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On the coast, following the death, in 1856, of Sayyid Saʿīd, his erstwhile dominions in East Africa were split off from the imamate of Muscat. By 1873 the authority of the Āl Bū Saʿīdī sultans on Zanzibar itself became complete, although there were still revolts against them on the coast—particularly at Pate and Mombasa (where the Mazrui retained their preeminence despite successive defeats)—and at Kilwa, to the south. This arose chiefly from the sultan’s acceptance of the further measures against the East African slave trade pressed upon him by the British consul at his court. By the 1860s some 7,000 or so slaves were being sold annually in the Zanzibar slave market, but in 1873 a treaty with the British closed the market at Zanzibar, and Sultan Barghash, by two proclamations in 1876, reduced the export from the mainland to a trickle. As it happened, however, there was then a final period of unprecedented slaving on the mainland, where the trade in slaves had generally been closely connected with the trade in ivory and the demand for porters was still considerable.

Trade in the East African interior began in African hands. In the southern regions Bisa, Yao, Fipa, and Nyamwezi traders were long active over a wide area. By the early 19th century Kamba traders had begun regularly to move northwestward between the Rift Valley and the sea. Indeed, it was Africans who usually arrived first to trade at the coast, rather than the Zanzibaris, who first moved inland. Zanzibari caravans had, however, begun to thrust inland before the end of the 18th century. Their main route thereafter struck immediately to the west and soon made Tabora their chief upcountry base. From there some traders went due west to Ujiji and across Lake Tanganyika to found, in the latter part of the 19th century, slave-based Arab states upon the Luapula and the upper reaches of the Congo. In these areas some of those who crossed the Nyasa-Tanganyika watershed (which was often approached from farther down the East African coast) were involved as well, while others went northwestward and captured the trade on the south and west sides of Lake Victoria. Here they were mostly kept out of Rwanda, but they were welcomed in both Buganda and Bunyoro and largely forestalled other traders who, after 1841, were thrusting up the Nile from Khartoum. They forestalled, too, the coastal traders moving inland from Mombasa, who seemed unable to establish themselves beyond Kilimanjaro on the south side of Lake Victoria. These Mombasa traders only captured the Kamba trade by first moving out beyond it to the west. By the 1880s, however, they were operating both in the Mount Kenya region and around Winam Bay and were even reaching north toward Lake Rudolf.

The colonial era

Suggestions that he might at this time establish his dominion over the East African interior prompted Sultan Barghash to send a Baloch force to Tabora, but the idea was never pursued. A comparable notion, however, led Khedive Ismāʿīl Pasha of Egypt to appoint in 1869 the Englishman Samuel White Baker as governor of the Equatorial Province of the Sudan, so that Baker might carry the Egyptian flag to the East African lakes. Though Baker reached as far south as Bunyoro in 1872, he was soon obliged to leave. His successor, Charles George Gordon, proposed to circumvent both Bunyoro and Buganda by going straight up the Nile’s banks. But Mutesa I, kabaka of Buganda, frustrated Gordon’s efforts on the Nile, and by the early 1880s, with bankruptcy in Egypt and the Mahdist revolt in the Sudan, only remnants of the Egyptian enterprise remained.

The Egyptian incursion had been the climax to the search by many European explorers for the headwaters of the Nile—a quest that had obsessed the later years of the Scottish missionary David Livingstone and had prompted the discovery in 1858 of Lake Tanganyika by the English expedition of Richard Burton and John Hanning Speke. Speke returned first to discover Lake Victoria in 1858 and then with James Grant in 1862 became the first white man to set eyes on the source of the Nile, which Speke named Ripon Falls. By circumnavigating Lake Victoria 12 years later, Henry Morton Stanley stilled the controversy that had ensued in Europe over Speke’s claim.

Missionary activity

The revelations of these explorers, the example of David Livingstone, concern in western Europe over the East African slave trade, and the Roman Catholic and evangelical fervour that existed there inspired the invasion of the East African interior by a motley collection of Christian missionary enterprises. Johann Ludwig Krapf and Johannes Rebmann of the Church Missionary Society, who had worked inland from Mombasa and had, in the 1840s and ’50s, journeyed to the foothills of Mount Kenya and Kilimanjaro, were followed by a British Methodist mission. Roman Catholic missionaries reached Zanzibar in 1860 and settled at Bagamoyo in 1868. An Anglo-Catholic mission first tried to establish itself in the Shire highlands, then in 1864 transferred to Zanzibar. Anglican missionaries arriving in Buganda in the mid-1870s at the request of Kabaka Mutesa were soon followed by Catholic White Fathers—there and elsewhere on Zanzibar’s Tabora route—while the London Missionary Society sent men both to Unyamwezi and to Lake Tanganyika.

There were, of course, a number of localized religious movements among the peoples of East Africa during the 19th century. These included the Mbari cult among the Nyakyusa, the Nyabingi in Rwanda, and the Yakany movement north of Mount Ruwenzori. None of them, however, spread in quite the way that the Chwezi movement had earlier. Islam, on the other hand—spread widely at the instance of the Zanzibari traders and long established on the coast—had secured a scattering of converts in the interior as in the key kingdom of Buganda.

This was the scene onto which Christian missionaries first entered. Although by 1885 there were nearly 300 of them in East Africa, they did not initially win many converts, and those they at first obtained came only from among freed slaves and refugees from local wars. After 1880, however, they made important conversions in Buganda, and by the end of the century Christianity was spreading in the Lake Victoria area over most of the region in which the Chwezi movement had previously percolated—and before very long over a much larger area as well.

Partition by Germany and Britain

Philanthropic, commercial, and eventually imperialist ventures followed these evangelical endeavours. Nothing of great moment, however, occurred until 1885, when a German, Carl Peters, riding a tide of diplomatic hostility between Germany and Britain in Europe, secured the grant of an imperial charter for his German East Africa Company. With this the European Scramble for Africa began. In east-central Africa the key occurrence was the Anglo-German Agreement of 1886, by which the two parties agreed that their spheres of influence in East Africa should be divided by a line running from south of Mombasa, then north of Kilimanjaro to a point on the eastern shore of Lake Victoria. This began the extraordinary process by which the territories and subsequently the nations of East Africa were blocked out first upon the maps far away in Europe and only later upon the ground in East Africa itself. The agreement put the area to the north (most of modern Kenya) under British influence and the area to the south (Tanganyika; modern mainland Tanzania) under German influence. The Anglo-German Agreement of 1890 placed additional territory (most of modern Uganda) under British influence.

Kenya was proclaimed a British protectorate in 1895 and a crown colony in 1920. Most of what is now Uganda was formally proclaimed a British protectorate in 1894, with additional areas being added to the protectorate in the following years. Tanganyika was declared a German protectorate in 1891. During World War I, Britain captured the German holdings, which became a British mandate in 1920. Britain retained control of Tanganyika after World War II when it became a United Nations trust territory. Tanganyika gained independence in 1961 and in 1964 merged with Zanzibar, later taking the name Tanzania. Uganda gained its independence in 1962, and Kenya became fully independent in 1963.

D. Anthony Low The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica

The Horn of Africa

The history of the Horn of Africa has largely been dominated by Ethiopia and has been characterized by struggles between Muslim and other herdsmen and Christian farmers for resources and living space. The Christians mostly spoke Semitic languages and the Muslims Cushitic tongues. Although these languages were derived from the same Afro-Asiatic stock, the more apparent differences between the peoples often were excuses for war, which, by the end of the 20th century, was waged under the banner of nationalism and Marxism-Leninism.

Aksum

When the Ethiopian empire of Aksum emerged into the light of history at the end of the 1st century ce, it was as a trading state known throughout the Red Sea region. Its people spoke Geʿez, a Semitic language, and they mostly worshipped Middle Eastern gods, although here and there a traditional African deity survived. Its port of Adulis received a continuous stream of merchants who offered textiles, glassware, tools, precious jewelry, copper, iron, and steel in return for ivory, tortoiseshell, rhinoceros horn, gold, silver, slaves, frankincense, and myrrh. Aksum, the capital, was five days’ march from the coast onto the Tigray Plateau, from which position it dominated trade routes into the south and west, where the commodities originated.

By the 4th century Aksum had become a regional power and an ally of Constantinople, whose language and culture attracted the ruling elites. Sometime around 321 Emperor Ezana and the Aksumite court converted to the monophysitic Christianity—a belief that Christ had one nature that was both divine and human—of Alexandria’s See of St. Mark. During the next 200 years Christianity penetrated the masses, as foreign and native-born monks proselytized the interior, building churches and establishing monasteries wherever they found pagan temples and shrines.

Through the first half of the 6th century Aksum was the most important state in the Red Sea–Indian Ocean region and even extended its power over the kingdom of the Ḥimyarites on the Arabian Peninsula. In the Horn, Aksum dominated Welo, Tigray, Eritrea, and the important trade routes to and from the Sudan. The capital’s stone buildings, monuments, churches, and 20,000 inhabitants were supported by tribute and taxes extracted from vassals and traders.

In 543 Abraha, the general in charge of Ḥimyar, rebelled and weakened Aksum’s hold over South Arabia. This event marked the end of the empire’s regional hegemony, allowed Persia to assume supremacy, and forced Constantinople into an overland trade route with India and Africa. Aksum’s international trade diminished, a shift reflected in the debasement of the state’s coins. The rise of Islam in Arabia a century later almost completely devastated Aksum, as Muslim sailors swept Ethiopian shipping from the sea-lanes.

Aksum lost its economic vitality, and Adulis and other commercial centres withered. State revenues were greatly reduced, and the government could no longer maintain a standing army, a complex administration, and urban amenities. The culture associated with the outside world quickly became a memory, and Ethiopia learned to exist in local terms. The Christian state moved southward into the rich grain-growing areas of the interior, where the rulers could sustain themselves. There they and the local Cushitic-speaking population, the Agau (Agaw, or Agew), worked out a new political arrangement for Ethiopia.

The Somali

Meanwhile, another Cushitic people, the Somali, had separated themselves from the Oromo in what is now north-central Kenya. For their livelihood, they depended upon the one-humped Arabian camel, sheep, and goats. During the first centuries ce they migrated in a southeastern direction, finally following the Tana River to the Indian Ocean. They then turned north and peopled the entire Somali peninsula, coming into contact on the coast with Arab and Persian trading communities, from whom they took Islam and a mythological Arabian origin. By the 12th century the entire northern Somali coast was Islamized, providing a basis for proselytism in the interior. But, as the Somali migration and Islam moved westward, they encountered a resurgent Christian Ethiopia.

The Solomonids

An amalgamated Christian state, led by Semitized Agau, had reappeared in the 12th century. This Zagwe dynasty gave way in the late 13th century to a dynasty that claimed descent from King Solomon and the Queen of Sheba, a genealogy providing the legitimacy and continuity so honoured in Ethiopia’s subsequent national history. During the 14th and 15th centuries the Solomonid monarchs expanded their state southward and eastward. By then Muslims dominated Ethiopia’s trade, which exited via Mitsiwa in Eritrea or through Seylac on the northern Somali coast.

The Solomonids permitted Muslim business activities in return for submission and taxes. In 1332 Ifat, a large Muslim polity with its port at Seylac, fed up with being a Christian vassal, declared a holy war against Ethiopia and invaded its territory, destroying churches and forcing conversions to Islam. The Ethiopian emperor, Amda Tseyon, fought back hard, routed the enemy, and carried the frontier of Christian power to the edge of the Shewan Plateau, overlooking the largely Muslim-inhabited Awash valley. One hundred years later, under Emperor Zara Yakob, the Solomonid empire extended its authority southward to modern Bale and Sidamo.

By then Ethiopia faced a challenge from Adal, Ifat’s militant successor. Located in the semidesert Harer region, Adal employed highly mobile Somali and Afar cavalry, whose raiding Ethiopia could not control. Meanwhile, the Solomonid state had begun to decay, owing to succession problems and the sheer complexity of governing a large empire. The Muslims consequently stopped paying tribute and a percentage of their trading profits to the hated Christians. Thereafter, they grew stronger and more daring, responding in part to overpopulation among the Somali.

The distress was exploited by the charismatic Aḥmad ibn Ibrāhīm al-Ghāzī, known to the Ethiopians as Aḥmad Grāñ (“Aḥmad the Left-handed”). A pious, indeed rigorous, Muslim, Aḥmad railed against the secular nature of Adal, mobilized tribesmen to purify the state, and trained his enlistees to use the modern tactics and firearms recently introduced by the Ottomans into the Red Sea region. After he took over Adal about 1526, his refusal to pay tribute triggered a Solomonid invasion in 1527, which his army easily repulsed.

Aḥmad thereupon declared a holy war, led his men into Ethiopia, and won battle after battle, fragmenting the Solomonid state into its component parts. During 1531–32 the Muslims pushed northward, traversing the rich Amhara Plateau north of the Awash and destroying churches and monasteries. Aḥmad Grāñ built a civil administration composed of his own men, remnants of the pre-Solomonid ruling classes, and collaborators. By 1535 he headed a vast Islamic empire stretching from Seylac to Mitsiwa on the coast and including much of the Ethiopian interior, but not the staunchly Christian mountain fastnesses.

There, in 1541, Emperor Galawdewos learned that 400 Portuguese musketeers had disembarked at Mitsiwa in response to pleas for assistance. Though they lost half their strength moving inland, their weapons and tactics inspired Galawdewos to exploit Ethiopia’s difficult terrain by undertaking hit-and-run warfare. Aḥmad never knew where his adversaries would strike and therefore placed his forces in defensive positions, where they lost their mobility, while he and his personal guard acted as a rapidly deployed reserve. Encamped at Weyna Dega near Lake Tana, Aḥmad’s unit was attacked on Feb. 21, 1543, by Galawdewos and a flying column. During the hard-fought battle Aḥmad was killed, and that single death ended the war.

Christian Ethiopia was reprieved, but at a great cost. The country had lost hundreds of thousands of lives, confidence in itself and its religion, and its store of capital. Unable to follow Europe into commercial and then industrial capitalism, Ethiopia rebuilt feudalism, because the state simply had to restore affordable administration. By the early 1550s Galawdewos had fashioned a reasonable facsimile of the high Solomonid empire. Muslims, especially in the border provinces of Ifat, Dawaro (in the modern Arsi region), and Bale, remained disaffected. Christian converts along the periphery of the heartland, south of the Blue Nile and the Awash River, chafed under renewed exploitation, and the Judaized Beta Israel, to the north of Lake Tana, returned to their life of dispossession and economic marginalization. Finally, south of Lake Tana, in modern Gojam, Welega, Ilubabor, Kefa, Gamo Gofa, and Sidamo, a whole range of people remained tributary to the Christian kingdom. From among this last category emerged a new and more fundamental threat to old-fashioned Ethiopia.

Rise of the Oromo

The challenge came from the Oromo, a Cushitic-speaking pastoralist people whose original homeland was located on the Sidamo-Borena plain. From there, the related Afar and Somali peoples had hived off northeastward to the Red Sea coast, the Indian Ocean, and the Gulf of Aden, perhaps in some way causing the pressures that finally erupted in Aḥmad Grāñ’s invasion of the Solomonid state. Some Oromo may have climbed onto the high Christian plateaus as early as the late 13th century, only to be repulsed. Garrisons established along the empire’s periphery by Amda Tseyon and Zara Yakob were designed to keep the Oromo out, but, when these defenses were destroyed during the war with Aḥmad Grāñ, the Oromo naturally resumed infiltrating.

The Oromo had an age-set form of government that changed every eight years, when a new warrior class sought its fortune by raiding and rustling in order to provide resources that the natural environment lacked. Every eight years, from the 1540s on, they advanced farther into the well-watered, fertile highlands—a sharp contrast with their arid bush country. Helped by their adversary’s war-weariness, demoralization, and depopulation, the Oromo invariably won territory after territory. By the beginning of the 17th century they had pushed northwestward into the modern regions of Arsi, Shewa, Welega, and Gojam and northeastward into Harerge and Welo, stopping only where they were blocked by forest, high population density, or effective mobilization of Christian forces.