, extending as far south as Webi Sebeli; to the south lay the Land of Sofala the northern limit of which may have been Pangani, opposite Pemba Island; beyond Sofala was the obscure realm of Waq-Waq.^[1] It was from Zanj that most of the Arab trade with East Africa was conducted.

Arab writers described the inhabitants of Zanj (the "Zanji") as black. The inhabitants of East Africa were considered by Arabs to be the most culturally primitive of the three Black African regions long known to them (the other two were Nubia nuba in modern Sudan and southern Egypt, and Abyssinia ħabaš in the modern Ethiopia/Eritrea area). One important trade commodity from this region was Zanji slaves, who were captured and taken to the Middle East and India for sale; East Africa served as a source of slaves for the Middle East for many centuries. The ninth century revolt of the Zanji against the Arab slavers was termed the Zanj Revolt.

Many Arab, Persian and Indian traders settled in Zanj and intermarried with the local population; this is the origin of the Swahili culture and language which incorporated these along with Bantu elements. Prominent settlements of the Zanj coast included the legendary Shungwaya (Bur Gao), as well as Malindi, Gedi, and Mombasa. By the late medieval period the area included at least 37 substantial Swahili trading towns, many of them quite wealthy. However, these communities never consolidated into a single political entity (the "Zanj Empire" being a late nineteenth century fiction).

"Zanj" apparently fell out of use in the tenth century, but after 1861, when the area controlled by the Sultan of Zanzibar was forced by the British to split with the parent country of Oman, it was often referred to as Zanj.

1 Applications of the Name:
2 Reference
3 See also
4 External links

[edit] Applications of the Name:

The name "Zanj" may have associations with the ancient name for the same region, Azania. (During the struggle against apartheid in South Africa, nationalists often referred to South Africa as "Azania", intending to eventually rename the country, but in the event this name was less favoured than simple retention of the previous name, South Africa, after the abolition of apartheid.)

The name "Zanj" is also connected with the name of the island of Zanzibar.

"Zanj" has also been used to refer to East Africa in general, and the Sea of Zanj was a name for that part of the Indian Ocean adjacent to East Africa. It included several islands, including Madagascar, Mauritius and Reunion.

In the twentieth century, the name supplied the world with Zinjanthropus boisei (nicknamed "Zinj"), a famous hominin fossil, now more properly termed Paranthropus boisei.

[edit] Reference

^ Chittick, Neville (1968). The Coast Before the Arrival of the Portuguese, Chapter 5 in Ogot, BA and JA Kieran, eds., "Zamani: A Survey of East African History", 100-118.