The towns of East Africa were built during two periods: pre‐colonial and colonial. The former grew up along the coast, facilitating trade and communication between the rim of the Indian Ocean Seaboard and the interior of Africa. The towns, better known in history as Swahili City States, survived from about the beginning of the second millennium AD to about the 1890s. The latter were mostly new administrative centres established with the launch of German and British rule in East Africa from about the 1890s. Only a few settlements of the colonial period had a history pre‐dating the colonial era. Such towns include Mombasa, which is a Swahili town, and Mengo in Kampala, which was the seat for the Buganda Kingdom. This article examines the pre‐colonial Swahili towns.
The Growth of the Swahili Towns
Swahili settlements spread all along the coast and islands of East Africa (Fig. 1). There were few settlements before the Swahili towns of the thirteenth century, mostly built with mud and...
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Chami, F. (2008). Cities and Towns in East Africa. In: Selin, H. (eds) Encyclopaedia of the History of Science, Technology, and Medicine in Non-Western Cultures. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4020-4425-0_8504
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