Swahili

The Swahili are the maritime Bantu people of the East African seaboard, from southern Somalia to northern Mozambique. Their Bantu-speaking ancestors had settled the shore by the early first millennium. From at least the sixth century Fukuchani on Zanzibar traded across the Indian Ocean; between the eighth and eleventh centuries trade grew and towns converted to Sunni Islam. From the ninth century Swahili became a trade language with Arabic loanwords.

Around 1000 the Kilwa Sultanate was founded south of Zanzibar; about 1180 Sultan Suleiman Hassan seized Sofala, through which Great Zimbabwe's gold reached the sea. Under the Mahdali dynasty, builders of Husuni Kubwa palace in the fourteenth century, Kilwa led a merchant-city confederation at its height in the fifteenth.

Portuguese ships entered the Indian Ocean after 1498, and the old monopolies were broken. From the late eighteenth century Zanzibari merchants carried Swahili and Islam inland along caravan routes.