Book Review - Early Swahili History Reconsidered

Thomas Spear is an exceptional author, part of an assemblage of early African history contributors. His journal article on Swahili history brings with it a revolutionary look into the bases of Swahili culture through historical and linguistic claims.A key component of Swahili which separates them from their neighbors is the emphasis they put on their Persian decent, opposing the Arabian immigrant neighbors. Swahili consider the Persian background more sophisticated than that of the Arabs.While it has been stated that during the eleventh and twelfth centuries, Swahili buildings and styles abruptly emerged from nothing, Spear actually conducts further research which contradicts this theory with supporting evidence that neither Swahili styles nor the Muslim religion emerge out of nothing, but that it rather preceded from the ninth century. Muslim stone towns, as he theorizes, came from local farming, fishing, and trading communities which slowly expanded throughout the lands. It
was in the twelfth century that trade itself began to expand and this expansion led to the construction of coral buildings and the adoption of Islam.Early linguists made the claim that the Swahili language was first written down in Arabic script and it contained a very large numbers of Arabic words, to clearly indicate Arab roots. This is also supported in his book by the earlier ethnographic claims of the word Ustaarabu which was meant to denote "Arabness". This word was applied to those who bore Arab names, appearances, and the sophisticated elitist lifestyle. However, Spear argues that while the Swahili dialects are all closely correlated it is because they were all developed from Bantu as the single ancestral language from the Northeast Congo. Arabic words appear in Swahili because the Arabs had a significant amount of influence in things such as maritime trade, religion, and the law which led the Swahili to adopt words for those specific fields.The problems with the af
orementioned interpretation, however, lies in the fact that Swahili people might speak of Shiraz, but thus far there is not concluding evidence either archeologically, culturally, or linguistically to support their influence. Another problem presents itself in the form of a chronological gap in the current archaeological, linguistic, and documentary evidence between the second and the ninth centuries. Evidence for the middle six centuries has not been discovered and after this gap in evidence the Swahili appeared.The development of Swahili took a longer period of time to produce more defined language and this is hard to reconstruct because there were successive genetic developments brought about by population shifts, external influences caused by interaction with others, as well as the distribution of languages.It can also be supported that Swahili is assumed to be a middlemen society. This meant that they have a very embracing town which was open to the influence of outside
Arab and African languages, music, colors, dances, and foods. So while people believed that Swahili-speaking people were not derived from Bantu-speakers because of their higher intelligence which only lent itself to an Eastern European culture, Spear presents an opposing argument, attacking each point of discussion with precision and data.

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